David and Goliath

The Methodist Church in Elmer held the pumpkin chucking competition today. Our church entered for the first time. We had no idea what to expect from the other churches, we had tried to do some recon but got nowhere. So with no idea what anyone else was building, we designed ours to fit in a pick up truck and really worked hard to get the most power we could out of our design. We were pretty proud of our little catapult and pretty excited to show it off today.

Then we saw the competition for the first time. They were not built to fit in a pickup truck. Most came in on flat bed trailers. If you look real close at the middle catapult, the tiny little one in the middle of the picture, that's ours. Click the picture for a larger image and with a magnifying glass, you might see it.




Two were so big, the teams brought a front end loader to hang the counter weights.

Them(left) us(right)

We hung our counter weight by hand.

It was a little intimidating. Being the new guys, having all the other churches commenting about the little catapult. But we had done our homework. We knew the weight of the pumpkins would be between 5 and 7 lbs. We had calculated moment of inertia of our throwing arm, we knew how much energy we were transferring to the pumpkin. We even watched video of our catapult frame by frame and calculated throwing angles, kinetic energy, and some other things. We had a well designed catapult.

As these things were towering over us, I kept thinking how much energy it would require to get a throwing arm that size rotating and how much faster our little throwing arm would accelerate. But still, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the size of these monstrous machines.

The other teams started doing a few practice throws and their catapults sure looked slow compared to ours. But slow on a 25' arm might still beat our little 12' throwing arm. My team wanted to do a couple of practice shots too. I suggested that we just wait and see what the others could do. We already know what ours can do and I was starting to believe that if we didn't win, at least we'd make a good showing and I wanted to surprise people. There were a few comments in the crowd about the church with the little catapult not throwing any pumpkins.

team Shiloh

We nervously walked around for two hours waiting for the competition to start. There was a lot to do. There was a live band, hot dogs and hamburgers, baked goods, several kids games to play, a pumpkin seed spitting contest (the winner was over 29'...wow), and a skillet throwing contest. There were two hay rides running continuously. You could even enter a scare crow making contest where participants scrambled to stuff scattered clothes with straw. The church that put this on did a really great job.

It was finally 4:00, pumpkin chucking time. Each team got three throws. To make things go faster, every other catapult would fire together. That meant catapults 1,3, and 5 would be launching at the same time. We were catapult #3. After a 10 count, we pulled the release cord. The giant machines to our right and left slowly slung around while ours whipped the pumpkin down range. Our pumpkin sailed past the other two. The second and third rounds went just about the same.

I was tending the catapult but lots of people I knew in the crowd told me later that everybody was talking about the little catapult and how it was beating all the big catapults. We hadn't seen the numbers, they had three men in the field who would run to the landing spots of the pumpkins. Someone with a rangefinder would then measure the distance to the men and write it all down on a chart. We hadn't seen the numbers but we thought we were out in front. It seemed like the guys marking the landing spots kept running toward us when everybody else would fire and away from us whenever we fired.

for a very big (9M) full size video click here

The second part of the competition was the accuracy contest. They stood a scarecrow 50' from the catapults and each team had 3 chances to hit the scarecrow. It might sound easy to hit a target 50' away but keep in mind, these catapults were designed to throw hundreds of feet with trajectories going over 100' high. Hitting a 6' tall scarecrow at ground height right in front of you was completely different. We really weren't prepared.

Not knowing what to do, we dropped most of the weight off our arm, and moved our sling release pin forward about 15 degrees. We figured this would be a shorter throw and would throw pretty flat to the ground. Our first throw was a record setter...7 feet...the wrong direction.

We added some weight and tried again. It was a hard throw and a straight, flat throw just above the ground. We were the first team in the competition's 4 year history to actually hit the scarecrow. We barely nicked it's glove. It counted. We were told that we could skip our 3rd throw if we wanted to since we had our successful hit. No, we wanted a real hit. No glove nicks for us.

Our third throw took off at 50 or 60 mph and hit the scarecrow square in the middle of the chest. The pumpkin exploded, the scarecrow's 2x4 spine snapped in two. The crowd went wild. We tried to act like we felt bad about the scarecrow. We didn't, we felt great.

In the end, the little catapult from Shiloh came in first place for distance at 96 yards, came in first place for accuracy, being the only team to hit the thing (and we did it twice), and won "best all around" for winning the other two. We walked away with two trophies, and the big "best all around" trophy is on it's way to us soon.

When the competition was done, the other teams started disassembling their catapults for the ride home. The front end loaders were moving weights, winches and come-alongs were lowering timbers. Flat bed trailers and dump trucks were pulling onto the field to load the catapults for transport. Four guys picked ours up, put it in the back of a pickup and we drove away.

I think I have a plan for next year that will have twice the punch in an even smaller package.

team Shiloh with one broken scarecrow.

Moving On

It's been almost a month since I've posted. That's because the garden's done for the year and this is a gardening blog. I still plan to sit down and make up a success and failure list of everything I grew this year but not today.

Today, I'm posting about a catapult.

I got a call from my friend's sister, and cousin's wife, Val. She wanted to know if I'd be interested in helping the teenagers at the church build a catapult to compete in a pumpkin throwing contest. What a ridiculous question. This was over the summer. I said sure as long as we have two things: 1) Enough time to build it, and 2) materials or a budget for materials.

I got a second call at the beginning of October, maybe it was the very end of September asking if I was still interested because the contest was in 4 weeks. So much for enough time to build it.

I went down to the church that evening and we all talked about catapults. We drew diagrams and by the end of the evening half a dozen high school and college kids and I had a pretty good working design on paper.

I put our sketches in Cad to let the computer do all the math and dimensions so I wouldn't have to.


We all spent the week trying to find materials. Everybody on the building team had a few scraps to bring, a couple of church members offered to let us look through their lumber piles, and Val's dad dropped off a load of everything we were missing from our materials list.

The following Sunday we started building. We got a lot done, had to make a lot of design changes as we went, and it really started looking like something. We did the same thing the next Sunday.





For the second build weekend, I had the flu. I showed up to help but really wasn't much help. I am really impressed with the group of guys who worked on this. They had good ideas, and really took charge. I offered advice and helped a little but these are country kids, they knew what they were doing.

It stands about 7' tall, has a 12' throwing arm with a 9' sling attached to the end of the arm. I borrowed 540 lbs of Olympic weights from work as a counterweight.

The third weekend was last Sunday and we got together to test it and make adjustments to the weights, release angle, sling, and anything else that needed adjusting to get maximum distance for the contest. A crowd from the church showed up and brought things to throw, mostly pumpkins. I still had the flu so I showed up late and mostly just watched. The best throw was 242 feet. That's not bad. I don't think it's enough to win but for our first year entering the contest, I'm satisfied.

If you want to see the full sized video and don't mind a 7M download,
it's temporarily available here.

The competition is this afternoon. We have no idea what to expect from the other churches that are competing and we have no idea what types of catapults they'll have. Later I'll post how we did.