Hey guys, I'm Nate.
Welcome back to the workshop, where today we're going to be making
a small desktop catapult that fits inside this tin of mints.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] [Music]
[Music]
For this build, we're going to need our tin of mints, Altoids or something similar,
a small binder clip, a plastic spoon, and some thin cardboard,
maybe a playing card that you have lying around
or I'll be getting mine from this empty cereal box.
We'll need a pair of scissors to cut things,
and some hot glue and tape to attach stuff together.
There's plenty of options for what you can use as ammunition,
but since our tin of mints comes full of mints that are the right size,
we'll try using that as ammo.
To get started, let's empty all of the mints out of our tin and into a cup.
We won't need this piece of paper.
Just throw that out.
Now, let's just clean out our tin a little bit,
so it's not so full of mint dust.
We are going to be gluing onto this surface,
so we really want to make sure it's clean enough that the glue will stick.
Our binder clip is going to be the mechanism
that gives our catapult some extra spring.
So that's going to fit inside our box.
And then our spoon will be the little basket
at the back of our catapult that holds our ammunition.
Let's take our plastic spoon, measure how long we want it to be,
and then cut it off so it fits within our tin.
Now, what we need to do is attach our plastic spoon
onto one side of the binder clip.
We'll use our strong tape for that.
There we go.
Attach the tape to the spoon.
You can flip this away from the binder clip
so we can easily wrap it all the way around the spoon and the handle of the clip.
Alright. I think we're getting a pretty good idea of how
this catapult mechanism is going to work.
If I hold down the back of the binder clip,
we can see that by pushing down on the spoon,
it stretches the binder clip open, and that's giving us a lot of spring power.
Now using whatever our source of cardboard is,
we want to cut out a piece that's the same width as the inside of our tin.
Let's trace around our tin and then cut a little bit smaller than that,
so the cardboard is the size of the inside,
rather than the outside.
We don't even need the entire bottom.
We only need about half of it, so I think right about there should be fine.
There we go.
Our piece of cardboard now fits pretty perfectly inside the bottom of our tin.
We now want to divide our cardboard into 2 pieces based on the size of this binder clip.
With the cardboard in the tin, and the binder clip on top of it,
pressed all the way up against the tin,
our dividing line should be right near the back of the binder clip.
The smaller piece of cardboard will fit inside of our binder clip.
And the larger piece will go over the second silver handle,
and overlap onto the tin.
Let's use some of our hot glue to attach this first piece of cardboard
to the inside of the binder clip.
Now, a little bit more hot glue on top of the second handle,
and then we'll put this piece of cardboard down on top of that.
We should be able to fit our whole mechanism down inside of our Altoid tin,
and we can start to see how this is going to work.
We'll use some more hot glue to attach all of that cardboard down to the tin,
and that should do a good job of holding our catapulting mechanism in place.
Now at this point,
we can pull back on the spoon,
and we see the spring effect starting to take place.
But if we look at the front, it looks like our cardboard is
just peeling up despite the hot glue.
So let's try reinforcing that by adding more glue around the edge of our cardboard,
but on top of the cardboard.
Now you can see that we've filled the corners all the way up,
so there's glue on top of the cardboard,
and hopefully, that will give it a secure enough hold against the tin,
that it should give us some resistance as we pull back on the spoon.
With our glue cooled and holding everything down,
we should be ready to start firing off some Altoids.
Let's go for a smaller shot.
There we go.
Little less power, it actually shot up quite a bit more.
I'll take it.
I hit the monitor on the camera.
That's pretty good.
Now this works alright, but I think there are some improvements that we can add to it.
Because of the high resistance level in one of these binder clips,
I don't think it's actually possible to fold this down
far enough that we can really close the whole tin.
And if we do, then it can just pop right open again.
So let's see if we can't modify this to have a little bit less resistance,
so that we can conceal the whole thing inside our tin.
For this upgraded version of the mint tin catapult,
we've got another tin, we have another spoon,
we'll be using an even smaller binder clip,
and we'll also use a paperclip,
and a piece of a paint stick.
We also have another piece of the same cardboard cut from our cereal box.
We'll start the same way by measuring our spoon and
cutting it short enough that it should be able to fit entirely inside our tin.
We'll attach our spoon to our binder clip,
much the same way we did before.
We can see the same extending action on our binder clip that we had before.
Let's cut out our cardboard the same way before as well.
That seemed to fit.
This step is also the same.
We fit our mechanism inside onto the piece of cardboard,
and we mark where the dividing line is.
Of course, this is a smaller binder clip,
so the small portion in front is even narrower.
Now here's where we're gonna start changing things
that aren't just the size of the binder clip.
Even with the smaller binder clip that doesn't have as much strength,
we would have a hard time getting this to stay down inside our tin.
There's a lot of pressure one of these clips.
So what we want to do is figure something out,
that we can put in the jaws of our binder clip
that will hold it open so that it's not just being held down by the lid of our tin.
That's the reason we have our paint stick,
if we fit this paint stick,
and maybe something else a little bit wider down inside the jaws of this binder clip,
it's held open which makes it lay flatter against the table.
We can see that just by itself, it's still sticking up quite a bit.
But if we can get it to open a little bit more,
it will stay in a position that should be able to let our tin close.
Let's cut off a piece approximately the size of our binder clip.
Our goal is to have our binder clip attached to the tin slightly off center,
so that we have space to fit the piece of the paint stick
in between the jaws when we want to switch from firing to storing our catapult.
To make it easier to move the piece of paint stick in and out of the binder clip,
let's take a small paper clip, and bend that into an L shape attached
to our piece of painter stick.
That should give us a little handle we can hold on to to put it in place
when we're ready to use it.
Like before, we'll have our small piece of cardboard in the jaws of the binder clip,
and when you combine that with the piece of paint stick and the paper clip,
hopefully will give us enough pressure holding it open,
that we can close the lid down on top of it.
Our spoon is still sticking up just a little bit,
but it doesn't have a lot of spring power to it.
I'm betting that'll be enough to hold it closed.
We are going to need enough space that we can fit our little wedge
in and out from inside the binder clip's jaws.
So we're gonna want to offset our binder clip
so it's easily out of the way.
That seems like a pretty good spot to me,
so that's where we'll attach our cardboard to the binder clip.
And I'll attach this piece of cardboard to the back handle of our binder clip,
the same way we did on the first one.
Let's apply hot glue all over the bottom of this cardboard,
glue it down in place into the tin,
and then of course,
we'll use the same reinforcing technique of adding hot glue along this corner edge.
While we're waiting for that glue to cool down a little bit,
let's work on making a target for these launchers.
I've got this piece of gray foam core and these nine plastic cups,
let's try and make a bit of a grid that we can put these cups into.
We'll trace out circles, cut holes into the foam core,
and then sink the cups down into the foam core,
and make sort of a target grid where we can assign different points to different cups.
Beautiful.
A multicolored target board.
[inaudible] we're great.
Alright, we can pull back on our catapult,
it has a good amount of spring, it's not pulling up the cardboard,
let's see if we can fit our little barrier block in the jaws of our binder clip.
Yeah, holds it open pretty well.
We can still see the spoon is a little bit above the top of the tin,
but there's not that much resistance on it.
So let's see if this will stay closed.
It does.
Beautiful.
Our tin holds itself closed,
we can open it up,
and we can remove our little support block,
whatever we want to call that.
And we have our fully functional catapult.
Let's get some mints out.
Try this bad boy.
Nice.
That just flew about 25 feet.
Alright, let's see if we can shoot some of our mints from our catapult into our target.
I bet we can do with both catapults.
Alright, let's try our first catapult first,
see if we can get this to go in.
I don't know how little power I'm gonna need.
Let's try this.
Nope.
That was too little.
That was way too much.
Back-up plan.
Still nothing. I shot like six at once.
Alright, I'm gonna see if I can lay this down a little flatter.
We can get steep or shallow.
Let's try a shallow angle.
Rolled down in between them all.
Yes.
Haha!
It went in.
I got one.
Finally.
That's like 55 shots.
And one of them went in because that's how good I am at aiming.
That went in again.
Alright, that's like 3 out of 70,
which is not a good ratio.
But let's try the other catapult.
See if I can do any better.
This one does have a little more give to it,
so I feel like it should be easier to adjust to the right range.
Ha!
See, it only took like six or seven tries with this one,
instead of like 50 with the other one.
Way better.
These catapults are designed for power.
Look at this thing.
I was trying to overshoot it,
and I overshot it.
And it hit the light, and fell down into the cup.
When we're finished using our catapult,
we can just put the block in place in between the binder clip jaws.
Add some ammunition for later,
and close the whole thing up.
It's nicely self-contained and if we want a mint, well,
we can also just have a mint.
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That's it for now.
Have fun. Be safe.
And see you tomorrow.