Like I want to read this...take me home.
I'm amused. What else does she have? See Blogspot or Archives
So...
I e-mailed Mr. Ripcord, just to make sure that all my use of his stuff was kosher. He liked it, or he was being nice. At any rate, all y'all help me wish some evil skunk bad juju for trying to sell Mr. Ripcord's plans on e-Bay. I have a great respect for this guy, and he even saw the link for Mr. Sapphire's snakes and inquired about them. Before I put the last bit up, I'm going to go back over to Mom's and take a picture of our treb so you can compare mine to his. Yikes, yikes, and more yikes.
PART ONE PART TWO PART THREE PART FIVE CONCLUSION
The breather heralded some time for me to squeeze in a few more transcription from tapes, the surgical center, and my subcontracting job. Treb or no treb, I had mouths to feed. I worked as fast as my fingers would let me. We were down to the wire, literally, when I tried to bend the pin and it broke. Hanger wire replaced it nicely, but the eye screws. Where in the heck were the blasted eye screws?
No time for that. We wrapped twine around the throwing arm. At that point, we started to see the mechanics of how it worked. Surely some of you have seen trebuchets used in movies, where the pin is pulled and the arm swings around and up, building momentum to pitch the throwing object towards its target. That takes a lot of room, even for miniature ones. That meant we needed to test it outside. I volunteered the hamster for tossing duty, but that didn't fly with Mr. Sapphire. I made Tiger's Eye keep a-huntin' for those lousy eye screws, and I cut the pouch, utilized our twine (I love the smell of twine, and still do!), and put the key rings in position, waiting for the eye screws for that final step.
Still couldn't find the eye screws. During the time, though, we realized we needed some spacing/bracing/fine tuning to get the arm with its coffee can counterweight attachment to swing clean through. I gave up on the eye screws and sent all three Nimrods on a hunt for bottled water caps, which we had in abundance from the ice storm supplies. Carefully, we used a glue gun to melt holes in the caps and slide them over various rods for cushioning and straightening of some things. It worked great! But where were the eye screws?
I gave up on the eye screws, and went back to hangers. It took my tired-from-typing hands a while to corkscrew hanger wire into loops with weird ends, which I more or less beat into the frame. When that didn't work, extra-long twister ties did the trick! That wiry loop thing was bound. The loops were a little uneven, but long enough yet narrow enough to contain the pull pin with minimal restriction. When applying weight, it held. Yes, twister ties always enter my mind as a possible solution to a lot of problems, especially at Christmastime, when twister ties are great substitutes for those pesky hangers you can never find when you need them while hanging ornaments on your tree.
Remember the optional part at the beginning? This was where we biffed, and biffed majorly. You see, the 1/4" molding functions as a trough, allowing the projectile on the pouch to slide easily down the chute during the throwing motion. Without it, the friction slowed it down. Instead of taking it outside, I sent the Nimrods back on the hunt for something slick and trough-like, seeing as, um, the hardware stores were closed or still without power.
ManCub had the best suggestion--cut the water bottles down the middle and at each end, and fit them together. After one bottle took a good 20 minutes to wrangle into shape, and it being 9:45 p.m., that idea was a complete bust, as brilliant as it was. ManCub felt good that I liked the idea even though we couldn't pull it off, so that made me feel better. Nothing like having a wonderful kid with a bright idea that you can't make happen...oh, wait. I think that's the theme of this entire blogodrama.
We spread out around the house and went back on the hunt. I do mom things when I'm hunting, like pick dryer sheets off the floor, put plates in the sink, move the tinfoil back up into the cupboard after ManCub steals half of it to make tinfoil balls...
I took the tinfoil box back down and looked at it. Really, really looked at it, down its length. Long, sturdy, that corner like a trough...
...and I had two boxes of foil. I always have one or two in reserve. It's an automatic pick-up item when I shop. I don't know where ManCub's tinfoil balls end up; he's made a lot of them over the years. I suspect I'll find them when we get a buyout offer on this shack and recycle them to make enough for a down payment on another shack.
As if the twister tie solution to the replacement eye screws wasn't enough, did you know that duct tape comes in all these wonderful colors? That's another standard purchase item during trips to Wal-Mart. I liked the red, so I bought two. This came in extremely handy when we decided to cut down the two boxes, avoiding the jagged part of the box, and cradled one angle in the angle of the next box. We checked it for length and then proceeded to cover every visible surface (and not visible, too) with red duct tape. The duct tape added extra weight, the Velcro base kept it in place, and the hard angles of the box corners disappeared and became one continuous decreased friction trough. I might be a redneck--twister ties and red duct tape just scream that, don't it?--but sometimes, just that glorious sometimes, it's not a bad thing.
Midnight. Tiger's Eye assured me that he was good to go for a while longer, and he completed all homework before devoting our life to the trebuchet. We took it outside, and fine tuned it.
Fine tuning, in a nutshell:
1. The length of the twine to the pouch makes a difference, depending on what you hurl. Using a wiffle ball, we played with the lengths, but...
2. The counterweight (coffee can) also changes the hurl, because with the increased weight of the contents of the can comes additional "oomph" to the throw. As we became more assured of the smooth ability for the throwing arm to swing through without catching on the frame on its way through, we put more red duct tape in appropriate places to make its path completely without restriction, and filled the can with more weight. Eventually, our desired mixture amounted to two plastic baggies of plaster of paris, one wet down and one not, in the coffee can. The wet plaster baggie took the wiffle ball about a yard, and adding the dry plaster baggie to it propelled it an additional yard. Being a wiffle ball, it was safe to propel down the sidewalk, but not an accurate projectile, but good enough for the test. I still wanted the darn hamster to take a trial flight. Mr. Sapphire still declined my desire.
Midnight came, and we took the treb back into the house. Our confidence soared. I arranged with my friend's son to videotape its use the next night in a parking lot next to their house, as he had video processing equipment and could shoot me an e-mail with it to burn on CD. We weren't sure if Mr. R, the instructor, would allow a demonstration, so we wanted an additional measure of our triumph. We felt so good. The treb came apart easily. Nobody scraped themselves on the pins. The throwing arm with its coffee can fit through the door, and we put it in the dining room until the next night, our final chance to get everything just right.
My son went to bed, and I went back to work, my fingers tired from bending and twisting wire, but I really felt we hit the home stretch. All the crises were past. All we needed was to prove it worked, and, tomorrow, we would do just that.
Or, so we thought.
PART ONE PART TWO PART THREE PART FIVE CONCLUSION
This story is so copyrighted! Reliving this trauma hasn't been cathartic. I'm on the schedule to see a shrink, so if you steal this and I find out about it, you'll be compacted into tennis ball size and launched. I won't need the trebuchet.
Sapphire wrote this. Sapphire Tigress has been around since 1992, when BBS was popular. I can prove it. My son can prove it. It's still in my mother's garage to prove it. A lot of impressed freshman can prove it. Please, just hand out the link. I lived through it. At least give me credit!
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