"Good ol' boy"-style skeet shooting...

[SDC]

Please tell me that someone here had something to do with this
http://www.trebuchet.com/skeet I'm thinking that someone said "Here, hold my beer" while this was being thunk up and put into practice.

 

[Fergy35]

I wonder how much spare time you have on your hands before you decide to build a trebuchet. It looks like a lot of fun though.

 

[Hooptie]

stupendeous!

 

[Gingerbreadman]

I give them kudos for that. Did they actually hit the bag with a shotgun, or was it somehow trebuchet-launched? It wasn't too clear on that.

 

[Gustav]

Nothing like a Trebuchet or old style catapult to lay siege to the castle or in this case bust a few melons.

May not be a traditional firearm but they do launch many types of projectiles everything from rounded stones to dead animals and nowadays fruits vegetables and even old cars and pianos are flung through the air with the greatest of glee.

Until the canon made them obsolete they were one of the main weapons to batter down the walls and storm the castle.

 

[Cougfan2]

Makes me want to go to the range with some leftover pumpkins from Halloween and give them the retirement they so richly deserve.

Hollowpoints and pumpkins are made for each other.

 

[Capstick1]

With the distance and speed this thing is throwing the targets at I think a 4 ga with a full choke might be more appropriate.

 

[Regolith]

I wonder how much spare time you have on your hands before you decide to build a trebuchet. It looks like a lot of fun though.

I did it once for a high school project. It was 6 feet high at the axle, with a 9 foot throwing arm. It took me three months (I started the project before school started, because I only had time to work on it during the weekends because of football and I knew ahead of time about the project) and about $200 or so.

Unfortunately, I didn't reinforce the axle properly. It was 1", solid steel, but it bent like it was rubber even with only 100lbs of counterweight. It turned into a nice V after I put 300lbs on it.

It was fun, though.

One of these days I'm going to do it again.

Edit: If I had reinforced the axle properly, and made a few minor tweaks, it should have been able to throw a 5lb pumpkin 100 yards. Alas, it was not to be...

 

[Bix]

Not quite as sophisticated as the device in the original post, but only took a couple weekends to build and runs great:

http://www.thehighroad.org/showpost.php?p=2762807&postcount=15