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The building of the bucket is pretty straight forward and
I got so busy building it that I forgot to take pictures as
I was building it. The pivot point is five feet off the ground. |
Here is a close up of the side of the
bucket. The base was designed to able to hold 2,000 pounds
of material without structural failure (not that I plan
on putting that much in it...yet :-D) |
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And here is a look at the inside of the bucket. It was designed
specifically to hold 4"x8"x16" concrete blocks
that weigh over 30 pounds each. There is enough room to lay
six of them across the bottom and stack them six deep which
will equal 1,080 pounds of concrete blocks. That is more than
enough for what I plan on doing with it. |
Now it is time to do a little more work
on the main lever arm. It is 16' long with two 8' beams
glued and screwed to either side of it for strength. I have
already drilled a 1.25" hole 12' from the long end
(which is 4' from the other.. duh) and then one more 1'
in from the short end which puts it 3' away from the fulcrum.
This gives the lever arm a 4:1 ratio which is normal (somewhere
between 4:1 and 5:1 is usually recommended) |
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Because there is no need to have the beam 6" thick
all the way to the end I tapered it starting at the 8' point
and tapering it to only 2.5" at the end of the beam.
This doesn't weaken the beam because of the law of equilibrium
in lever systems. The further you move from the fulcrum the
easier it is to move the lever therefore a thinner piece can
do the job. |
And here is a look from the other end
of the lever arm. |
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I'm running out of sunlight so I decided to pack it in for
the day. You can see that the entire trebuchet fits into a
one car garage along with everything else that I have in there.
Unfortunately, this meant that both of my motorcycles had
to be moved out of the garage :-p |
