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.