Lake Orion Pumpkin Launch

Well, we didn't win. We actually came in 3rd. At first glance, it is disappointing but after further reflection, I am actually okay with how things went. That's not to say that the event was a total success, it was. We had 4 teams and the winning distance was 385 I believe.
What I do mean is that even though our machine only worked for a few launches and had to be repaired after all but one or two launches, this wasn't our ultimate goal. Our goal has been to construct Telos. We learned a lot of valuable lessons from this test. Lessons like: "we need a new winch", "the arm saver concept still need some work" and "it's a darn good thing we are doing a hinged instead of a fixed."
The fixed CW concept has proven extremely difficult. We knew it would be a difficult idea but not this difficult. We had some problems dating back to the first construction. The holes in our throwing arm for the axle is just too big. It was originally designed to have sleeves inside to help with the swinging.
Since we have the hard work done for Telos, cutting, drilling, design, we can now hunker down and raise some real cash. That's really all there is left, to raise money.

Arm saver Testing

We had a long day of testing and building with our most recent team member, Ed. We worked on our medium trebuchet with the goal of having it ready for the Lake Orion Pumpkin Launch. We are still going to try to win the competition even though we are not entering Telos. Our big hurdle to over comer is the use of the arm savers. Our original design called for it to fall away before it was hit by the throwing arm. that didn't work since we didn't have as much weight on pulling on the arm saver as we did on the throwing arm. the result was that the throwing arm hit the arm saver, violently. Nothing large was broken and the repairs were made in minutes. Over dinner we re-evaluated our design and came up with two new possibilities. We decided to try using cables instead of an axle to attach the ends of the arms savers. It worked much better. We wil do some more testing and refining next Sunday. Our distances up to this point are very encouraging, we are looking at 205 ft. as of now.
Check out the Youtube video to see how our testing went.

Our new plan for this year

Money, money, money. It's always about the money. We were so close. We have the bolts, nuts, gussets, wood (cut and drilled), CW box and bricks. We had a quote for the axles, tubing, shaft collars, and everything else we needed. The problem is that the quote was for about $2000. That's just more money that what we had. We are disappointed but we know it's for the best. Even if we had the money it would have been pushing it to get it done in time.
Our new plan is to modify our medium trebuchet to a fixed CW and add on some of our ideas for Telos. Our new release pin, arm savers, cable stays, and a couple of other items. This will allow us to test out some of these ideas on a smaller, less expensive scale while we raise some money. Also, it frees us up to work on the kits which are almost done, the new website, and producing more mini treb's to continue raising money.
We will be ready for next year. We have 13 months to raise about $3000 and to get everything finished and tested. It's going to be great to finally get there.