Trebuchet Throwing Balls of Fire ///. Homemade Science with Bruce Yeany

[Music] well I appreciate you intimating homemade science we're gonna take a look at a trade mache in action now as a teacher I found having students build trebuchet was a great learning experience and we've put them in all different sizes using common materials [Music] in a future video I'll show you some of these and all as I show you step by step how to build one for yourself to get you started on this video I wanna show you some practice those that we're taking with our big machine for a special event we're hosting in the near future now we usually throw pumpkins with this machine [Music] and then we're gonna practice with a block of wood which later we're going to set on fire we're practicing for next week when a television crew comes in to shoot an episode of do-it-yourself science now to pull this arm down I'm using a pulley system which has three wheels on the top two wheels on the bottom so the mechanical advantage as a pulley system plus the arm acting as a first class lever allows me to lift 600 pounds of counterweight easily by myself looks good take safety off it's ready to go that check was a little bit too long we need to take some weight off and shorten the sling to try and keep the jugs in the yard better but it's still a little bit too long perfect now that the sun's going down I'm gonna stop throwing these water jugs and we're gonna take off this sling that has ropes attached to it and we're going to switch over to these other two Glocks on closer inspection will see these towels are stapled to the Block and it has a chain attached to it instead of rope now we have thrown both of these logs without letting Mont fire we've adjusted the length of the chain and also the amount of weight that's pulling the arm down just to ensure that it stays within the yard here's our block here's where it landed and that's about 250 feet away from the machine it's about right where we want it our safety precautions include recent rains to keep the ground nice and wet we'll have plenty of water available and part of our help will be to volunteer firemen now we're adding a small amount of kerosene to the logs to help them burn but we don't want to damage the machine so we've added some metal to protect it after waiting around for a while it's finally gotten dark enough for us to set up for our first test this is something that we've wanted to try for about 15 years now and we're finally getting the chance to do it oh we need to release it ready five four three two [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] you left a little bit right here [Applause] [Music] well this Sunday was a lot of fun but I do want to stress that these machines and working with fire can be very dangerous please don't try any experiments without taking proper safety precautions and having adult supervision [Music] now after several trials and throwing fire we thought the machine would chase some burn bars but it looks like it's come through in pretty good shape [Music] not only aren't there any burn marks on the supports but I don't even feel any soot that's really surprising well I hope you enjoyed this video in the chamber chase and as always I want to thank you for watching ok bye

Channel: Bruce Yeany

Views: 28,342

Rating: 4.9650793 out of 5

Keywords: trebuchets, greek fire, homemade science, don't try this at home, Bruce Yeany, steve spangler, DIY SCI

Id: 1xPKJFdaTWA

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/beardedkomodo]

This guy’s the man!

[u/danoob2727]

The superior siege weapon

[u/secretsofwumbology]

As cool as this is they're pretty lucky they didn't start a big fire