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Fling-A-Keg
dave weekly writes: "Ever play Age of Empires and wonder at the trebuchets and catapults and what it would be like to launch them? Well, a bunch of medieval history and mechanical engineering geeks at Siege Engine decided to piece together several launching apparatuses and, for the benefit of the History Channel, flung kegs, pumpkins, and watermelons hundreds of feet all day long. The page also has pictures of a bunch of other sweet launchers, including air cannons."
I saw something a little like this, with some blokes in england launching a car and then a blaming barrel of some petrolium product, exploding on contact... quite entertaining. I found it on filepile.org, but I think it has been dropped off the queue.
:P
i have a copy here (please dont kill my server
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
These still pictures don't do it justice... be sure to look for it to be repeated on the History Channel (it was on last weekend), hopefully they will repeat it again soon..
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
This reminds me a lot of the piano-flinging device that was seen on Northern Exposure so many years ago, where they flung a piano something like 300+ yds with a tree hooked up to some pulleys. That was a damn funny episode.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
Too cool - we aren't the only ones who are completely nuts! :-) Me and 6 other friends are getting our siege engine (a smaller one) ready for a competition here in the Midwest. However, instead of one of the giant siege engines, we are building an Onager that looks quite a bit like the Baby Onager listed there (ours is about half again as large as the one there). This is our first attempt at building at building one, so I convinced everyone that we needed to start small. Next year, well start to build the full sized Onager to start flinging the big stuff really far... :-) Luckly, the competition is an accuracy competition for the most part, so we actually stand a chance with a smaller onager.
Siege weapons - fun to build, but even more fun to fire!
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
See the info here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/trebuchet /
;)
Yeah, they didn't mess around with pumpkins, they destroyed a wall with a 200 lb ball.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The best thing I got from that show was that the catapults on wheels worked the best. The reason was their counter wight was able to fall in a straighter line towards the center of the Eather, rather than the arc created on a fixed leg catapult. If you watch one on wheels fire, it will shimmy back and forth, but watch the weight in reference to another object (like a tree on the horizon) and you'll notice it very closely falls in a straight line... At the time I didn't think a free rolling catapult would work better, but now that I understand why it just seems so obvious. In any event, that PBS show was great!!!
Wheeeee
Sometimes a trebuchet is just a trebuchet...
from the people that brought Tetris on the Science Library, comes Technology-Assited TPing trees and flying pikachus thanks to the (small scale) trebuchet we built last year. Yay, we got a couple of the frats jealous (and a few deans...interested) and I got pegged by a tennis ball flying out of it, but all in all, trebs kick some sweet ass =).
I was wondering what I could do with that keg of Milwaukee's Best I got last Christmas
Trebuchets? Onagers? Bah... These people have build a full-scale Roman ballista using a dual-torsion palintone design. It's effectively a giant mechanical cannon. Fun for the whole neighborhood!
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
The other groups were doing things with surgical tubing making slingshots and whatnot. My group modeled our launcher after a trebuchet. Actually, the device I had in mind I saw on 'Northern Exposure' that was powered by a truck that would pull a line and swing a huge arm around and fling a piano about 300 feet or so.
The device we ended up making was a rickety old POS made from several pulleys, a box of weights, a fulcrum made from some rebar and two really thick broomsticks. In the end we didn't hit the teacher, but we were the only group to get the egg PAST him. In fact, with some more weights we could have hurled that egg a DAMN far ways.
That was a fun project.
Some english guy built a monster one of these that was capable of flinging a volkswagen over a quarter mile. It was fantastic.
-
During the spring I saw a documentary about a team building a Trebuchet with medieval tools.
It was on the Swedish science program, Vetenskapens värld.
In the NOVA/WGBH Trebuchet Project (October-November 1998),
the Timber Framers Guild helped to build two Trebuchets,
supervised by Mr Renaud Beffeyte.
A 300 pound stone ball was used to smash a a 7 foot-thick granite wall
more than 160 yards away.
No modern tools were used in the construction.
There are several types of Trebuchets and other war-mashines.
Schematic overviews and more information can be found at Medieval Mechanical Artillery
A programme on UK televison earlier this year documented the making of replicas of "real", full-size-and-dangerous trebuchets.
These beasts are spec'd to hurl rocks ~600kg about 300m (i.e. further than long-bow range, so the crew don't get picked off by the defenders). The replicas did just that, and were suprisingly accurate. The target was a replica segment of castle wall - actual masonry of the style appropriate for maybe 12th century - and the machines knocked holes in it with a few shots.
The historical idea was to build a machine matching the one that Edward nth of England used on a military expedition into Scotland (sorry, can't remember dates and details, but I think we're talking 1300s here). IIRC, he reduced one castle, then the word spread and the rest surrendered without a fight as soon as the trebuchet showed up on site.
Grey Company
I crew a trebuchet on a regular basis, and they really are fun pieces of machinery. Check out the "tabletop trebs" on the Grey Company pages and have a go at making your own mini "cheese chucker". ;)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I found hairspray to explode the best. When i used to live right on the beach, I had an island about 1/4 mile offshore behind my house, with some really rich guys house ON the island.. well, one day we thought it would be fun to see if we could hit the island, not thinking we could ever get one out that far.. not only did we reach the island but we busted a window in the house. That guy must have been quite surprised to come home to a potato on his living room floor. heh.
Don't Tread on Me
I'm guessing they didn't use any nails way back when. Far too labor intensive and expensive to make by hand. Instead they'd use peg and hole construction, which is actually stronger than using nails. And if you split the wood yourself, it will split along the grain, which means the resulting piece of wood will be stronger than if you cut it at a mill. If anything I would imagine that the modern versions are weaker than their historical counterparts.
Pick up a copy of The Book of the Crossbow, by Sir Ralph Payne Gallwey.
He lived in pre-WWI England, and was a minor noble with money and spare time. In the book, he recounts building crossbows and small seige engines and testing them on his grounds.
The most interesting passage to me was where he gets his hands on a 400+ year old French crossbow, restrings it, and discovers EXACTLY what it can do... even at long distance.
Great read.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
The annual Pumpkin Chunkin' festival is in Delaware the weekend of November 2-4th. punkinchunkin.com My 3-year old son is gonna love it.
It was started by a HS physics teacher (aren't they all....) but lots of area teams, including colleges, compete.
It's in Abilene, and is usually a week or two after Halloween when all the pumpkins are on closeout. The contest "home page" above probably has details or at least the contact information will help.
Nate
PS - the guys I helped out occasionally as an undergrad have some pics of their machines here and here (If there are any others, ACU guys, I couldn't find them).
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
Kegs and organs are neat, but amateurish. A friend sent me an e-mail with an attached MPEG of a bunch of British nuts throwing a CAR.
Yes, a car. My favorite part is how the nutcase shoots a hole in the floor to be able to tie it securely to the catapult's sling.
Beware that this will Slashdot my server, be patient if the download is very slow.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
i have a copy here (please dont kill my server
Oops. I posted a link to my video of that as a reply to the first post, just to make sure that it was about the first thing you see if you read the comments. (Yeah, I'm a karma whore, and I'm looking for work, so I'm trying to keep myself Slashdotted.)
Anyway, my mirror is here.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.