Observations about the universe, life, Lausanne and me

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Trebuchet

In the summer I became interested in trebuchets, and one weekend in the lab I spontanously decided to build one. You can see the result in the photos. It worked quite well, throwing it's payload about 2 meters. The counterweight consists of four AA cells.




I made it out of ceramic tubes lying around in the lab - scrap, or so I thought at the time. These are ideal for trebuchets - immensly strong and lightweight. They are also unbelievably expensive, and my supervisor Ane got rather pale when I showed her my "work" the Monday after. Turns out the "scrap" was the box of the most expensive parts - so expensive that they even keep small pieces of a couple of centimeters length. Ane appraised my trebuchet to a couple of hundred Australian Dollars.

Ooops.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, I remember that incident with much fondness. I should really salvage the trebuchet from the lab and put it in a display case as an example to all others! Hehehe!

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  2. Is it still around? Ohhh, I built for eternity! Seems that the components were not as important as I was led to believe, though. Only expensive ;-)

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