Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion new hobby - catapults

Anyone else have a kid into things that get shot across a room? We taped the annual Pumpkin Chunkin contest that was aired on tv the other night and DS7 watched it this morning and was totally fascinated with the air cannons, catapults, and trebuchets...he had to go online and find their official website and was thrilled when he saw they have a junior's division.....he then looked up plans on how to build a small catapult and begged to go to Lowe's to go get the wood/supplies......which we did...god help us! He already has plans to build the larger back yard version if this smaller one is successful. When I woke up this morning...I didn't quite expect that we would be builing a catapult! Oh the joy of homeschooling

D had a fascination with trebuchets after watching a history channel special about them a few years ago (cemented by her love for the Lord of the Rings movies...). We found a kit to build a trebuchet for her as a Christmas gift (from our local science museum). Watch out for what they choose to use as weights, though... her dad gave her a bunch of lead shot, which ended up ALL over the floor of the room she was "tossing" in.

We found a cool catapult design that he might like, when DS7 was doing them for DI. Here is the site:
StormTheCastle

It's a little one made of popsicle sticks, but I got him some sticks about the size of yardsticks to make a bigger version. He never managed to finish it, and his friend took the sticks to finish it himself, but it would have really flung well! I'd like to see one in action, so I hope the friend makes it. It's based on the strength of triangles/pyramids.

LOL - we have a model trebuchet and catapult that regularly fling cat toys across the house. Glad we're not alone.

My HS had a Greek/Roman Day. One of the events WAS the catapult.

One of the students had a dad who was a machinist. He built a catapult that won the day.

This catapult tossed the payload over 600 yards across a busy road and almost into the stained glass window of a church.

The payload was a metal spear.

Of course, we all cheered. The faculty was, of course, aghast.

Something about watching the cars going by the road with the 8 foot spear visible above their roofs? Or was it the kids walking up and down the road?

Nautigal - that site is awesome :-) That is where he found the plans for his small size that we just finished and are quite giddy with using a variety of small cat toys that are zooming through our house as I type...I smiled with kimck's comment because he was the one who found the cat toys and thought they would work perfectly as projectiles and then I read your post
:-) He is already planning how to make the mechanism stronger with better bands or bungee cords - oh my is all I can say!

That's another one DS will love, Nautigal!!

And oh what fun, collecting ice cream sticks .

Ahh, well, I'm a spoilsport and just keep a bag of "craft sticks" around instead of suffering through all that ice cream when a project comes up!

Not that we don't eat the ice cream anyway, but I hate sticky projects....


I love it! That's one of those "hey, we survived our childhood and we did x" stories.

We'll try that one. DS6 loves them too. Recently he had a sub say she liked medieval things and he started talking about catapults and the sub had him explain them to the class. He's excited to do this project.