Well that looked pretty cool to me!
Yes! First incendiaries; but they're going to get bigger and better from here.
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm back with my trebuchet. Yes,
you heard that right, I mean I don't suppose you could have missed it after last film and I'm still
grinning because I have a trebuchet. I've got the holy trinity now, I've got a Gopro, a pumpkin
and a trebuchet, so there is really only one thing that we can do. Well you probably guessed it,
I'm going to send one of my GoPros on a flight because I've hit one of the plumbata, I've shot
one with an arrow, but I've never trebuched one. And there we go, the latest of my brave little
GoPros, nicely seated in its pumpkin and seriously I am actually expecting this to live because in
a scientific way this is going to reduce its deceleration, it is it's got nothing hard in
there that's going to fracture the case, so in reality I suspect the GoPro will be just fine.
I might be wrong, I've been wrong before. Right let's load up and let's shoot.
Ready! Loose!
GoPro fell out.
Well the first thing I've learned about trebuchets is keeping a GoPro in a pumpkin
is surprisingly difficult. I never thought I'd say that phrase. The real reason that I'm here is not
about that junk, I thought it'd give you something fun at the beginning, the real reasonIi'm here
is to explain some of the decisions that I made when I was making this machine because if I was
making it as a real historical replica I would not have made it quite like this because I took some
shortcuts. I did some other things, you know a little bit naughty in the historical world,
but what you need to remember is I delivered this thing in well two and a half weeks, it restricts
you in the way things like the timber that you can get, the choices that you have to make about
design but then also they wanted weird things to happen, so they wanted a variety of things thrown
but they didn't know what that was going to be. Some would be really light, some would be heavy,
one of the things mentioned was a washing machine, so I had to make it big enough to do all these
kind of things, so I'll give you a tour of the machine. Now and I'll take you through bit by bit
what I did and why I did it and then also what I'm going to change because tomorrow I'm coming back
in with my mate Bill, and we're going to do some mods on this and we're going to basically get it
into a state where we can start throwing things a bit further because at the moment it's probably
a bit delicate for that. Anyway here's the guided tour. So first of all in terms of overall
construction part of the brief was to make it look medieval you know, it didn't want to be made
of of pine, it didn't want to be made of welded steel, so the whole thing has been made of oak
almost all of it in 15 centimeters square except for these main beams here running along which are
15 by 20,. so I couldn't get them long enough to run all the way to the end so I had to put
an extension for the winch, but I'll show you that in a minute and explain why that made
some of my winch choices as they were. So then the main construction here, I think probably
historically they did beef up their machines with steel plates and steel fittings. These things
move around a lot there's a lot of very rapidly moving forces going in different directions,
I don't suppose they did it with hex headed bolts but at the time, so I've got some big
steel plates here, but then these main beams are also bolted through so it's not tenon and mortise
joints which you would expect on a historical structure that's kind of the attitude I've
done through this, I've made it look pretty historical because don't forget this is being
seen really from a little distance, up close anybody who knew anything about timber framing
they could see what I'd done and they could see it was a big cheat, but from a bit of a distance
looks great. Let's go have a look at the winch. So what I would have really liked was these have
been about a meter longer but instead I had to bolt these extensions on here for the winch
now what that means without any extra timber work these are always going to be not that strong,
so what I've done is I've arranged the winch in such a way that it's pulling directly along
the line of that beam which means that the beam is is still strong rather than pulling the arm
down onto that, which is going to be putting that into bend. Now it's got quite a big winding drum
on it and actually probably a little bit too big I think because it is as you can see, quite
difficult. However I did have to consider that there was a reload time on this filming, because
everything's about the film, it's not about me, nobody cares about me, they care about the film,
so you've got to reload quickly because they want to shoot again quickly,
time is money, so a bigger winding drum you can reload quicker even if you've got to do some work,
but you only have to do that work for two hours one afternoon in reality and that's what I'm
going to do now. This whole winding drum, I'm going to reduce in diameter which will give
the winch more power, it'll make it easier for me to load but slower, that means because I'm
fairly close to the limit I think that means I can put a bigger weight in the counterweight
and that is definitely what we all want. Now for the original brief we wanted this thing to
to look medieval, to be medieval and so I found these old pulleys here, these old
iron and wood sheaves and they work and they work well, you can see that,
but I've got no way of knowing how strong these are, I've got no way of knowing what the load is
going to be on these before they fail. I like life all right? It's more than just a Youtube film,
so I have bought some bigger pulleys, unfortunately you know nice big chunky ones that
I can believe in the rating, unfortunately they're bright orange, but I guess I might paint them,
but in the meantime I'm going to re-rig this with those ones. The next set of problems we're going
to talk about is all to do with the width of this machine here and actually what happened
when I filmed it originally. Now if you remember back this was made for the computer game the
launch of the computer game Age of Empires IV and they wanted to do wacky crazy stuff, they wanted
to throw stupid things around, unfortunately a lot of things which were very light were chosen
and that made the machine not work very well, but what it also did is cause damage because you want
a heavy projectile, you know relatively heavy, because what it does is it damps the movement of
the machine, it damps the the viciousness of the arm swinging around and the counterweight dropping
and without that you put a massive amount of stress on the axle at the top
and actually as well, the whole basket as it comes down just jiggles about and gets very excited
and that is what happened. If you look at that you can see it's actually crooked. It's crooked
because it whacked one of these supports on the day and it bent the whole thing, so I've got to
straighten that back out, I'm going to put some more guide rails on the side and I'm going to look
after it, so I'm going to shoot heavier weights that's what these things like and then that won't
be a problem. But what the problem is, it still remains, is the whole width of it. Now they wanted
to shoot crazy things, they kept on talking about, one of the things was washing machines,
so that's why the gutter is really wide, that's why the A-frames are wide to give clearance right,
but what that means is you end up with a weak axle so I'm going to come back in tomorrow and put some
extra support under that axle, it is to be honest 50 millimeter solid steel bar, it's going to take
a bit of beating but nonetheless I'm going to put some supports under it and that will help to bring
the effective edge of the A-frames in. Next up I'm going to replace the sling, I'm going to do a more
conventional netted one. Now I actually did this one obviously with a lot of rope work and then a
linen liner, the reason for that was I didn't know what was going to be thrown and so I didn't want
it catching on anything, I wanted a smooth surface so there was reasoning behind it but you know it's
day has passed now for me but the other thing is it's actually relatively heavy and anybody
who gets involved in bows for instance, will know that the more mass you have out at the limb tips
the more it matters because the inertia of that mass goes up as a cube with the distance from
the center of rotation. Common English; basically the longer your stick is the harder it is to wave
about. This thing you know adds, the sling adds two or three meters onto the length of the arm so
that's now five or six meters out from the center of rotation, any mass makes quite a difference and
if I'm accelerating this, I'm not accelerating my projectile, that's what I want to do,
so I'm going to go back to a conventional net for bowling balls or whatever ammunition I settle on,
but I'm going to keep this because I think it's day might come again for other things.
I'm also going to have a look at this rigging here and actually this is a medieval way that
I've done it you see this in the illustrations, there is another way that I could do it which
actually might be easier but because of the way this framework is with the extensions it doesn't
really work for this so I'm going to stick with this system and I've actually put a load cell on
here to measure the weight in the ropes, I know that these ropes are well within the limits,
I've looked at the data tables for them, they're fine but in my gut it just feels wrong. Things
like this, I just like to follow my gut reaction, so I'm going to put bigger ropes on here.
Now here's something I'm not going to change and that's the trigger and it's a slip hook system. So
basically you've got a curve here that rotates around that point so when you pull the lever,
pull the cord and even like five, six, seven kilos, that rotates around and slips out of there.
It works beautifully, it looks really alarming, it looks really insecure, but actually it's brilliant
and what it does is it allows with my five kilo pull to shoot this machine running at 250 kilos,
it's not a problem, I'm not going to trust my life to it because it doesn't look great,
but it really does work well, it really does. I'm out in the field, the trebuchet is loaded pumpkins
are ready to fly, what's going on well it's really a simple thing, I'm offline a little bit you know,
I'm not that dense, I'm not that dangerous, but when you want to understand things you
need to see how they operate and you can see how they operate from that end
but you need to see how they operate from this end as well and everything just helps,
so here I am few meters, couple of meters offline, it's slow moving anyway so here we go.
Result! Love it! I'm back with all of the changes now and so we've changed the rigging on it,
we've changed the weight, it's 380 kilos now in the counterbalance, I've got new ammunition,
a bowling ball, it seems to be like industry standard, pumpkins or bowling balls, a new sling
and quite a lot of fear because you know it's heavier than it was, so here we go let's find out!
Wow!!! Yes!!!!!
Yes so it was very, very high, we'll have a look at the GoPro later, I can't see it now, it's
very high but it's pretty long, so I'll get you a distance and I'll come back and let you know, but
that was faultless. So our bowling ball did 117 meters and we're only going to go up from there
when we tune the machine, increase the weights and that sort of thing, but in the meantime I can't
really do any more filming with this tonight, it's just not going to show properly it's too dark
but when I made the original trebuchet for Age of Empires IV the game release,
I made some flaming projectiles for them, they never used them,
so I still got them in the back of the van now is the moment,
however they are not a medieval recipe, they are not true to what would have been, so I will come
back with proper medieval incendiary charges for this thing. Anyway let's have fun. So we've got a
couple of these old charges now hopefully they'll go well, so Bill light up! Fingers crossed.
Well that looked pretty cool to me. Yes!! first incendiaries, but they're going to get bigger and
better from here because those are like fakes, they're not real. So that's it for today guys,
but the journey has just begun it really has because as you all know,
"I've got a trebuchet and I am going to use it" so I'll see you again.