Do it better: Medieval |
For this project, my partner Beau and I decided that instead of doing one of our previous projects better, that we wanted to build some medieval weaponry. Mr. Williams was skeptical at first, but we had some pretty good ideas and we pulled through on them. We started off with our first of three weapons, the catapult!
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Spring Powered Catapult:
Our catapult was simple but a good design. We decided that we would use springs to fire the arm of the catapult forward, sending the ball flying. In the end, we achieved just that. We managed to fire the ball to around 15 meters away, and maximum height of 11 feet. I really enjoyed making this because it was very new to me and it got my mind coming up with all sorts of ideas on how to achieve what we wanted.
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Spring Powered Catapult:
Our catapult was simple but a good design. We decided that we would use springs to fire the arm of the catapult forward, sending the ball flying. In the end, we achieved just that. We managed to fire the ball to around 15 meters away, and maximum height of 11 feet. I really enjoyed making this because it was very new to me and it got my mind coming up with all sorts of ideas on how to achieve what we wanted.
Wrist Catapult:
This contraption was built by my partner Beau. We thought it would be awesome to have a mini catapult that would rest on your arm, and when you pulled a string, it would release the arm of the catapult, and send the ball flying. We achieved a pretty good output. it was small and didn't fire very far, but we had a lot of fun tweaking things here and there to make it better, overall, it was a really cool part of this project.
Mini Crossbow:
Our third and final weapon so to say, was a mini crossbow. We came up with the idea because when we were researching PVC pipes, we saw a ton of results saying, "PVC crossbow". Now our crossbow has a little twist to it, we used my bendy ruler as the power source to launch the ammo. The end result was pretty good, we ended up with a sweet looking crossbow, with a shooting distance of 10 feet. We had a lot of trial and error with this part of the project. The crossbow originally was very bad and would occasionally fire if we got lucky, we finally fixed the solution by putting a so called scope or holder on the front to keep the colored pencil arrow in place. In the end, I was happy with what we made.
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Reflection:
This project was really fun, I really enjoyed it. I got to work with one of my best friends on some of the coolest and most fun things I have built yet. We didn't have any problems working together, because we have done it a lot before. We had basically no issue with the spring powered and wrist catapult, but we had some issues with the crossbow. We struggled at first to figure out how to properly aim and consistently fire the crossbow. But in the end we managed to find the solution by putting a sort of scope/holder on near the front. This let us easily fire and aim well. We had pretty good time management, we only struggled to work near the end of the second week, when we had already finished everything. This project was really fun and a good way to close out the year for STEM.
Reflection:
This project was really fun, I really enjoyed it. I got to work with one of my best friends on some of the coolest and most fun things I have built yet. We didn't have any problems working together, because we have done it a lot before. We had basically no issue with the spring powered and wrist catapult, but we had some issues with the crossbow. We struggled at first to figure out how to properly aim and consistently fire the crossbow. But in the end we managed to find the solution by putting a sort of scope/holder on near the front. This let us easily fire and aim well. We had pretty good time management, we only struggled to work near the end of the second week, when we had already finished everything. This project was really fun and a good way to close out the year for STEM.