David the original comment is how many of us Canadians would talk too.. imperial is often used in dialogue and in construction, and then we use the more accurate system for real math
@@David-vo1rl Please don't use that word. Besides, it's the British Imperial system, ergo from the British Royal Family. "Inbred system" would be far more accurate.
You've got one thing absolutely right. An ideal trebuchet launch would be where the machine came to a complete rest, upon the release of the projectile. That last throw looked like you sent 75% or better of the potential energy of the weight away with the tennis ball. It becomes more tricky, as the weight ratio between the counter weight and the projectile weight becomes greater. That looks like a great design for the World Punkin Chunkin Championship event in Sussex County, in Delaware. If you consider this, note that the pumpkins MUST weigh more than 8 pounds, but less than 10 pounds. (3.63 Kg to 4.54 Kg) The idea is to see who can throw a pumpkin the farthest. Trebuchet is one of the classes of launchers recognized by that event.
Tennis rackets are extremely efficient at sending energy into tennis balls, so effective that tennis rackets are strung "too hard" to improve accuracy over speed and they still achieve these speed. Also consider if you could lift 15 kg 1.5 meters in half a second? I am pretty sure you can, and without hurting yourself. Weight lifters doing snatch achieves speeds of about 2 m/s, so the lift from floor to above head would take about 1.5 seconds but those weight are far more than 15 kg. And if you use your legs, you can probably jump at least one meter into the air, which is a decent amount of energy applied in a very short time.
nice!! I would like to know.... 1. Do you ever see any of the Tennis Balls again? 2. how far do the Tennis Balls fly? 3. how far would a heavy projectile fly? 4. can you aim for my neighbor next time?
this construct doesnt work with heavy weights/projectiles, because you'd have to get those weights on top of this bullshit construct with his bullshit method.
I love coming back to your older videos. Seeing that you only had 100k subs vs your 1m subs now and still having the same kind of content is awesome. Keep being you man.
I have a bag of 12 balls, so only have to walk to collect every 12 launches and hope a dog walker hasn't picked them up whilst I'm not watching haha... disclaimer: there is only one guy that walks through that field and I always check before launching ;)
@@Reach1335 Now come on, Arma 3 might not be CPU-optimised but the game itself got fixed after the initial (beta?) release. There are hardly any bugs. They didnt keep "every" problem from Beta to 3 years later with lots of random crashes, cheaters etc.
Thanks so much for this video. it was a bit tough for an 8 year old cub scout to follow some of the stuff you said, but the video sure helped show a lot for me to follow along. You inspired me to upload video of a whipper trebuchet I built with my dad over the weekend. We use some of your ideas and it worked out well for our 1st little trebuchet project- which I will be using at my cub scout camping trip this weekend. We will be flinging soccer balls!
2:20 Energy is proportional to velocity squared, so your energy transfer efficiency here is only 26%, not 51% If you want to see a _really_ optimized trebuchet, look up the video "Development of a Dynamically Tuned MURLIN Trebuchet"
If you put wheels on the bottom of the frame on all four corners facing the way the projectile is the wait only has to travel down and not backwards as well. It sounds counter intuitive but it works, most of the energy goes into throwing the projectiles rather than fighting with the frame. The wait goes straight down and the frame rocks back and fourth so less energy is wasted. Please try it and post the results. The ball will go higher, further and travel faster.
Yes, this makes a lot of sense actually. Besides the transporting of them, cannons had wheels for a similar purpose I believe. It is akin to the recoil effect of guns. If a handgun/rifle/shotgun is not "allowed" to jump back the shot fires the projectile and, to use Scott's word, fights the gun frame. If the frame is allowed to free flow upon firing... Well. lol NOT a very good or scientific comparison there but it does make sense (if you are me I guess lol). In order for energy to perform proficiently, it can't (shouldn't?) be bound.
proved it for my sons science project using a Kinex frame and motor wound up the same for throws 1- base held down 2- base not held and 3- base on wheels... as well as using the slide frames under the C2 rowing erg (and not) for blind power-10s
@@mystic_tacos This is all wrong. Field cannon had wheels for moving. The draw tang would be set on the ground to prevent them from rolling under fire. Stationary and ship mounted cannon had wheels so they could be pulled back for reloading. Bullets do not "fight the gun frame." Any motion of the gun reduces the muzzle velocity. A gun will only have recoil damping if it is powerful enough to damage itself when used. Soft gripping a semi-automatic handgun will actually cause it to jamb. handguns and rifles are always gripped as tightly and as rigidly as possible. Artillery will often have recoil damping to protect the frame.
z4zuse this is true. I tested it as a kid. Less energy is transferred to the rotational energy of the swing arm and more is transferred to the forward kinetic energy of the entire system right before the release. Awesome video!
wheels let the counterweight drop straight down and so you get all the energy without transferring any to the frame and hence the ground. [ added advantage . . . you don't mess with the length of the day (firing E/W) or the seasons (firing N/S) ]
what? that doesn't make sense. each action has an equal and opposite reaction. if there is no normal force, the frame should be moving the other direction.
@@The1wsx10 Ive seen this done in other documentaries (years ago), they were firing a trebuchet with the wheels locked and couldnt get decent range, range increases once you let the thing free wheel, since the counter movement of the arm pushed the whole machine forward.
@@The1wsx10 Notice how the frame rocks violently back and forth. This uses up energy. If you let the pivot slide back and forth freely, no energy is used to rock the frame, improving efficiency. The next best thing is letting the entire frame roll back and forth freely, then energy is still used up to move the entire frame, but it's not immediately dissipated as friction against the ground.
@@karlgiese6100 Not sure if it's a meme, or something random. But you can launch 300 kg 90 meters with the right device, i.e how large the trebuchet is.
I just wanted to say thank you for making such a great video for this! I'm doing a ball-launching project in high school and my group is going to use this design now.
@@TomStantonEngineering This is VERY important for optimizing a trebuchet: Do you see how the platform rocks during the swing? A trebuchet MUST be on wheels and allowed to roll forwards and backwards, so that from the perspective of the weight, it is falling straight down. A terrible amount of energy is wasted by being transferred to the frame and rocking it. You will DEFINITELY increase your efficiency by putting it on wheels and allowing it to roll forwards and backwards during the throw.
That was in an old trebuchet video. The experimenters did it by accident but it allowed a farther throw. Then looking at medieval pictures, they recognized that the trebuchets WERE on wheels.
Without any drag or ball mass, about 220 meters away, at 104mph and 45 degres, but they probably bounced so.... :P *edit, maybe if you did the math for mass and drag it could go to 300 meters
Tennis balls have a LOT of drag and only land about 80-90m away... a golf ball on the other hand! I tried a golf ball once and it landed 181m away, even after releasing at a really high angle. I'll give it another go once I make a golf ball sized sling!
Yeah golf balls fly much further bc of the dimples and turbulent flow! But if dimples reduce drag, why not use them on cars for example? (At least at the back)
Tom, I doubt you'll see this on such an old video, but I just have to say that I'm newer to your work and looking through old videos and just thought it was great to hear your enthusiasm at having 100k subs now that you have over 350k. You so deserve it, these videos are just awesome!
Nice workmanship. There was an episode of Mythbusters (I believe) a number of years ago where they built & tested a Trebuchet. They put 4 wheels on the legs and that allowed the machine to move forward & back a few feet during launch. I recall it increased the distance of the throw. Thanks for posting.
You can optimize any machine that is below 100% efficient. While you can never get 100% due to losses in energy transfer, friction etc.. you can always get that 0.001% closer to 100%. I'm pretty sure that the old engineers trebuchets had higher efficiency than Tom, as they had decades to improve them. However as Tom is doing calculations and using physics, i don't think he's too far behind. And what was it? 60%~ish efficiency. Quite a room for improvement.
Great video man. The concept of a trebuchet is intended to ultimately transfer energy from the counter weight to the target, literally meaning the bigger the trebuchet the more energy you can punch into a wall. A true marvel of historic ingenuity.
Channels like this always make me jealous. I absolutely love this kind of stuff, I just do not have the resources required to support it (tools and materials). awesome video! and grats
Nice video! Something I noticed was that you were calculating efficiency as measured against a "black box" model where the trebuchet is a machine converting gravitational potential energy straight to kinetic energy. This is actually pretty unrealistic (but is a great first-approximation method), since it neglects important factors like arm rotational energy, counterweight ending potential energy, etc, which of course have to be present in some form for the machine to operate. If you factor those things in to your "expected" velocity, you'd find that your efficiency is actually much higher than what you found! Source: did a classical mechanics II class where we used Legrangian mechanics to calculate theoretical launch velocities of trebuchets we built, and ended up achieving ~85% efficiency.
Lukey B. The Physics G Excluding some losses (such as unwanted energy deposited in internal movement) just provides bogus marketing numbers. Losses are losses.
I built a trebuchet for school and came across this video while I was researching and trying to find ideas. My team and I decided to make a whipper and ended up winning a competition with it! Thanks for the vid, Tom!
Was wondering at the improvements, at Winbelton,50 years ago, they reached 130mph. Pretty impressive improvement. How much was the equipment and what percentage too the player?
Hey Tom, just saw the new Colin Furze video and couldn't stop thinking about the fact that you could really give him a hand with his trebuchet, try and contact him!
I built an air cannon for a BBC tv show years ago that apparently got a tennis ball over mach1, according to a chronograph. Apparently thats not possible, due to choked flow... I keep meaning to re build the canon and try again and measure the speed properly. I built this giant 100mm piston valve that used the air pressure in the storage chamber to open the valve really fast. It was absolutely terrifying, and nearly 4M long. Those were the days....
Not sure which one you mean. It won't let me post a link, but if you search on youtube for hoarp001 and find the video 'Monster tennis ball launcher", you will find it. There are other videos of it shooting bars of soap and coke bottles. There is also a video with the chronograph. I was about 18 when I built it, about 12 years ago now. I feel old.
We have a project in Physics (school) and every group of 3 sudents has to build a catapult with some restrictions (max weight 250g, max height of the weight, 30cm), and your vid helped me a lot! Thx
Me and some friends for a school project used this design of a trebuchet and it worked very well. This design went the farthest distance so thanks for the idea.
That was a fantastic build and the maths to get there was pretty cool too. In what little study I have done on "regular" trebuchets, there was a theory that putting the whole thing on wheels allowed it to conserve even more energy - kind of letting the whole thing counter-move with the forces lost during the flight. Okay that was a lousy description as it's been quite a while!!! Some food for thought. Congratulations on blowing past 100 mph!!!
Hey Tom, I don't think I've ever fully explained how and why I developed the curved hanger system. It was really to accommodate large diameter projectiles in small Whippers, or machines with narrow main axles. A straight, split rail hanger system will work just fine with small projectiles, like golf balls or baseballs, because they can fit between the rails, where softballs or pumpkins will not. I developed the Double Link hanger system first to make space for larger pojos. It worked and performed pretty well, but the configuration reduced the cocking height of the counterweight, reducing the PE. The two counterweight bars in the curved hanger allow me to load large amounts of counterweight and move the center of gravity around, effectively opening or closing the angle between the arm and the hanger without actually adjusting the Timing Prop. A Timing Prop is a mechanical adjusting device between the arm and the hanger. My big full size Whipper did not require the curved hanger because it's so huge that there's space between the hanger rails. Even though it has a mechanical timing prop, location of the CW center of mass was crucial in getting it timed.
Will you enhance this trebuchet out of exotic material such as ceramic bearing, aerodynamicly sculpted carbon fiber for the arm, and lead block as the counterweight?
Gabe Sewell well osmium is extraordinarily expensive actually all dense materials are quite expensive like tungsten gold and osmium but tungsten would definitely be the easiest
Mercury would work as well but it is probably hard to get it also it as toxic as lead so as long as you don't have cuts on your hand you can mess with it because of it not absorbing through the skin
When I was a kid,(about 55 years ago) My Dad was a general contractor and built houses so there was always a surplus of scrap lumber in the back yard, which was adjacent to the electrical power line tower right of way and that gave me plenty of room to sling objects. I”m not sure what prompted me to do it, but for a number of years I built, what I called a catapult in the back yard that was similar to the one you are using only it was much more simple, using a skinny 20 foot tree trunk laying on the fulcrum and creating a receptacle to hold rocks on the weight end an another small cup shaped thing on the long end. We just pulled the long end down, loaded it with a rock and let it fly. Very primitive, but a hell of a lot of fun.
Thank you for keeping this video active. I think the expression for the kinetic energy needs V squared. Ke = 0.5 mass x velocity ^ 2. Velocity equation is incongruent otherwise.
assuming the camera is completely level, and the 2 frames the ball is in the air are representative of the angle it leaves, it goes 199 meters (654 feet)
He's not terrorizing his neighbors. He's terrorizing his neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbor. They'll never know it's him! The perfect crime!
Speed of projectile is as higher as less is inertia of the arm. So fixed arm trebuchet accelerates way slower as it has to spend some extra energy on increasing of inertia moment of the counterweight and additional part of arm. It's similar effect as in typical physics task on which barrel descends faster from top of hill: filled with water or empty one (filled with sand). So if the counterweight moves only in vertical direction straight and experience no rotation at all - speed of the projectile will be maximized.
My guess is that a glider or water filled 3d printed rocket were high on his long list of projectiles (along with a gopro and the cat). The rope and release doodad required to keep things aligned are probably a whole project in itself. Thank you for sharing this stuff, Tom!
well, measure the angle. then use newtons constant acceleration to get the time till vertical movement is 0. double that, then just approximate the horizontal velocity for that time.
ok, i just did the maths... assuming the camera is completely level, and the 2 frames the ball is in the air are representative of the angle it leaves, it goes 199 meters (654 feet) docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_UtC9ZjoW7aZw-X7mHikqZPpjg3d-9BvmxYfQhGdZYE/edit?usp=sharing
Hey Tom, I have a new passion for trebuchets. Being new at this hobby, I was wondering if you offer any plans or drawings with dimensions for your whipper trebuchet for sale?
i am 13 yrs old and i built a whipper trebuchet like this one that is 2 m tall. it was a ton of fun and mine can shoot 180 m. keep makeing awesome videos!
in fact 42.7 m/s is NOT an efficiency of 62.5% as you should compare joules instead of velocity. this trebuchet has an output energy of 51J which is just 39%. Sorry bro.. :/ did you try building a murlin?
It's a lot more involved than that too. You can't take the energy transferred to the ball and neglect the energy needed to rotate the much more massive wooden arms in the first place. You have the moment of inertia for the long arm, and the sling/ball itself has a moment of inertia about an axis that's revolving about the main axis of the trebuchet. AND none of them are revolving about their centers of mass.
@pyropulse The theoretical energy doesn't depend only on drop distance of the counterweight, though. For instance, in the case of a whipper design (as Tom has done), the long arm is already sort of pointed up when the firing trigger is pulled, but a lot of designs start with the long arm pointed down, so it is guaranteed to capture some energy as it has to be raised between start of launch and the moment the projectile escapes.
Yes, but lets see how a tennis player manages several 10kg rocks... I mean, i think the idea here is to make a scalable design, so that you can increase the projectile and counterweight, while keeping their proportion, and launch serious wheight. It would also be nice to have a destruction test, to see how much weight it can move before it cracks. Then you make a bigger, stronger version...
Сергей Сурков , We have plenty of fat tree rats in our neighborhood, didn’t plan on launching them quite that far. The closest country is Canada, but I have lots of relatives up there that I like. Was thinking more like out into the Atlantic Ocean, onto a small island surrounded by puffy sea cows. PS, do you have any info on squirrel googles or safety glasses, was thinking ziplock bags, but there’s enough plastic in the ocean already.
How about that transparent ball for hamsters? It is called "zorb" or something, I'm not sure... This thing floats! Just imagine sad seamen who suddenly meet a flock of squirrels in such suits vigorously running somewhere right in the middle of Atlantics
Сергей Сурков Sea Squirrels that would be funny, not sure how the lobsters would react to them, lol. Though I’m sure the stripped bass will love playing toss with them, just trying to picture the tourists running for their lives when they get bombarded with in coming rodent balls infused with soggy fur sags.
9:44 thats actually a great angle for main purpose of a trebuchet, stone walls are way stronger against energy of projectile falling down on them than projectile knocking blocks off with high horizontal energy
Nice design. One day at around age 12, I came across two 8" x 8" six foot long lumber in the scrap pile with two holes drilled near conveniently near the ends, my first thought, a stand for the hinge of a trebucket. By the end of the next day, I had a trebucket in my parent's front yard. The weight was a 25 gallon barrel with rocks, the arm, varying pieces of gradually thinner lumber. It was terribly inefficient and rather strange looking. I think it was about 20 feet long. It definitely had people talking for the two months it stayed there ... lol. Thanks for answering that long lasting question in my mind about how a trebucket could be made more efficient.
I got my group to build a small scale trebuchet for our final in our project 'management' class in college. Stood 1 foot tall at the axle, I think 3 feet along the throwing arm, and managed about 50 yards with a golf ball. Then it got swiped by someone because I was sick and didn't get to the school to collect it after that day.
Great investigation. Basically, it comes down to designing something which has the least residual amount of movement in the trebuchet after the tennis ball is launched. A double-pendulum can have almost all of the energy held in the motion on one of the arms (while the other is almost still) or split among the two, so there's probably some wisdom about those that you can tap into to minimize the residual motion. I figure that there's a lot of research into this kind of thing with earthquake dampeners for skyscrapers, too.
Today, I discovered a man who builds trebuchets in his garden for fun.
This is fantastic.
His neighbours aren't that happy
Well I'd be surprised if I discovered someone who's building these things for something other than fun
Germans may be?
Exactly my thought, one year later!
@@nissimtrifonov5314 Wanna know something fun?I watch this video for my pathetic engineering project.
Imagine getting hit by a tennis ball at 104 miles per hour that was shot from a homemade trebuchet 300 meters away.
Did you just use both metric and retarded system in one sentence?
@@David-vo1rl 'retarded system' lmao
@@GielL96 well it IS Imperial
David the original comment is how many of us Canadians would talk too.. imperial is often used in dialogue and in construction, and then we use the more accurate system for real math
@@David-vo1rl Please don't use that word. Besides, it's the British Imperial system, ergo from the British Royal Family. "Inbred system" would be far more accurate.
You be talking some mad shit for being someone 300 meters from me.
You talking mad shit for 90km projectile range of 300m
I am watching this with my dog. She is looking at me like I need to get to work building this superior fetch engine.
feed the poor thing.
LMAO @ "fetch engine" :)
Go fetch the 90kg projectile over 300m
The dog would lose sight of them.
Launch the dog..... I bet there has never been a dog fetching a ball that fast... ever! xD
You've got one thing absolutely right. An ideal trebuchet launch would be where the machine came to a complete rest, upon the release of the projectile. That last throw looked like you sent 75% or better of the potential energy of the weight away with the tennis ball. It becomes more tricky, as the weight ratio between the counter weight and the projectile weight becomes greater. That looks like a great design for the World Punkin Chunkin Championship event in Sussex County, in Delaware. If you consider this, note that the pumpkins MUST weigh more than 8 pounds, but less than 10 pounds. (3.63 Kg to 4.54 Kg) The idea is to see who can throw a pumpkin the farthest. Trebuchet is one of the classes of launchers recognized by that event.
Unbelievable that a professional tennis player can serve faster than this.
Tennis rackets are extremely efficient at sending energy into tennis balls, so effective that tennis rackets are strung "too hard" to improve accuracy over speed and they still achieve these speed.
Also consider if you could lift 15 kg 1.5 meters in half a second? I am pretty sure you can, and without hurting yourself. Weight lifters doing snatch achieves speeds of about 2 m/s, so the lift from floor to above head would take about 1.5 seconds but those weight are far more than 15 kg.
And if you use your legs, you can probably jump at least one meter into the air, which is a decent amount of energy applied in a very short time.
@@57thorns basically,we just need some heavier counter weights.
Fala direito porra
@@dicasdavida2315 O povo aqui não sabe escrever. Parece que não aprenderam portugês na escola. Nossa educação é um lixo mesmo.
@@57thorns I see the point you're trying to make but jump 1 meter into the air? Very VERY few people can jump one meter into the air.
Are you planning and equipping yourself for a crusade?
Can I join?
Ryan M.
Deus Vult
I’m in
we will take Jerusalem my friends
I think the idea is to take down those annoying, noisy airplanes that fly over his otherwise beautiful garden.
I think Tom's crusade may involve Wimbledon rather than Jerusalem
nice!! I would like to know....
1. Do you ever see any of the Tennis Balls again?
2. how far do the Tennis Balls fly?
3. how far would a heavy projectile fly?
4. can you aim for my neighbor next time?
u need quick mafs
You can launch your 90kg tennis balls 300m away
this construct doesnt work with heavy weights/projectiles, because you'd have to get those weights on top of this bullshit construct with his bullshit method.
@@digdigktn lol what? Just check the Colossal Thunder trebuchet. They have the same system and can charge it with a pulley
@@digdigktn I'd like to see you do better. Realy.
I love coming back to your older videos. Seeing that you only had 100k subs vs your 1m subs now and still having the same kind of content is awesome. Keep being you man.
After seeing many of your videos over the years, I associate this channel being one of the engineering highlights of the internet.
But can it launch a 90 kg projectile over 300 meters?
Projections Of course, it's the superior siege engine, after all.
I was looking for this 😂😂😂
Damn, Your gf is pretty heavy. Tell her that she should go on a diet or something ;)
It can launch a 95kg projectile over 305 meters
That is your weight with a parachute, isn't it?
Congratulations on 100K Subs!
Thanks mate!
You earned my subscribe with the "hovering rocket" video. Keep on rockin! :D
@Jay R check this guy: ruclips.net/channel/UCILl8ozWuxnFYXIe2svjHhg
Imagine having to get that ball after every launch
Get a dog.
Marcus Joakimsen
Or a bulk discount at your local sports shop 😛
I have a bag of 12 balls, so only have to walk to collect every 12 launches and hope a dog walker hasn't picked them up whilst I'm not watching haha... disclaimer: there is only one guy that walks through that field and I always check before launching ;)
Ay the mad lad himself aswered
Why didn't you just put up a big net to catch the tennis balls? I know it's fun to watch how far they go, but chasing them must get old pretty quick.
Imagine going on your morning walk when all of the sudden, a super sonic tennis ball comes out of nowhere and clocks you up side the head.
"Oh, these russian spies again..."
Sounds like instakill from Tennis. *Wii Sports intensifies*
one thing is clear, throwing a grenade with this mechanism is dangerous.
na it´s fine. he is doing from a distance relesing with a string.
Now talking about cooking that grenade is another story
As opposed to throwing a regular grenade, which is perfectly safe....
-to passing aircraft.
That's called artillery.
More optimised than PUBG
LeoFPV This will hold true unless the trebuchet clipped into the ground and explode
everything is more optimised than PUBG
Arma 3 isn't sadly.
that bar glitched through the ground and fell all the way down
@@Reach1335 Now come on, Arma 3 might not be CPU-optimised but the game itself got fixed after the initial (beta?) release. There are hardly any bugs. They didnt keep "every" problem from Beta to 3 years later with lots of random crashes, cheaters etc.
Love that whipping sound
Awesome work as always! Congrats on 100k subscribers!
I'm sure you'll get there as well with your fantastic content :)
Thanks man! You'll be at 100k soon for sure!!
Thanks so much for this video. it was a bit tough for an 8 year old cub scout to follow some of the stuff you said, but the video sure helped show a lot for me to follow along.
You inspired me to upload video of a whipper trebuchet I built with my dad over the weekend. We use some of your ideas and it worked out well for our 1st little trebuchet project- which I will be using at my cub scout camping trip this weekend. We will be flinging soccer balls!
I just watched your video. Great job! Made me want to make one too. Thanks for sharing!
2:20 Energy is proportional to velocity squared, so your energy transfer efficiency here is only 26%, not 51%
If you want to see a _really_ optimized trebuchet, look up the video "Development of a Dynamically Tuned MURLIN Trebuchet"
If you put wheels on the bottom of the frame on all four corners facing the way the projectile is the wait only has to travel down and not backwards as well. It sounds counter intuitive but it works, most of the energy goes into throwing the projectiles rather than fighting with the frame. The wait goes straight down and the frame rocks back and fourth so less energy is wasted. Please try it and post the results. The ball will go higher, further and travel faster.
Huh that sounds interesting
Yes, this makes a lot of sense actually. Besides the transporting of them, cannons had wheels for a similar purpose I believe. It is akin to the recoil effect of guns. If a handgun/rifle/shotgun is not "allowed" to jump back the shot fires the projectile and, to use Scott's word, fights the gun frame. If the frame is allowed to free flow upon firing... Well. lol
NOT a very good or scientific comparison there but it does make sense (if you are me I guess lol). In order for energy to perform proficiently, it can't (shouldn't?) be bound.
proved it for my sons science project using
a Kinex frame and motor wound up the same
for throws 1- base held down 2- base not held
and 3- base on wheels... as well as using
the slide frames under the C2 rowing erg
(and not) for blind power-10s
@@mystic_tacos This is all wrong.
Field cannon had wheels for moving. The draw tang would be set on the ground to prevent them from rolling under fire.
Stationary and ship mounted cannon had wheels so they could be pulled back for reloading.
Bullets do not "fight the gun frame." Any motion of the gun reduces the muzzle velocity. A gun will only have recoil damping if it is powerful enough to damage itself when used. Soft gripping a semi-automatic handgun will actually cause it to jamb. handguns and rifles are always gripped as tightly and as rigidly as possible. Artillery will often have recoil damping to protect the frame.
Weight. Not wait.
Add wheels and mount it on rails. It apparently makes it more efficient
z4zuse this is true. I tested it as a kid. Less energy is transferred to the rotational energy of the swing arm and more is transferred to the forward kinetic energy of the entire system right before the release. Awesome video!
wheels let the counterweight drop straight down and so you get all the energy without transferring any to the frame and hence the ground.
[ added advantage . . . you don't mess with the length of the day (firing E/W) or the seasons (firing N/S) ]
what? that doesn't make sense. each action has an equal and opposite reaction. if there is no normal force, the frame should be moving the other direction.
@@The1wsx10 Ive seen this done in other documentaries (years ago), they were firing a trebuchet with the wheels locked and couldnt get decent range, range increases once you let the thing free wheel, since the counter movement of the arm pushed the whole machine forward.
@@The1wsx10 Notice how the frame rocks violently back and forth. This uses up energy. If you let the pivot slide back and forth freely, no energy is used to rock the frame, improving efficiency. The next best thing is letting the entire frame roll back and forth freely, then energy is still used up to move the entire frame, but it's not immediately dissipated as friction against the ground.
My girlfriend: "honey, why is that 300 kg stone 90 meters away?"
Me: "uh no reason"
Other way around
It's a 90kg projectile over 300m, you imbecile
@@karlgiese6100 Not sure if it's a meme, or something random. But you can launch 300 kg 90 meters with the right device, i.e how large the trebuchet is.
I still don’t get that reference.
I dont get it gg izi
I just wanted to say thank you for making such a great video for this! I'm doing a ball-launching project in high school and my group is going to use this design now.
Me: You can't improve upon perfection.
Tom Stanton: Hold my counterweight.
imagine going to an airsoft match and one guy shows up with a trebuchet
Congratulations with you 100K.
You are a big inspiration to me.
I'm only 10, but hope to do things like you do when I am older.
Best regards - Kian 👍
Jesus,? Yeah sure, whatever.
I hope you will one day Kian
When a ten year old has better grammar than you. Haha.
Huge congrats on the 100k Tom, well deserved! Also, trebuchet powered 100mph tennis ball? what's not to love about that?! :D two thumbs up mate :)
Thanks mate!!
@@TomStantonEngineering This is VERY important for optimizing a trebuchet: Do you see how the platform rocks during the swing? A trebuchet MUST be on wheels and allowed to roll forwards and backwards, so that from the perspective of the weight, it is falling straight down. A terrible amount of energy is wasted by being transferred to the frame and rocking it. You will DEFINITELY increase your efficiency by putting it on wheels and allowing it to roll forwards and backwards during the throw.
P.S. Source: "Medieval Siege" by Nova, "Secrets of Lost Empires II"
Try mounting the trebuchet on wheels. The basket dropping straight down will drive entire trebuchet forward thus giving projectile added velocity.
That was in an old trebuchet video. The experimenters did it by accident but it allowed a farther throw. Then looking at medieval pictures, they recognized that the trebuchets WERE on wheels.
Tom, just found this off the back off Tods recent vlogs . Absolute pleasure to watch, something deeply satisfying in Trebuchets and tinkering 👌
I bet this pulls women like crazy.
Powder guns are more effective anyway.
Considering he's a pimp with a dozen women under his spell... why yes, it does!! ;D
Chicks Dig Long Poles...
-Some Lonely Fisherman
Hard to say, it's a pull/push sort of mechanism. I guess it's pulls them to begin with then pushes them away as efficiently as possible.
Only the young ones..
Launch a GoPro!!!!!
Pls
go pro and gps unit so it can be recovered
or a 360 camera!
The big question is, where did all the tennis balls go???
Without any drag or ball mass, about 220 meters away, at 104mph and 45 degres, but they probably bounced so.... :P *edit, maybe if you did the math for mass and drag it could go to 300 meters
Tennis balls have a LOT of drag and only land about 80-90m away... a golf ball on the other hand! I tried a golf ball once and it landed 181m away, even after releasing at a really high angle. I'll give it another go once I make a golf ball sized sling!
That sounds like more video content!
You should try baseballs too.
Yeah golf balls fly much further bc of the dimples and turbulent flow! But if dimples reduce drag, why not use them on cars for example? (At least at the back)
It's very rare ofind a channel that convinces me to subscribe in just 1 video. Congrats for the milestone and keep up the awesome work!
Tom, I doubt you'll see this on such an old video, but I just have to say that I'm newer to your work and looking through old videos and just thought it was great to hear your enthusiasm at having 100k subs now that you have over 350k. You so deserve it, these videos are just awesome!
Nice workmanship. There was an episode of Mythbusters (I believe) a number of years ago where they built & tested a Trebuchet. They put 4 wheels on the legs and that allowed the machine to move forward & back a few feet during launch. I recall it increased the distance of the throw. Thanks for posting.
If I need to storm a castle you’re my man,great work love it
you can't optimise a trebuchet, they're already perfect
The trebuchet is the superior siege machine after all.
the perfect version called schwerer gustav
@@herrpension1280yes
You can optimize any machine that is below 100% efficient. While you can never get 100% due to losses in energy transfer, friction etc.. you can always get that 0.001% closer to 100%. I'm pretty sure that the old engineers trebuchets had higher efficiency than Tom, as they had decades to improve them. However as Tom is doing calculations and using physics, i don't think he's too far behind. And what was it? 60%~ish efficiency. Quite a room for improvement.
@@RRKS you're the guy thats fun at parties, right?
Great video man. The concept of a trebuchet is intended to ultimately transfer energy from the counter weight to the target, literally meaning the bigger the trebuchet the more energy you can punch into a wall. A true marvel of historic ingenuity.
Channels like this always make me jealous. I absolutely love this kind of stuff, I just do not have the resources required to support it (tools and materials).
awesome video! and grats
Finally! I was worried about you thinking that you shot yourself with the trebuchet :D
Fortunately not haha! Trebuchet rule no1, always stand to the side ;)
Adding wheels to your treb also optimses the kinetic energy at the end of the curve
Amazing work, dude... Just... Fantastic! 😀
And congrats for the 100k subscribers! Now let's get another 100k! 😊
Nice video! Something I noticed was that you were calculating efficiency as measured against a "black box" model where the trebuchet is a machine converting gravitational potential energy straight to kinetic energy. This is actually pretty unrealistic (but is a great first-approximation method), since it neglects important factors like arm rotational energy, counterweight ending potential energy, etc, which of course have to be present in some form for the machine to operate. If you factor those things in to your "expected" velocity, you'd find that your efficiency is actually much higher than what you found!
Source: did a classical mechanics II class where we used Legrangian mechanics to calculate theoretical launch velocities of trebuchets we built, and ended up achieving ~85% efficiency.
Lukey B. The Physics G Excluding some losses (such as unwanted energy deposited in internal movement) just provides bogus marketing numbers. Losses are losses.
Watching this for a second tome four years later and you are now 10x the number of subs, lol. Way to go Tom!
You need to talk to Joerge Sprave about making this semi-automatic.
Full-auto trebuchet???
Put it on wheels and it will be more efficient. The whole frame will roll forwards just prior to release, as the weight swings backwards
2:20 efficiency is not related linearly with speed, since KE=1/2 mV^2
I built a trebuchet for school and came across this video while I was researching and trying to find ideas. My team and I decided to make a whipper and ended up winning a competition with it! Thanks for the vid, Tom!
And now you're over a million subs! Makes sense considering all the awesome videos! Keep up the good work!
Watching that, and seeing how fast and efficient it was, it’s amazing to think that pro tennis players regularly serve 150mph.
Was wondering at the improvements, at Winbelton,50 years ago, they reached 130mph. Pretty impressive improvement. How much was the equipment and what percentage too the player?
Hey Tom,
just saw the new Colin Furze video and couldn't stop thinking about the fact that you could really give him a hand with his trebuchet, try and contact him!
I built an air cannon for a BBC tv show years ago that apparently got a tennis ball over mach1, according to a chronograph. Apparently thats not possible, due to choked flow... I keep meaning to re build the canon and try again and measure the speed properly. I built this giant 100mm piston valve that used the air pressure in the storage chamber to open the valve really fast. It was absolutely terrifying, and nearly 4M long. Those were the days....
... That was your cannon ?
Not sure which one you mean. It won't let me post a link, but if you search on youtube for hoarp001 and find the video 'Monster tennis ball launcher", you will find it. There are other videos of it shooting bars of soap and coke bottles. There is also a video with the chronograph. I was about 18 when I built it, about 12 years ago now. I feel old.
U know BBC has more than 1 meaning
Hmm, well I am pretty sure I was not commissioned to build an air canon for a TV show by a 'Big Black C**k."
I watched something about that air cannon ( on BBC ) long ago... fucking hell what a small world we live on
We have a project in Physics (school) and every group of 3 sudents has to build a catapult with some restrictions (max weight 250g, max height of the weight, 30cm), and your vid helped me a lot! Thx
Me and some friends for a school project used this design of a trebuchet and it worked very well. This design went the farthest distance so thanks for the idea.
I just wonder where all the tennis balls are going. I mean imagine waking up from a afternoon nap and 20-30 tennis balls are just in your backyard.
Looks like they going into orbit ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌
I suggested he turn the tennis balls into flaming projectiles.
what about putting the whole thing on wheels? instead of the whole frame rocking it will roll forward and the weights will drop straighter down.
You lose energy accelerating the frame.
i tried to build a whipper in Medieval Engineers but the technology just isn't there yet...
That was a fantastic build and the maths to get there was pretty cool too. In what little study I have done on "regular" trebuchets, there was a theory that putting the whole thing on wheels allowed it to conserve even more energy - kind of letting the whole thing counter-move with the forces lost during the flight. Okay that was a lousy description as it's been quite a while!!!
Some food for thought. Congratulations on blowing past 100 mph!!!
Hey Tom, I don't think I've ever fully explained how and why I developed the curved hanger system. It was really to accommodate large diameter projectiles in small Whippers, or machines with narrow main axles. A straight, split rail hanger system will work just fine with small projectiles, like golf balls or baseballs, because they can fit between the rails, where softballs or pumpkins will not. I developed the Double Link hanger system first to make space for larger pojos. It worked and performed pretty well, but the configuration reduced the cocking height of the counterweight, reducing the PE. The two counterweight bars in the curved hanger allow me to load large amounts of counterweight and move the center of gravity around, effectively opening or closing the angle between the arm and the hanger without actually adjusting the Timing Prop. A Timing Prop is a mechanical adjusting device between the arm and the hanger. My big full size Whipper did not require the curved hanger because it's so huge that there's space between the hanger rails. Even though it has a mechanical timing prop, location of the CW center of mass was crucial in getting it timed.
if the k in the sub number was kilograms, a normal trebuchet would not be able to launch your subcount over 300 metres
kilograms is k the sub count has 100K (capital)
That motor is entirely far too down, you have to minimize flexing in a CNC, not increase it.
if it works it can't be dumb
Will you enhance this trebuchet out of exotic material such as ceramic bearing, aerodynamicly sculpted carbon fiber for the arm, and lead block as the counterweight?
it would be cool to see this taken to the extreme!
i thought you said exotic materials... osmium counterweight
pizza_boy18 a tungsten cube would work 100x better
Gabe Sewell well osmium is extraordinarily expensive actually all dense materials are quite expensive like tungsten gold and osmium but tungsten would definitely be the easiest
Mercury would work as well but it is probably hard to get it also it as toxic as lead so as long as you don't have cuts on your hand you can mess with it because of it not absorbing through the skin
When I was a kid,(about 55 years ago) My Dad was a general contractor and built houses so there was always a surplus of scrap lumber in the back yard, which was adjacent to the electrical power line tower right of way and that gave me plenty of room to sling objects. I”m not sure what prompted me to do it, but for a number of years I built, what I called a catapult in the back yard that was similar to the one you are using only it was much more simple, using a skinny 20 foot tree trunk laying on the fulcrum and creating a receptacle to hold rocks on the weight end an another small cup shaped thing on the long end. We just pulled the long end down, loaded it with a rock and let it fly. Very primitive, but a hell of a lot of fun.
Thank you for keeping this video active. I think the expression for the kinetic energy needs V squared. Ke = 0.5 mass x velocity ^ 2. Velocity equation is incongruent otherwise.
How far did they go?
Glen M a 90kg projectile can be slung(?) over 300 meters
assuming the camera is completely level, and the 2 frames the ball is in the air are representative of the angle it leaves, it goes 199 meters (654 feet)
1wsx10
300m, if it were 90kg.
what? you aren't getting 300m with a 90kg projectile with this trebuchet. its frame is bolted together with plywood
1wsx10
/r/trebuchetmemes
lmao stop terrorizing the neighbours
He's not terrorizing his neighbors.
He's terrorizing his neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbors, neighbor.
They'll never know it's him!
The perfect crime!
And where do you think he got these tennis balls from?
....and?....what significant idea!.....Fetch a BOX of grenades!
@@DeathsHood Lol just walkin around one day wondering who smashed my window with a supersonic tennis ball and find a whip it trebuchet 5 blocks down
I've been watching too much PewDiePie and this shows up on Recommended
same
This trebuchet project is the best! I really hope you plan on doing some more videos on this trebuchet! Its great!!!
Speed of projectile is as higher as less is inertia of the arm. So fixed arm trebuchet accelerates way slower as it has to spend some extra energy on increasing of inertia moment of the counterweight and additional part of arm. It's similar effect as in typical physics task on which barrel descends faster from top of hill: filled with water or empty one (filled with sand).
So if the counterweight moves only in vertical direction straight and experience no rotation at all - speed of the projectile will be maximized.
try throwing a plain in it, and see if it gets destroyed by the G-force or glide through the air in a tremendous speed
My guess is that a glider or water filled 3d printed rocket were high on his long list of projectiles (along with a gopro and the cat). The rope and release doodad required to keep things aligned are probably a whole project in itself. Thank you for sharing this stuff, Tom!
And somewhere is a guy, wondering about all the Tennis balls in his garden :-]
What was the distance of the 104 mph ball?
well, measure the angle. then use newtons constant acceleration to get the time till vertical movement is 0. double that, then just approximate the horizontal velocity for that time.
ok, i just did the maths... assuming the camera is completely level, and the 2 frames the ball is in the air are representative of the angle it leaves, it goes 199 meters (654 feet)
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_UtC9ZjoW7aZw-X7mHikqZPpjg3d-9BvmxYfQhGdZYE/edit?usp=sharing
Interesting calculation. It will be lot less in reality though, because of the significant air resistance at that speed.
@@1Hippo it would also catch a lot more air than any normal object because of the fuzzes on it are made to
cause air friction.
I like how the wood cutter table has a ton of marks in it. Proof that its been used
The way that trebuchet works is so satisfyingly beautiful
Hey Tom, I have a new passion for trebuchets. Being new at this hobby, I was wondering if you offer any plans or drawings with dimensions for your whipper trebuchet for sale?
104 mph in 0.5 sec!?
DAAAAYYYYUUMM!!!!!!
tesla roadster will be faster
Now you can bombard your neighbours with Molotov cocktails)
i am 13 yrs old and i built a whipper trebuchet like this one that is 2 m tall. it was a ton of fun and mine can shoot 180 m. keep makeing awesome videos!
I wish I had done more research when it came to making my trebuchet in highschool, that whipper one is neat.
in fact 42.7 m/s is NOT an efficiency of 62.5% as you should compare joules instead of velocity. this trebuchet has an output energy of 51J which is just 39%. Sorry bro.. :/
did you try building a murlin?
It's a lot more involved than that too. You can't take the energy transferred to the ball and neglect the energy needed to rotate the much more massive wooden arms in the first place. You have the moment of inertia for the long arm, and the sling/ball itself has a moment of inertia about an axis that's revolving about the main axis of the trebuchet. AND none of them are revolving about their centers of mass.
@pyropulse The theoretical energy doesn't depend only on drop distance of the counterweight, though. For instance, in the case of a whipper design (as Tom has done), the long arm is already sort of pointed up when the firing trigger is pulled, but a lot of designs start with the long arm pointed down, so it is guaranteed to capture some energy as it has to be raised between start of launch and the moment the projectile escapes.
Just think, the players at Wimbledon at the moment can serve faster than you trebuchet can throw the ball.
Yes, but lets see how a tennis player manages several 10kg rocks... I mean, i think the idea here is to make a scalable design, so that you can increase the projectile and counterweight, while keeping their proportion, and launch serious wheight. It would also be nice to have a destruction test, to see how much weight it can move before it cracks. Then you make a bigger, stronger version...
For the non american viewers:
104 mph = 167 km/h aprox
PD: Very cool video Tom!
quick mafs
Seriously? There is a video about optimising a trebuchet? Truly wonderful the internet is!
That launch sound at 14:09 is amazing! Impressive that you broke 100 mph
What size works best on squirrels, umm asking for a friend.
It depends on a fatness of a squirrel and on a country you want to launch it to
Сергей Сурков , We have plenty of fat tree rats in our neighborhood, didn’t plan on launching them quite that far. The closest country is Canada, but I have lots of relatives up there that I like. Was thinking more like out into the Atlantic Ocean, onto a small island surrounded by puffy sea cows.
PS, do you have any info on squirrel googles or safety glasses, was thinking ziplock bags, but there’s enough plastic in the ocean already.
How about that transparent ball for hamsters? It is called "zorb" or something, I'm not sure... This thing floats!
Just imagine sad seamen who suddenly meet a flock of squirrels in such suits vigorously running somewhere right in the middle of Atlantics
Сергей Сурков Sea Squirrels that would be funny, not sure how the lobsters would react to them, lol.
Though I’m sure the stripped bass will love playing toss with them, just trying to picture the tourists running for their lives when they get bombarded with in coming rodent balls infused with soggy fur sags.
"Urgent news: It's raining squirrels all over the world! Ufologists say that it is the beginning of alien's paratroopers attack!"
Isn't your efficiency (at 9:20) math wrong because you should be using V1^2/V2^2 instead of V1/V2 ?
Idk why this was recommended to me, but I am not dissapointed.
Trust the algorithm. It is the master. It knows you better than you know you.
i know this is 6 years old, but this is incredible work. great vid.
9:44 thats actually a great angle for main purpose of a trebuchet, stone walls are way stronger against energy of projectile falling down on them than projectile knocking blocks off with high horizontal energy
Alright, now lets re take jerusalem
Or go to the Moon in a tennis ball.. tsk-tsk
@@BillAnt retaking Jerusalems seems better
@@Fede_uyz we have it already lets take anatolia instead
DEUS VULT!
Nah....leave it....'Smells of wee in the corners! Why do you want anything that smells of wee?
In the equation E_kin the velocity is missing a ^2
and so half the speed is only a quarter efficiency, not half as stated.
Yep.
The poster goes all high and mighty about improving the efficiency, but makes a pre-school goofup on the math.
Sad.
The calculations are however correct
So he is correctly calculating the WRONG thing. Yay for him.
Marvin Kitfox at 8:53 you can clearly see the sqare root, he just forgot to add ^2 in the kE formula while EDITING...
ACE!
15:0
Nice design. One day at around age 12, I came across two 8" x 8" six foot long lumber in the scrap pile with two holes drilled near conveniently near the ends, my first thought, a stand for the hinge of a trebucket. By the end of the next day, I had a trebucket in my parent's front yard. The weight was a 25 gallon barrel with rocks, the arm, varying pieces of gradually thinner lumber. It was terribly inefficient and rather strange looking. I think it was about 20 feet long. It definitely had people talking for the two months it stayed there ... lol.
Thanks for answering that long lasting question in my mind about how a trebucket could be made more efficient.
I got my group to build a small scale trebuchet for our final in our project 'management' class in college. Stood 1 foot tall at the axle, I think 3 feet along the throwing arm, and managed about 50 yards with a golf ball. Then it got swiped by someone because I was sick and didn't get to the school to collect it after that day.
the reason this video doesnot have any dislikes. is because the trebuchet killed the people who would :P
oh noo no he missed one :(
If i hear the word “naught” ONE MORE TIME!
naught
Lol tom! Yeh naught is a good english word
These replies are rather..........
naughty
RiP BoB tHe Dog 2019-2019
killed by a flying play button
Hey thanks man you really helped me with my school project we had to build a smaller siege machine!! :)
How did it go?
Great investigation. Basically, it comes down to designing something which has the least residual amount of movement in the trebuchet after the tennis ball is launched. A double-pendulum can have almost all of the energy held in the motion on one of the arms (while the other is almost still) or split among the two, so there's probably some wisdom about those that you can tap into to minimize the residual motion. I figure that there's a lot of research into this kind of thing with earthquake dampeners for skyscrapers, too.