The physics of the Trebuchet

Welcome to The Physics of the Trebuchet!

The trebuchet:
The greatest weapon from the
ancient world. A reminder that
great machines have been built by
man since the dawn of time and
that we can never say the best are
yet to come.

This work originated as a Physics project I did last year at school. I have converted it from a text document and have manually typed all the html encoding, so please bear these two facts in mind if you encounter any problems. Please email me with any mistakes or errors ou find. This was also the first major project I ever wrote, so my structuring may not be ingenious... I did my best at the time!

I also have one request of all those who use this work:
Please acknowledge it. I put an awful lot of work into everything presented and would appreciate being stated as the author of my work. Thanks.

You can get back to this page at any time by clicking on the trebuchet link in the frame on the left. There are a lot of small graphics throughout this work, so I reccomended that you have "auto load images" on. I have tried to divide the pages so that you get no more than 25kb of data per page. Everything was tested and designed to work with Netscape 4.

If you want to get rid of all frames, click here! If you want them back, click here. My main homepage is here!

Table of contents

Titlepage and Introduction
Principles of Motion
Design adaptations made to my Trebuchet
Limitations and Complications
Computer simulation: Method
Computer simulations: Results
Introduction to results
Figure 1 discussion
Figure 2 discussion
Figure 3 discussion
Figure 4 discussion
Figure 5 discussion
Figure 6 discussion
Figure 7 discussion
Figure 8 discussion
Figure 9 discussion
Figure 10 discussion
Figure 11 discussion
Figure 12 discussion
Figure 13 discussion
Conclusion
Bibliography

Pictures of my trebuchet (approx 30k each)
Side view
Front view
The slip pin

Tips if building a trebuchet

My main homepage!