Good progress

As you may learn, "making progress" or a derivation of that is one of my favorite sayings and today we made progress. We worked with Harry, our new team member for the first time today. He jumped right in on the construction of the Mini-trebs. Harry is also our new internet exclusive distributor of Oakland Ballstics mini-trebs. They should be up and selling in a couple of weeks. As always, if you cannot wait, you are welcome to visit us at the Lake Orion Flower fair on May 17th and 18th.

We had a bit of a mishap with our medium trebuchet today. On our fourth firing of the day the CW box fell off the axle. We had just talked about lessening the weight in the box. The damage is less than troubling and should only take about 20 minutes to repair. Still it was in front of our new sponsor, Yarema Marquetry. John Yarema has talked us into scaling up the project to more than 50% larger. This project just got really big. As always, I won't talk specifics but I would be willing to bet that if we pull this off we will have the largest trebuchet in Michigan.

Kingsbury Country Fair

We have just made arrangements to be at the Kingsbury School Country Fair in Oxford. We will have the Medium Treb setup and will be selling our Mini-trebs to help raise money. We will have some of our Oakland Ballistics apparel for display and some of our bumper stickers for sale.
Speaking of bumper stickers, our Zazzle account is almost complete. We should have a link to our store on the website sometime next week. Be sure to check it out, we hope you will find it as humorous as we did.

Lots of progress

Ryan and I met today for about 4 hours to work on the details of the mini-treb and the large treb. We basically finalized the design of the mini-treb and will be setting a date to build those to have them ready for the Lake Orion Flower Fair.
As for the Large Treb, we made lots of progress. I thought we pretty much had the design finished but we figured out some issues that we had had on the medium treb and came up with ways to fix those. We have decided to use wooden gussets made out of plywood to keep all of the junctions of wood together. We figure we can use 3/4 plywood to brace all connections. This plus construction adhesive should keep the wood together, with a little help from the 6" deck screws.
The most exciting news from today I cannot share with you. We made a major breakthrough in the design of our Large Treb. We had run into a problem of wheels for the treb, since we are using a fixed CW wheels are a must. The problem is that with the CW swinging down the forces that would need to be overcome would have cost a minimum of $120.00. That was something that Ryan could not fathom. So, he came up with an ingenious plan what is both cheap and simple. We will be testing it on our Medium Treb to decide if it will work. If it does work, check back after Oct. 25th when we will reveal all (or most) of our secrets. If it doesn't work, check back soon when we tell you one idea not to try.

Trebuchet Apparel

We are looking at having some Trebuchet and Oakland Ballistics apparel and bumper sticker type items. We are coming up with some pithy saying to have on them. You will be able to choose from several designs, several slogans. Check back in about a week and see what we have.

Lake Orion Flower Fair appearance

It's official, we will have a booth at the Lake Orion Flower on May 17th and 18th. Come by and visit us. We will have the mini-trebs for sale as well as information about the upcoming Lake Orion Pumpkin Launching Contest.

Here's a link to Google maps as to where Lake Orion is and where we will be. We are at booth #78 which is near the State Farm Insurance office at Shadbolt and Broadway streets.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=E.+Shadbolt+st.+and+N.+Broadway+st.+Lake+Orion,+MI,+USA&jsv=107&sll=42.785492,-83.239873&sspn=0.000937,0.002009&ie=UTF8&ll=42.786063,-83.239868&spn=0.007496,0.016072&z=16&iwloc=addr

Getting some Proffessional help

Normally, Ryan and i are do-it-yourself/figure-it-out-yourself kind of guys, but when we started talking about weights exceeding 800 lbs we thought we might want some professional help. The guy we have been talking to has been giving us some informal help but has indicated some professional help including materials and tools. This should make things much easier. I look forward to having some update as to his help later this week.

Mini Treb is a success!

I took advantage of the nice weather today and completed work on the mini-treb. It took a little while to make the final adjustments, I have found that when working on such a small scale there is much less room for error. After much trial and error including rebuilding the CW box about three times, the mini treb finally launched. The first few launches didn't go so well but after a few adjustments I was able to get a marble to go 26'. The next two launches went 25' and 28'. I called it a day after those launches, needless to say I was very pleased. I'll let you know how things turn out after some more tweaking. Remember, only $12 for a mini-treb that can accomplish 28' or more.

Mini Trebuchet coming soon

I did a fair amount of tinkering today with our design for a mini trebuchet. We plan on selling it to raise money for our team. I don't have any estimates for distance yet, but the price should be about $12. Expect to see videos and details soon.

First entry, lots going on

Well, this is our first post for Oakland Ballistics. We have been doing a lot of work over the last two weeks or so. The competition for Lake Orion is official which gave us the impetus to begin our design process for what we are calling the winning trebuchet. While we won't be divulging too many specifics about our upcoming machine until after the competition we will give some details.
To start with, we designed our treb using Google Sketchup. I can't tell you how handy this was. We were able to design, view and operate our treb without spending any money. We made a few changes to the design like making the vertical supports higher to allow a greater cocking angle. The greater the angle the greater distance, in general. A good place to start is usually recommended as 45 degrees, but I would suggest more of 50 degrees. It allows for the arm to swing longer and therefor gain more speed.
As you can see we have a website, that is in total part due to Ryan. The website, we hope, will be a place for hurlers to go as a resource for building their own trebs. We will be posting videos, pictures and anything else that we can post to help. We look forward to any comments that any has and we are willing to make any changes to help.