The Muhlestein Family

The Winning Catapult

June 29th, 2008

We had a busy week. That is somewhat of an understatement. A more accurate depiction of our week would be to list all the things we were supposed to get done and then line item all the things we didn’t get done because of the activities we were participating in. Amongst all our business however, I was able to get the Webelos together to build a catapult on Tuesday, and then attend the Jeremiah Johnson Camp Saturday. I thought I’d mention a little about how we did.

Before I write about the catapult competition, I thought I’d mention that the boys had fun participating in a wide variety of activities and making progress toward a lot of activity pins. We learned things about planets and stars, slingshots, bows and arrows, BB guns, engineering stuff and even made some miniature catapults.

The leaders guide for the camp said if we wanted, we could bring a catapult to shoot a tennis ball. They said they didn’t want something too terribly big, but something that you could bring and generally not have to assemble when you go there. Here is what we built Tuesday:

Actually, Tuesday we got the frame and most of the work done to where we could launch something but I had a little touch up work to do Saturday morning. Saturday, I put some caps on the end of the axel and screwed a few more screws into the frame so it wouldn’t fall apart. I also added an extra bungee cord so we could get a little more distance.

We won the distance part of our competition by quite a bit. I think we were shooting around 40 or 50 yards but nobody was measuring. (That counts how far the ball rolled after it hit too.) One time, our ball hit some kinds of bump or ditch and bounced backward. It rolled backward for a ways and was still quite a bit further than the nearest ball from another catapult.

For our efforts, we won a bag of jolly ranchers that the boys enjoyed!

Entry Filed under: Misc