It's not done yet, I poured the quickrete counterweight (80lbs) last night and assembled the arm (~7' pivot to sling end) and weight tonight. I'm a little anxious about my amateur welding skills on the rebar. Tomorrow I'll cut out a plywood base platform and make a sling. I'm open for suggestions for a sling pouch design.
Oh yeah, forgot to add, this is my first ever trebuchet. Definitely learned a few lessons in the process, but also happy with how the concrete weight turned out. On the one hand, I think I probably should've started at like half this scale for a first time built, on the other hand, I couldn't resist the go big or ho home mentality. All the 2x4s were leftover from building my deck, the 2x6s were in decent shape and saved from the previous deck, and the plywood, idek where it came from, some really weathered ¾" stuff
Please show it in action when it's done, I love it!
Hopefully in a few hours. Still gotta figure out a sling pouch. I wish I had some leather at my house
https://imgur.com/yrMvcdh
Definitely needs some tweaking but first, I gotta disassemble it and move it to my open pasture, and second, I think I want to upgrade from golf balls to maybe a lacrosse or baseball. More mass, less range, and most importantly, easier to recover. I'm also considering if the long arm should get some weight reduction, maybe a diagonal cut down to half width so it's only 2x2 not 2x4
Update: moved it 150 yards uphill across my property in 2 trips with a garden cart. That was exhausting. I'll make a leather sling pouch this weekend when I go help my dad with his project since he has leather tools.
That's badass, I hope to have property and make one with my son one day.
You can still go small. Build something like 1:4 my scale and you could launch tennis balls in a park or something.
Check out https://virtualtrebuchet.com/ to figure out dimensions. If you're decent with math, try to keep the same ratios as the default when scaling yourself