Outside Resource

For our outside resource, we talked to JT Wyrick, a fellow senior that took physics class last year. For his end of the year project, he also built a trebuchet. He gave a couple of helpful hints. The first hint he gave us was to make sure that we have enough weight. He said that when we scale our model up to the full size, it seemed to him that the weight didn't scale at the same factor as the size of the trebuchet did. A second hint he gave us was about the sling. He said that this is the most frustrating part of getting the trebuchet to work right. Unfortunately, he really didn't have any solutions to the problem of the string getting tangled and the projectile getting caught in the string. When we did the trebuchet battle, we really understood what he was talking about because of how windy it was. In the end, JT provided some good advice that we used when we built the final product.

BATTLE DAY 5/14

The trebuchet is 100% complete! Attaching the sling took a little longer than expected, but that is about it. Unfortunately, we really didn't have a chance to test it before the battle and hone in the aim and force of the launch. I think that if we had another day or two, we would have been perfect. I wouldn't say that it worked amazing, but it was not the worst either. If I were to give the trebuchet's performance a grade, I would give it a B-. All in all, we had a great time designing and building our trebuchet.

Work Day 5/13

I can not believe it, but our trebuchet is finally starting to look like a trebuchet. We put so much work into it our model, CAPA, and our final product over the last month. It is a good feeling to see something that you designed be completed. All we have to do before the battle it attack our sling. Overall, we really didn't run into any major problems with this build. It was amazing that it all came together the last day we had to work on it. We had all of the individual pieces built before, today was just the day to attach them all.

Work Day 5/10

Good progress was made today. I remembered to bring the fourth 2x4, so we cut that to the same length as the other three. We then screwed them together. All that is left is screwing them to the base, and hooking the sling and arm up.

Work Day 5/7

A lot of progress was made on building the trebuchet. We cut the boards for the base and screwed them together. We also started planning the dimensions of the tray that the projectile will slide in. We also worked on CAPA for a couple of minutes. I think that we are back on track towards being done by next week.

CAPA Day 5/6

Today we spent the day working on CAPA. No progress was made on building the trebuchet.

Work Day 5/2

Today we began cutting wood for the frame of the trebuchet. We also finalized our dimensions for the whole project. The base is going to be 1 meter by 60 cm. The height to the axle should be about 80 cm. The height to the top of the arm when it is straight up and down will be between 1.25 to 1.5 meters. We decided that we want to keep the same ratio of length from axle to length from axle to weight bucket as on our model. Just in case, we are going to drill more holes in the arm so that we can change the ratio if we need to.