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This week on the best of Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis, we join him in arms and learn how to make a trebuchet. With a trebuchet, you can smash your enemy’s castle or at least fling the heads of enemy spies into their courtyard. In the old days, the most important metric of a trebuchet is that it can fire farther than your enemy’s archers can shoot their arrows!
In this podcast you’ll see how to build a paperclip trebuchet and a medium sized trebuchet. The paperclip trebuchet can be made in under an hour and it teaches you a lot about how they work.
The medium sized trebuchet took a little longer to cut, drill, and screw together, but it’s not hard.
Download the pdf for more instructions to make your own seige weapon!
16 thoughts on “Trebuchet – Best of Weekend Projects”
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My treb is the one made with tongue depressor size craft sticks. It’ll throw a mouse ball 35 feet with 4.5lb of counterweight in its basket.
boohoohoo, what happenned to bré ? He’s such an awsome chap !
Trebuchet was the coolest thing I ever made with my dad. Ours was six feet tall, used a coffee can full of rocks, and flung a grapefruit the full length of the high school football field. Not sure if that’s further than an archer could shoot but I bet it’s further than an archer could project a grapefruit.
It seems that it wouldn’t be too hard to convert a swing-set in a park into a trebuchet… Hmmmm.
Check out the Trebuchet kit
http://www.timberkitsus.com
Ooops, forgot to say, they also have a Catapult and a Ballista
3 months of reruns…
Is Bre OK? Anything new coming soon?
I love the trebuchet! I started looking to build this when I decided that is wasn’t big enough. I haven’ finished it, yet, but I’m planning on building a full scale trebuchet. My goal it to launch a pumpkin the length of a football field. Thanks for getting me started!