A Trebuchet Story

It all started out with Jeff saying he wanted to build a robot. About an hour later, we had managed to take over an empty bedroom with a table stolen from another room. Then, we retrieved the fischertechnik parts from their 3 year journey in the storage cabinet.

Building a robot apparently takes a little more planning than what we were up to that particular evening. Well, okay, its probably more honest to leave the "that particular evening" clause off. Anyway, after having watch several episodes of Junk Yard Wars that centered on various medieval tools of destruction, it didn't take long to make the decision move on to building a trebuchet.

Well, we hadn't planned well enough ahead to have sufficient time to finish the trebuchet that evening. Okay, we hadn't planned. Anyway, we ran out of time. A few days later, when Jeff had left town to see Kirk over Spring Break, Brian happened to be over and once again we were looking for something to do. It didn't take long to find the partially constructed trebuchet. About two hours later, we had mostly redesigned it. And, it worked. Below are the pictures with some brief explanations.

	This is the view our fearful opponents would have (were they to be about 6 inches tall). However, as we concluded later, couches may have little to fear from this trebuchet.
	Here Brian is making the final adjustments to the sling in preperation for firing.
	Fractions of a second after the trigger is released, the firing arm is in motion. As you may note, Brian wisely posed for the picture by watching the camera through the entire firing cycle.
	From this angle, you can actually see the hex nut near the top of the image as it wreaks terror into the heart of our unsuspecting target couch.
	After firing upon the couch, the trebuchet comes to rest. The long chain dangling from the firing arm is the sling.
	With a smirk clearly indicating his satisfaction with our successful siege on the couch, Brian proudly points at the epicenter of our formidable trebuchet's strike against the couch.

	[insert poignant, but marginally relevant, descriptive text here]
	[insert more marginally relevant text here]
	[and more text here]
	[and some more]
	[yadda, yadda]
	[you know, its 2:50am, and I really just want to go to bed, if you want to suggest some text, just mail me and I'll consider it]