Week 10/27 - 10/31

On Friday of last week a few students from our metal fabrication shop at the school challenged us to make a trebuchet within a month that could beat theirs. Since Ben and I had just finished modeling the steam engine, we decided to take a break and do the challenge. The first part involved researching trebuchets and what type we would make. The end result was the whipper trebuchet (shown below) that could theoretically launch tennis balls over 100 mph.

Once finished modeling, we added joints to our design to simulate the motion it would make when actually fired. This is its starting position before anything is launched. There are going to be weights on the end of the short part of the arms and a tennis ball attached to a sling on the long part. The long arm will go fully around to release the ball while the counterweight arms will stop moving when they reach the bottom, transferring all their potential energy into kinetic energy

Before making a full-size model, Ben and I decided to scale it down and 3D print a mini version to test how it works. The 3D printer took like five tries to actually start printing it correctly and the nworked perfectly once it started. Unfortunately, the print was only partly finished by the time I made this post, but we'll start testing it next week. For all the axles, we found a small betal bar that was found in the machine shop and then cut them to appropriate size.