But you know what if it does? What we then get is a fantastic bit of
footage of a trebuchet exploding on launch, bits flying everywhere,
whole thing collapses, you get to see some great footage. It's a win for everybody.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm back with the trebuchet again
and some of the changes that I have made before we start shooting it again. Some of the changes
I'm not going to make. So first up, when this was originally made by Bill and myself for the Age of
Empires computer game launch, they made us do some things that you know I didn't really want to do,
it wasn't made how I would have chosen to make it, so I'm sort of correcting that now and that's what
we've been doing. So I've remade the sling, I've strengthened up the pivot. Up at the top there,
I've re-straightened the bucket because that was damaged during the original filming because some
of the stuff was a bit light really. The way I originally set it up with the winch system
I didn't like it, wasn't really working very well, so I've redone that as well, but we're going
to come and talk to that more at length because that's really quite interesting in its own right.
We're going to start by talking about the sling. Now the thing about the sling is it's like every
other part of this machine; they're all related. All aspects are related and so the weight of the
projectile, the length of the sling, the weight of the counterweight, the distance between the
pivots. I'm going to give you all of those later between the bucket and the bucket pivot and the
bucket pivot and the main pivot and the tip and all of these things are all related and
that changes how your machine operates. Now I've been getting some original information off a guy
called Jem Stansfield, an old friend of mine and possibly the smartest man who's ever lived; I'll
put a link in the notes to Jem. He has designed a very special trebuchet, but you don't know
about that yet, but you will and he also designed this one. Now I will honestly say that I actually
changed his stats because I made a little scale model of it and I wanted to see visually how it
looked because i was making it for a tv program, I wanted a particular look, a computer game launch,
so I've fudged his numbers around a little bit so this is not optimized according to Jem's
calculations. So sorry Jen. However there's another guy over in the States Daniel Bertrand.
I think he was Utah, I said earlier and he's been messing around with trebuchets for many years now
and he has a fantastic one that's a little bit bigger than this, you know,
it's I think the main arm is about 4.8 meters from the pivot to the tip, mine's 3.5m and he's
getting extraordinary distances, 300 meters, again link in the notes. Check his films out,
but he's been talking about tuning. I am not ready to tune this yet, I'm still building up
the weights and trying to understand it, but what I do know is that when I come to tune this sling
I might need to adjust it, so I've just made this whole section here adjustable. I can get about
another 80-90 centimeters on length if I want. But then we come to the main sling itself and this is
made with crown knots, it's a net that's all it is. If your cup holds the projectile too tightly,
if you sort of like form the cup around the projectile, it doesn't come out cleanly,
so I have deliberately made this so that it holds the shot, in this case bowling ball,
but not wraps around it, that's really quite important. So I'll show you this with our bowling
ball in it, so that may not look enormously secure, but it's secure enough. Actually
again my work with with using a regular kind of sling tells me that this ball will stay in this
and you need it to be in, but not really in, and that's how you get a nice clean release of it.
The original brief included the possibility of throwing washing machines, they never
actually did, but it meant that the distance between these A-frames had to be very wide.
That of course means you've got a wide axle and as the weight comes down, especially if you're
shooting something light, the weight slams down to the bottom, massively loads this axle here
and that can potentially cause a big problem. It's actually 50 mm, 2 inch thick solid bar,
maybe it bends, maybe it wouldn't, I don't know, but what I did do was I just quickly,
I should have done it in timber it would have been beautiful, but I've done it in steel,
I've just made these big brackets here to bring effectively a buttress
to this point here, so now there is an awful lot more strength in this whole pivot assembly.
if I hire it out ever for a historic event I'll probably remake this in wood,
but at the moment just a quick and dirty job, it's done in steel. We're going to talk about
the counterweight bucket, now when we did the first bit of filming for the computer game launch
we actually damaged the machine because we kept on shooting things, throwing things which were too
light and if you imagine, just if you want to go kick a football or a soccer ball, if you
connect with the ball there's some resistance and your body works fine. If you don't connect with
that ball, yes you might fall over, but the other thing is you can actually end up hurting yourself
because you're expecting a resistance on your leg when you kick it and you don't get it and any
kinetic machine is much like that that it wants a little bit of resistance to damp the movement, to
to stop it just like jerking around crazy. So when we actually damaged it,
what happened was the bucket came down swinging and jerking around violently and it actually ended
up hitting the edge of this support here, not that violently fortunately, but it did rip a chunk off,
so then when I came back here, I put these guide rails on, but again I hadn't straightened the
bucket and so the first shot again this bucket came in and scraped the side of this and it
immediately told me I had to sort the problem out and now because the bucket is completely centered,
completely straight within the framework, that gives me the confidence really to put more and
more weight in it. The rest of the structure I believe is going to be strong enough,
I'm not worried about that, but this being crooked was a problem. No problem anymore. The original
brief was to make this as medieval as possible and so I bought these wonderful pulleys off Ebay,
you know, iron and wooden sheaves and they work great, but they're not rated and I don't
know what load they take and I think they'll be fine ultimately, but last week I wasn't so keen,
so I've changed that now and I now have lovely modern pulleys which are rated and I can believe
in and they're nice and strong. I've upped the rope on the winch rope about twice the breaking
strain it was before, but I still wasn't really getting the system to work properly in the way I
wanted and I came to the conclusion that the winch system I was using wasn't any good. Conversation
with Daniel Bertrand over in the States and he was saying, I think other people over there
where they love their trebuchets for pumpkin chunkin', also don't like that rigging system,
and I've gone for what everybody else has done which is that there's a pulley on the end of the
arm and it pulls the arm down and everything is smoother and easier and wonderful, but
actually that's an interesting point. So why did I rig it in the first place the way I did? Well
there is a guy and I'm sorry for what I'm about to say French people,
this guy was a guy called Violet Le Duc, lived in the 19th century and wrote some fantastic
books on arms and armour and really started a movement in France as I understand it, to
preserve their their heritage, their actual built environment around them, their old buildings and
that whole sort of historical culture that otherwise was just getting replaced and built over
and he was an incredibly important man and did some incredibly good things and was knowledgeable.
But he did what a lot of other authors did at that time, which was if he didn't know the answer,
he didn't want to write that in a book, he just made it up. There are some beautiful pictures of
trebuchets in his book which are so detailed you think well clearly these are copies of originals,
but I don't think they were, I think he was just looking at original manuscript pictures and
reinterpreting it and reinventing and he put a rigging system on it that works, but it doesn't
work very well and I was really struggling with it and so I decided to change it. So actually
what's happened now is I've upped all the rigging system to cope with the old one that I didn't like
and now it's actually probably well over spec for the way I'm doing it now but the whole system is
beautiful and smooth. If you watch the previous films of me winching it down and well from now on
you'll see there is quite a difference in the way the winch system operates but what that also means
is I was going to reduce the size of this drum because it was so hard to do with the old system.
Now it's much easier, I keep the drum nice and big and it makes it a little bit faster, but two
things that keep on coming up again and again are firstly cracks in the timberwork and people say
"oh the whole thing's going to collapse on you". Well you know particularly if you're European and
you're used to old timber buildings that we have over here of maybe five, six, seven hundred years
old, look at the cracks in those timbers, those cracks are big enough to put your hand into. The
building stands. I'm not expecting any of these cracks to ever be a problem, they do not concern
me in the slightest. What concerns me a little bit more is if something happens to the main beam, the
main throwing arm, but that has been laminated up out of lots of bits, you expect to see the joints.
But again you know I've pegged it, I've bolted it, I've clamped it, I've glued it, I've roped it.
I'm not expecting the arm to give up, but you know what if it does? Well I'm back a little
way on my trigger string, so I'm not in any danger and what we then get is a fantastic bit
of footage of a trebuchet exploding on launch, bits flying everywhere, whole thing collapses,
you get to see some great footage, I get to rebuild my machine. It's a win for everybody. I'm
not expecting a problem with the arm, but if it is well it's just another bit of filming isn't it? So
that's the first one. The second one is wheels on the trebuchet. Now there is, again I'll put a link
in the notes, an amazing guy, Tom Stanton who does some extraordinary engineering projects, a real
sharp dude, he was messing about with trebuchets two or three years ago, different format to this,
a sort of a modern conception of one and smaller and he found in his 'optimizing trebuchets' that
putting wheels on that improved it massively and explained why and that's great. But this is a
lot bigger, this is a soft field and I haven't got the time to put the wheels on, but also I
expect that they never did. I don't know for a fact, but I don't think that they put wheels on
their trebuchets back in the day and part of the reason for that is I don't know how many tons,
you know if you look at the one at Wawick how many tons that is?
30 40 50 tons? I don't know. Now putting wheels on that, on fairly soft uneven ground, ground
that can get rained on, turned into a quagmire you know? The machines going backwards and forwards,
I just can't see that working and I suspect that they never did it. So it might improve efficiency
but it's you know it's one of those sort of like theoretical things. Yeah theoretically
it does improve efficiency; real world you spent a whole load of time making wheels that won't turn
because you're stuck up to your axles in mud. That would be my guess. I want to play around with this
thing, I don't want to put wheels on it, that's not what interests me, I just want to shoot it.
I'm just going to run through some of the dimensions of the machine now and that will
help us to understand what it should deliver in the end, what we should be able to get out of
it. So from the center of the counterweight, center of the bucket there to the pivot on
the bottom of the arm, 125 centimeters. From the pivot at the bottom of the arm to the main axle,
125 centimeters again and from the main axle to the tip of the arm is 360 centimeters,
3.6 meters so those are the dimensions of this machine and they're not going to change. The
weight in the counterweight bucket that's going to increase over time so I'm going to get it up
to around about 500 kilos if I just fill it with concrete and sand I'm not going to get it up more
than that but that'll be fine you know, that'll be fine for me, I'm not going world beating,
I just want to have a nice fun machine to mess about with and then talking to Daniel over in the
States again he's explained that there's actually rules of thumb about these machines, which I just
love that people can have these conversations and go "yeah of course it works like this",
the modern world is a weird place with things like this, but anyway I have a trebuchet and
I need to know about it, so Daniel's a really handy guy and he's explained that
with the counterweight here if we look at let's say 150th of that weight which is around about
three and a half kilos, this house brick, that's a good weight for this machine to be throwing.
Now that house brick is going to go around about 50 times the length of the arm from pivot to tip
which is around about 180 meters if the sling is the right length and that he couldn't tell me, so
that is down to me to find out, but basically it means at its very best this machine should
deliver a house brick around about 180 meters and that's coming from a long way up so I can tell you
that's going to be pretty destructive and more so when I set them on fire, because this is actually
the core of the incendiary charges, I needed a bit of weight in those, so that's what's inside these
but not right now because first up we're gonna do the bowling balls which actually in truth
are a little bit heavier, a little bit heavier than this machine wants to shoot,
but it'll shoot them just fine. So there's one last thing that I need to show you,
one little change, special guest star and this is the last change. My Trebuchet Support Vehicle
a Land Rover 101 GS and it's got its bowling ball dispenser on the front here as you can see,
fits three bowling balls and it allows me to drive out into the field 150 odd meters,
pick up my ammunition and bring them back. Just saves me some walking across wet fields basically.
Now the eagle eyed amongst you will also spot a winch on the front which I will not be using to
winch my trebuchet down I'm going to do it old school. But let's start shooting some bowling
balls and we'll see where we get to. The GoPro is back, one camera, three GoPros later and anything
this brave deserves a name so this is a Graham, so Graham the IV is going into the trusty Knight
Vision armoured unit and we're going to put them out 130 meters and the reason we're going to do
that is I put the weight up so it is 440 kilos we got 117 meters before I think so I'm reckoning on
130, 135 meters fingers crossed and that's where we're going to put this. See you in a minute.
So courtesy of Jenny you've just seen it winched down and this is where it
all gets a bit different, so now what I need to do
is attach the trigger on put a safety line on then back the whole winch rope off
and that stays attached to the arm so when the arm flies up it needs enough slack on that rope.
If that rope catches anywhere, anywhere when that arm is swinging around it's going to rip
something apart the result is not good, so you've got to be really quite careful about
how you lay it out, so I'm just going to slack it off now, position the ropes and then we go.
All looks good all looks ready.
Let's shoot! Firing three two one!
Goodness gracious me, I was unusually silent there for that one, but that was really high,
really, really high and that needs adjustment, needs a longer sling I think,
but that's not this week's show, that's, we'll, we'll come back for tuning another time,
but hopefully we can now see the movement of it in the wide over there but more importantly I can go
out, I can take the position of that and re-plant my GoPro and see if we can get it really close.
Two things. First, I said firing last time; I meant loose of course or shooting,
secondly it went beyond the GoPro, so I've moved some things.
Loosing!
Oh that is a thing to see, it really is a thing to see, so let's go and have a
look at the GoPro end of town and we'll do it all again. And this was the first shot,
just down here at my feet, so the second one that I just did after I repositioned the GoPro.
Is just here, so six, seven meters away, so that's just here, impact was here and impact
for the first one was here, so about six meters apart something like that. We're going to come
back and look at accuracy, but that is not today's one, so the next one we're going to reposition the
GoPro again because it's actually a little bit lighter the next ball, so I'm going to run this
back another 10 meters and we'll see how we go, but we're getting really good distances today.
I haven't actually bothered measuring, I'm guessing about 130,135 meters at the moment,
so again this was our first strike. Second strike a little behind me, so I've now run the GoPro in
the helmet another 10 meters or so that way, so in the background Jenny is working away,
loving it! Got a red bowling ball there which is the lightest, so it's about 700 grams lighter
than the others they're seven kilos, they're 6.3 kilos and well we're losing the light
so it's gonna be the last of the bowling balls today and if you are loosing the
light and you got a trebuchet, oh I wonder what you could throw next?
Three two one loose!
And down! Oh my goodness me, that was a close one.
I'm really sorry guys, I have totally messed up the audio in this last section of the film,
in fact I left my microphone right next to the trebuchet. Now what that means is, well you're
not going to hear me for a few minutes, but you are going to hear the exact sound a trebuchet
makes when you're standing next to it when it shoots and not many people can say that up to now,
so that's one bonus. Now from now on this whole thing is finished, everything's done, it's tuning
it's getting it to work reliably, so that's what the next films are going to be about, but in the
meantime I hope you've enjoyed this one. See you again soon and check out the new trebuchet
t-shirts, they're on the merch shelf below the film. See you. This time I can say firing
fire!
loving it!