Umm...potato cannons...
I helped a friend build a pneumatic cannon which we could fire like a mortar, that was great. My highschool had a few catapults I was involved with taking care of, a ballista and a trebuchet. The ballista can fire over four hundred feet consistenly and still drill bolts six inches into frozen ground...imagine getting hit by that!
The treb is a little more interesting. We used to tires filled with concrete to make a five hundred pound counterweight. In order to cock the arm, we would have about ten guys pull on a safety line to pull the arm to the ground, and then have five or six more sit on the arm. I was the safety guy who was the last person holding the line before we fired. For some reason, we though that one guy could hold down the arm as backup in case the release broke prematurely...I don't know what we were thinking. Well, because the line was made of rope, I always wore gloves to keep from getting burned, but one day, everyone else forgot theirs. We pulled down the arm pretty far, but people started to get rope burn...one guy let go, two guys let go, and so on. Well, I had wrapped part of the rope around my hand to get a better grip, and as people started to let go and the arm started to swing back up, the loop got caught around my hand. Well, I got pulled up, but not over the top, instead I got thrown towards the counterweights. I was at such a height, though, that I was able to run up the crossbars to avoid taking five hundred pounds to the crotch...how's that for fun
I helped a friend build a pneumatic cannon which we could fire like a mortar, that was great. My highschool had a few catapults I was involved with taking care of, a ballista and a trebuchet. The ballista can fire over four hundred feet consistenly and still drill bolts six inches into frozen ground...imagine getting hit by that!
The treb is a little more interesting. We used to tires filled with concrete to make a five hundred pound counterweight. In order to cock the arm, we would have about ten guys pull on a safety line to pull the arm to the ground, and then have five or six more sit on the arm. I was the safety guy who was the last person holding the line before we fired. For some reason, we though that one guy could hold down the arm as backup in case the release broke prematurely...I don't know what we were thinking. Well, because the line was made of rope, I always wore gloves to keep from getting burned, but one day, everyone else forgot theirs. We pulled down the arm pretty far, but people started to get rope burn...one guy let go, two guys let go, and so on. Well, I had wrapped part of the rope around my hand to get a better grip, and as people started to let go and the arm started to swing back up, the loop got caught around my hand. Well, I got pulled up, but not over the top, instead I got thrown towards the counterweights. I was at such a height, though, that I was able to run up the crossbars to avoid taking five hundred pounds to the crotch...how's that for fun
HAHAHAHHAHA
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