For many of us, our first encounter with the famous trebuchet was Age of Empires II, or perhaps a documentary on historical siege engines. However, many people continue to pursue builds of their very own, exploring designs new and old. The walking arm trebuchet is a good example, which uses an unconventional design to great effect.
The design eschews a rigid frame, instead consisting of simply an arm and a triangular leg assembly. The arm is held upside down, and is launched by allowing the trebuchet to collapse forward to rest on the triangular leg. The triangular leg is fitted with spikes which dig into the ground, and the arm then pivots around, launching the projectile. The design is reportedly quite efficient, similar to a floating arm trebuchet, with a very simple design. Performance was so good, it netted a clean sweep of the 2018 Vermont Pumpkin Chuckin’ festival.
There’s a wide variety of ways to go about building a trebuchet, and we’ve featured some before. You can even instrument your payloads to quantify performance. Video after the break.
My first exposure to trebuchet was the TV show Northern Exposure, where one was used to launch, if memory serves, a piano and later a corpse. They were featured in an episode of Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge (depending on your location). Been fascinated with them ever since.
Somebody get Tom Staton here quick
Neat design but I’m dubious about the accuracy, I think the castle is still safe (if not the pumpkins).
Oh my. So simple and portable that it’s Awesome!
Must have for next summer’s annual picnic water balloon fight!
What I don’t get is the big one. It has a 10 foot arm with 500 pounds on the end. How do you lift a pole with 500 lbs on the end straight up? And how do you keep it there until you are ready to launch? Do you need to be an olympic weight lifter?
Just lift the trebuchet first without the weights, then afterwards put the weights on one by one.