We did this a couple years ago, in the form of a
competition between the different patrols. In fact, that was our
intent for this year,
but
schedules a such didn't work out that way, and we just went over the to
beach and built it
As you may see here, we built the whole trebuchet from pretty
crude supplies... just wood that we'd find around camp, a ball of twine, a
short section of rope and kerchief (for the sling), and a single nail and
ring for the release mechanism. That's it. The whole thing was
done without a ruler, and held together only with lashing (which the
scouts had learned earlier).
Special thanks and credit go to
Russell
Miners, and his
exceptionally good trebuchet web page.
We'd brought along printouts of it for study prior to putting the thing
together, and it made all the difference in the word.
This monster could hurl apples
like nobody's
business! Rather than use a heavy counter weight, we just had
scouts heave downwards on the lever. It worked perfectly fine, and
was a lot safer. Click on the "It Works" image in the upper right to
see a movie of a launch.
The Cedarlands staff seemed to get as much of a kick out
of seeing the trebuchet work as we did in building it. They even
brought out some (scary) leftover food items for us to launch out into the
lake.
If anybody out there reading this wants to try and build
one the way we did, feel free to
drop me a note with questions. I'll
see what I can do to help.
