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| By bavetta, salomorales, kabir, rustaman, rubix
  4 ratings
We built 30 foot tall trebuchet like device for people. It was counterbalanced with over 1000 pounds of concrete and had over 180 degrees of rotation. |
This year for MIT residence selection we decided to take the original trebuchet design up a notch and make it a ride. We used a 1.75" stainless steel shaft which went through 12 foot tall 6"x6"s 10 feet high. We used another 6"x6" for the main part of the arm, and used 4"x4"s to extend the arm to 20feet from the axis. The length of the arm made things tricky - we needed to brace the arm with crossbeams to reduce the stress on the arm.
Bavetta presented it to the safety office and got it fully approved!!
Operation went like this:
1. Strap the rider on
2. Release
3. Swing
4. Pull Down (sometimes we waited a while before this step)
5. Dismount
The only problem was that it was fairly slow - the large moment of inertia made it hard to get moving. The way to get it moving faster would be to increase the weight difference weight-side to person-side. However, we couldn't do this anymore because we still had to pull the rider down with a rope, and any more counterweight would have made it near impossible.
More photos at: http://flickr.com/photos/bavetta/sets/72157594283451636/
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