Yeeee Haaawww! More Power

OK... so here is the deal. One of Brandt's teachers is making him to a very stupid project. It's not so much the project is dumb it's how they handled it. They didn't give the kids any time to plan for it, and they want them to do it all in class. That's all fine but they want something that's really advanced and takes time. Their project was to build a working catapult. Well you know me. I'm off to Lowes to try and steal that big giant Jimmy sign they have there in front and while I"m there I'll pick up some wood and screws. At this point we didn't even really know what we wanted to do. Well we knew what but not how. Well after thinking about it, I talked with Brandt and we decided to build the biggest, baddest catapult the sixth grade has ever seen. And we did! We used the wood we bought, plus we recycled a little shelf set I had from the kitchen and we began to create. It wasn't my idea, it wasn't Brandt's. I was truly a combination of us both. I was in charge of a lot of the power tool work. But heck, by the end, I was pretty much just a clamp so Brandt could do the power tools. It's amazing what you can do with a Dremel and a cutoff wheel. :) Anyway we built it and test fired it. It didn't work very well. It was pretty but not much power. Anyway, after thinking about it we realized that we needed a stop. We had been using the rubber band as a stop but it was stopping the arm two late causing the payload to be launched straight into the ground. Slapped us in a big beefy brace to stop the arm from going fwd and magic happened. We could launch a rock a good 30 feet. And we could even get the cat to get some hang time if we tried. Anyway... Here's the pics..... Brandt's Catapult