Catapult!

In engineering and design, my eight O’Clock class, we’ve been building catapults. Yeah, extremely fun. Really they aren’t that difficult….. except for the part where you have to measure things like mass and angles, plug them into this

Spreadsheet

to figure out the exact distance a ball will be flung. Really and truly I have no idea how we actually got the formula part right since I did a good bit of the measuring and I’m not sure where I got the numbers I did, but it worked. We predicted the ball to be launched 222 cm past the point of departure from the arm (The picture is before we entered the right angle). So a ring/hoop was set up 222 cm away and we fired. The first time it bounced off the edge of the jerk of a hoop, but secound time it went in perfectly. Anyway, it was my turn to take the catapult to my dorm and I decided to play around for a few minutes……


The shoe didn’t launch right because it was too heavy and kept falling off. There are two different ways to make the catapult fling things. First off, the quickest way, is what I did with the hairbrush,just push down on the arm. The activates the momentary switch which cuts off the current to the electromagnet keeping the metal pin in place. The secound way is to simply flick the switch to cut the current like I tried with the shoe. Unfortunately the shoe was heavy enough to limit its range…..alot. It was a pretty cool project, lol if anybody gets bored on a rainy day email me for the schematics and excel formula.

-JD

~ by twilightspath on July 24, 2008.