The Trebuchet

Darwin has been learning about the Romans at school and any chance I can get to reinforced learning whilst doing something fun too, well we should do something right? So this weekend Darwin, Pete and I made a trebuchet. (As I write this Darwin won the ‘Wonder of the Week’ for our collaborative model of a Greek temple. I got him to do the maths relating to the pillars and the spacing, work the stand drill and slide saw and source the materials, and we bonded doing DIY, something which I think was missing in my relationship with my dad.)

‘What have the Romans got to do with trebuchets?’ I hear you ask. Well, good question, they didn’t have the counter balanced trebuchet like we built but they were the inventors of its forerunner, the Onager (that reminds me, I need to tell you about my Asian Ass poem!). The Onager used twisty ropes to produce a spring effect and energy was lost all over the place. It could only fling things just over 100 m or so. The trebuchet was a lot more efficient and could fire much larger things over 3x the distance of the onager, so given the much simpler design and potential for flinging things further we went with the trebuchet.

There’s a lovely little trebuchet calculator on the internet which helped us with the maths and given the material and resource we had it calculated that we should be able to fire apples beyond 200 m. This made me giddy and worried at the same time as Stone Hall was about that distance away. In reality we only fired about 70m which was enough to give us all a thrill.