Odd use for a spring

I think this counts as tech. Very modified, but still somewhat.

Anyway, my class at school decided we would build planes and then catapaults to shoot them down. My group's design was basically a big crossbow (balista). We wanted a compound bow to mount on the end, but no one had one so we had to come up with another idea. What we eventually decided on was some wire cable and a leaf spring on the end of a 6x6 that had a PVC tube mounted on it. Hell Yea! :clap: And as it turns out we found a cherokee spring, the thing works great! Its like a big U on the end of a stick and when we're pulling it back to fire, it goes completely flat and thats what we are using to launch rocks at the other groups plane. I just thought that it was an awesome project and that someone might get a kick out of it.

what the heck kind of class is that for? we never did anything cool like that when i was in school

its called tech seminar, we have regular english for one period and tech for another. The tech part is tought by the coolest teacher in the school, his goal for the year is to have us do all the work. So he asks us what we want to do, how we want to do it, and then what we want for a grade.

I schemed up a concept like that back in my dope-smoking millitant-hippy days (for when the bad liberal guvmint seizes our guns)

it involved r/r track crossties, 'u' channel, 1 ton leafpacks steel rebar for arrows, and a boat trailer winch to cock it... the intent being to take out light skinned wheeled vehicles... then steal the weapons/food/equipment.

In hindsight and with better training, it's easier to just blow up the lead and trail vehicles as they drive and pelt the occupants with homemade claymores, then steal their weapons/food/equipment.

I dunno how much luck your having with single projectiles...folks hunt birds and other moving targets with shotguns for a reason y'know.

Yea, single sucks, were using a larger version of buckshot made from rocks. in a coffee can. Itll be cool if it works. Like you said though, the original plan was a leaf spring from something like an f-350 super duty or something, but they cost too much. Even our cherokee spring was a little steep, but we needed to get it done.

woody said:

I schemed up a concept like that back in my dope-smoking millitant-hippy days (for when the bad liberal guvmint seizes our guns)

it involved r/r track crossties, 'u' channel, 1 ton leafpacks steel rebar for arrows, and a boat trailer winch to cock it... the intent being to take out light skinned wheeled vehicles... then steal the weapons/food/equipment.

In hindsight and with better training, it's easier to just blow up the lead and trail vehicles as they drive and pelt the occupants with homemade claymores, then steal their weapons/food/equipment.

I dunno how much luck your having with single projectiles...folks hunt birds and other moving targets with shotguns for a reason y'know.

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Sounds like you must be spending your spare time giving lessons to the Iraqi teen-agers.

Gee i never had a teacher that awesome. The best I ever had was a science teacher who was a pyromaniac. That man lit any and everything on fire. As a positive side note I got real good with a fire extinguisher(that's come in handy a few times since )

One of my kids had an extra-credit high school project to build a catapult to hit a teacher with a water balloon. We built a primitive 2x4 Onager with bungee cords for propulsion. He was the only one who got a hit.

I have lingering fantasies of building a compact onager out of heavy-gauge steel using VW torsion bars for propulsion.

has anyone hit the plane yet?

Naw, sadly we didnt end up getting it to work all right and everything. And I havnt moved it from the school yet to play around with it at home. But I bet it would work if i was given another hour or so.