Paper Model Trebuchet

   Our trebuchet challenge experience began with us being paired off into groups of 2. After this it consisted of us getting pieces of paper with cutouts that we had to assemble to make the small paper model. This took several hours for Karissa and I making sure that it was solidly put together and there would be no pieces causing friction. The trebuchet had to hurl a distance of 10m using a little wooden ball and washers acting as our counterweight. Since the marble was a projectile and it was dealing with no other forces other than gravity we really found that we had to tweak our angle of release in order for it to shoot the way we wanted it. We were quite frustrated off the start seeing as ours was shooting backwards, but after a lot of fine adjustments it started shooting forward as best to its ability as it could.

   As we were doing our refining there were many factors that we had to deal with. Some of the more obvious environmental factors were gravity and air resistance. Gravity had the pull on the ball bringing it as low to the ground as possible and air resistance we didn't deal much with in an inside setting. These 2 factors we couldn't control and had to hope instead that they worked in our favor.

 Next were the performance factors that we could control, such as friction, counterweight, angle of release and the durability of our paper model. Friction was something that we dealt with as I have said previous in the building of our model, any rubbing of any parts of the trebuchet would cause a big problem. Friction was also present in the pouch that we had to sew, the force needed to be there to ensure the ball to stay in the pouch, but it also had to be a smaller force in order for the ball to release at the proper time. The easiest factor we could control would've been the counterweight. We ended up using 45 washers in our bucket to achieve our maximum distance, but in order to hit the accuracy you needed to reduce the amount of weight. The most frustrating factor that I felt we had to accomplish was the angle of release, it was one of those things that once you perfected it, you didn't want to toy around. In the end the angle that worked best for us was a 45 degree release.

  In the end there were more performance factors vs. environmental factors so we had the opportunity to pretty much make it how we wanted, overlooking the gravitational force. We definitely got 80% of our frustration out on building this little guy, so the other 20% will be saved for the big one! Overall it was a smart idea building the paper model so we could get a better understanding of how exactly it works,

The picture shown below is not of our actual model, but yet a class members.