Trebuchet Project

(The Trebuchet, without the counterweight bucket)
For my Honors Physics class, we were assigned a project which involved designing and building a trebuchet. The siege engines would be designed to hurl miniature pumpkins across the school field, similar to . Also, we had to measure the various distances versus varying amounts of counterweight. My group constructed a medium sized machine, which stood approximately 3 feet tall with an arm length of about 7 feet. Our design was fairly simple. We used a gate latch to release the arm and a bucket filled with barbell plates as a counterweight. The axle was made of nested PVC pipe and the rest of the trebuchet was built using wood. During testing, we attained a maximum distance of 66.9 feet with 45 pounds of counterweight. The full results are below. Our trebuchet performed well for its size and weight, though other groups reached farther distances they had to use much larger siege engines to do so. Overall, I was fairly pleased with the effort, though I would build a larger one if I did it again.

(The data we collected during testing)

(An early test video)