For some time now, I have been thinking of printing a trebuchet. On Youtube you see massive trebuchets capable of hurling a flaming piano (!) to a distance of 200 meters, or trailer-based versions used in pumpkin-throwing contests. This sort of machinery is clearly beyond my MiniFactories and even the Print-Rite model I was handed the other week, but a small one should be within reason.

As always I first tried an unstable one before hitting on the right design. The first version seemed fine in Blender, and I was thinking of creating a system with many separate parts to maximize size. The first version looks like this in Blender:

Continue reading Trebuchet, or counterweight catapult, part I →