Jordan's Trebuchet

For months now, Jordan's been talking about a project he needed to do for his science class. First he wanted to do something involving batteries and a disposable camera--I never quite understood what he was talking about--but after a number of failed attempts and destroyed cameras, he moved on to Plan B.

Plan B was to build something called a trebuchet. Again, I did not quite understand what he was talking about. I learned it was something like a catapult, only different. According to the paper Jordan wrote to accompany the project, a trebuchet is "a medieval engine of war for hurling large stones." It has a pivot arm with one side shorter than the other and the shorter side has a counterweight on it while the other side has a sling attached to it.

He wanted to build something big enough to throw a five pound weight something like 100 yards. When he priced out the materials and the cost came to several hundred dollars, I thought this plan had died as well.

He was not so easily deterred, though. Using scrap wood and other items he scavenged, he started building his trebuchet on Wednesday. Thursday night, with a due date of Friday morning, he was hard at work. About 10:00 PM, I went outside to lend a hand. Around 1:00 AM, we got the thing figured out to where we thought it would work. However, we couldn't really test it because [1] it was 1:00 AM, [2] we weren't sure it would be a good idea to launch a five pound weight in the neighborhood and [3] we were afraid that the trebuchet only really had one good throw in it and then it might fall apart. Originally, we tried to use over 300 pounds of counterweight to provide the force but when Jordan and I together couldn't pull that much weight into position, we started compromising and ended up at 250 pounds of old gym weights loaded on the machine. While I kept watching the clock on Thursday night, he kept reminding me what a valuable father-son time we were having.

We loaded it on the pick-up and Friday morning, Jordan drove it to school. It wasn't quite as successful as he had dreamed, with a toss of only about fifty feet, and we were right that it really had only one successful throw in it. The pressure bent the trebuchet's axle so that his second toss actually went backwards. Still, I was pretty impressed with his work ethic, his creativity and his scientific and math calculations.