Does any one have any suggestions on building a trebuchet?

Question

Anything would help; plans, advice, personal experience. etc...

I would like to build three - for grapes, oranges, and pumpkins/watermelons (in that order)

Answer 1

A Trebuchet is a medieval siege weapon that uses a counter weight to provide the force to hurl the stone or fruit. A catapult use ropes/cables/animal sinew to wind up and then when released it would throw the object.

Catapults have a problem in that the transfer a lot of shock into the ground underneath them. This made large catapults on ships or on a castle wall impracticable. The trebuchet doesn't suffer this problem, since the counter weight can move forward.

THIS SITE IS PROBABLY THE BEST FOR YOU: http://www.ripcord.ws/plans/plans.html
It offers detailed instructions on his Tennis Ball Trebuchet and you can download the plans in MS Word or Adobe Acrobat format (requires WinZip to open the plans).

This site will help you contact the trebuchet community: http://www.ripcord.ws/
You may be able to get plans or advice if you join these communities.

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This site: http://www.io.com/~beckerdo/index.html
Has some good instructions on making trebuchets for free. Below are the pages that might interest you the most.
-- The Toothpick Trebuchet: http://www.io.com/~beckerdo/other/ToothpickTreb/ToothpickTreb.html
Could be a good place to start for your grape tosser, and the work up to the next design.
-- This site: http://www.io.com/~beckerdo/other/trebuchet.html#design
Offers a step-by-step procedure on how to build a trebuchet with pictures of each phase. There are no blue prints here, but you can construct one from this website for free. Once you build one then you can change to plans to scale up or down.

-- Trebuchet Plans: http://www.trebuchetplans.com/
This site will show you various completed trebuchets. You can buy the kit or the plans. Below I have listed some of the sites to find the plans. You can go directly to that page if you want to and you will know how much the plans for each version costs.
$14.95 the Floating Arm Trebuchet: tp://www.rlt.com/trebuchet/plans/fat/
$9.95 The Tabletop Trebuchet: http://www.rlt.com/trebuchet/plans/tabletop/
$8.95 The PVC Trebuchet: http://www.rlt.com/trebuchet/plans/pvc/
$19.95 Catapult Design, Construction and Competition
with The Projectile Throwing Engines of the Ancients and Forward by Ron Toms: http://www.rlt.com/trebuchet/ISBN_1/

Once you have your trebuchet built you will want to know how to shoot it. You can either learn projectile theory and do it yourself or you can download these programs and let your computer sweat it out: http://www.algobeautytreb.com/
It was first designed for the MAC, but if you go almost halfway down the page you will find two versions for the PC. You can download the zip files for free, but you need to pay $15.00 to use them.

This site: http://members.iinet.com.au/~rmine/gctrebs.html#cwtreb

Answer 2

perhaps you should consider it more before you get deep into the construction...

trebuchets only work well because they rely on significant cyntrifical force, which is the more effective the larger the object

so a grape and orange trebuchet would only go a few feet, and a good pumkin' chucker is at least 8 feet tall

potato cannons and homemade wooden pumpkin cannons are much more efficient and go much farther, and are also somewhat easier to build

Answer 3

try www.trebuchet.com also i think the myth busters built one once, try looking up their site.

Answer 4

http://www.ripcord.ws/plans/plans.html

http://www.trebuchet.com/