Cardboard Trebuchet

    Creating our paper trebuchet was very fun and interesting and quite a learning experience. There was some difficulty in making it because of the somewhat fuzzy directions. It was sometimes difficult to tell which lines to cut and which lines to fold. The cutting and gluing was relatively easy and once we got going the process was easy to complete.

    One of the things that a trebuchet cannot overcome is air resistance however in our small trebuchet air resistance was not really that prevelant as we were using such a small round ball, similar to a small version of a golf ball which is meant to go long distances with minimal air resistance. Air resistance may not have been very obvious however we know that it was still present.

    Gravity was very much an obstacle that was shown in our paper trebuchet as we had to overcome it to, the best of our abilities in order to get our trebuchet to go as far as it could distance wise and as accurate as we could.

    The last thing that we had to consider was the angle of release in order to get the optimal range out of our trebuchet we had to toy with the angle of release. Once we figured out that the optimal angle of release was 45 degrees we used this for our range.

    As well a trebuchet must have a counterweight in order to use the full potential amount of gravitational pull. The larger this counterweight is the more gravity pulls it downward which causes the sling of the trebuchet to swing around faster.When we tested our paper trebuchet we used approximately 40 individual weights as a counterweight to get the longest range and we took out about 15 weights out in order to reach the right spot for accuracy by taking out weights this allows us to not have to change our angle of release which means we do not have to re-do the angle for distance again.

This is a picture of what our cardboard trebuchet looked similar to.