Catapult

All pictures by me, except for the ones I'm in (either by Quinn or Hannah)

PROJECT GUIDELINES
Make a catapult without using bungee cord, springs, or any type of motor that throws thirty yards and can fit into a 1.5 meter cubed box.

PRE-BUILD
First things first: we all got together and figured out what we wanted to build. Me + Quinn found a lot of videos depicting floating arm trebuchet builds. The floating arm trebuchet has two arms that hold a weight in between them. The weight drops to trigger the throwing arm. Soon, we decided to nix that idea in favor of another, more simple trebuchet. After that, we did some math. Well, Hannah and Quinn did some math. We had to figure out what weight would pull the throwing arm down to a certain angle fast enough to throw a water balloon thirty yards, and, subsequently, hit Mrs. Duke. 

DAY ONE:
There was a Lowe's trip to pick up some lumber and a few other completely unecessary things (like wood glue one had to hold for half an hour, for instance). We got a lot of help from Marcus, a Lowe's employee. We went back to Hannah's where most of the build took place. We cut the base pieces down to a half meter width and a meter depth. We nailed those pieces together (using some seventy-plus-year-old nails and an equally aged ax) to make a rectangle. By the time we some pieces on the sides for our bar to go across it had gotten late, so we called it a day. 

At one point, Hannah actually did smash her finger with the hammer. I have photographic evidence!

I never noticed how nice Quinn's nails are. I like how this picture makes it look like she was barely trying to hold the wood, but in reality, the weight was around fifty pounds. 

In case you cannot tell, this is how we measured out the thirty yards. 

DAY TWO:
We had a cross bar and even some lumber and a hook for our throwing arm, but we needed a big hole for the bar to go through the lumber. Quinn lives nearest to the Lowe's, so she took home the bar and a couple of lengths of lumber. Turns our, Lowe's will not supply a trio of desperate girls with a hole saw/drill for a few minutes. Luckily, Quinn's house is in the process of being remodeled and some nice men did it for us (thanks!). We all met back up at Hannah's for a long day, hoping for a finished project by nightfall. We hammered our hook into our lumber and then reinforced the other end where our weight would be held. With the actual catapult built, Hannah started to craft a sling out of duct tape. Then, we measured out thirty yards in string and moved our party to Hannah's front lawn, braving the cold freezing rain (I had to put a couple of plastic bags around my DSLR and cut a hole for the lens). We tried launching some duct tape a couple of times, but it kept sticking to our pouch. We began to troubleshoot, beginning with trading our sling for a knitting basket. We sort of made a smaller basket inside the top of the basket to hold the tape so our object would stay high. Different things kept messing up, but it was mainly the fact that the duct tape would not leave the basket. We were tired, soaked, and cold, so we loaded the thing into the garage and slept on it. 

DAY THREE:
Going into working today, we knew we had to fix the basket that would hold our water balloon. To continuously work on the basket, we would have to stay out of the garage to be able to fix whatever we saw went wrong. Luckily, it did not rain that day. *hallelujah* We decided to start off by transporting the catapult to my house (which is across the street from school). We took it apart and stuffed it into Quinn's old, fragile car, leaving her trunk open, and I drove us to my house. We immediately got to work on that basket, and eventually we had crafted a nice slope inside the basket that helped our water balloon along. However, we could not get the catapult to throw past 10-12 yards. After hours of trying and trying and not making any progress, we decided 12-ish yards was good enough and loaded it into my car. 

Going into war. 

CATAPULT DAY
I parked my car by the stadium so we wouldn't have to walk with the heavy stuff very far and waited for fourth period (in horror). I heard that not many of the catapults had come close to throwing thirty yards and that made me feel a little better. We carried our duct tape-covered catapult on to the field, and I couldn't help but laugh because we literally used mostly duct tape (hey, okay, it's really, really hard to hammer). Ours ended up only throwing 5-ish yards (I think we lost some rocks in my car, haha!), but I got an 89 so I'm happy. 

CONCLUSION
At the end of the day, I'm not worried that ours didn't throw 30 yards. I'm not planning on going into physics (or construction), but I know I worked really hard to get ours to throw the length it did, and I took about 97% of the pictures. I'm glad it's over though! 

xx