Treb 2000: Flinging the Newsserver

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Elsewhere I've documented The Day the Newsserver Died. To bring the story up to date, after a few of us tried to breathe life into it and after all usable parts were stripped from it, it ended up in a heap of stuff headed to the dumpster. Or at least that's what it thought.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2000 saw the newsserver make it up north for a date with the trebuchet.

The carcass trussed up just like the weekend's Thanksgiving turkey. Only difference is, dinner couldn't fly.
 

Flingggg! It's an entire PC in mid-launch.
 

Crash! The art of flinging things from a trebuchet isn't quite an exact science; there's the story of a huge trebuchet built for the siege of Mexico City that threw its first rock straight upwards and destroyed itself. We came close here; the newsserver landed right beside the treb with a resounding crash. You can see it just to the right of the front of the trebuchet.

I'm fairly certain now that I need to shorten the treb's sling whilst flinging heavier loads.

So, the bottom line: do I trust INN as far as I can throw it? Well, considering that the net throw was zero metres forward and a metre sideways, I'd have to answer with a confident "yes".
 

The intention was to see how big a splash the box would make, and if at first you don't succeed, try again. This was accomplished by the simple expedient of pushing the box over the railing with one hand while holding the camera in the other.
 

Glug, glug, glug. The yellow poly rope tied to the server is because I'm trying to put brains before brawn for a change and not have to go scuba diving to recover the unit from the lake bottom. This was inspired in part by the occasional snow flurry this weekend.
 

Call these things what you want, just don't call them milspec.
 

One side of a bent peecee.
 

The other side.
 

M. C. Escher's newsserver. If you could build functional machines that looked like this, you could make tons of money from trendy yuppies.
 

To try and handle the weight of this shot, the pair of pins in the hinge were replaced with a hardened steel bolt after hammering the hinge back into shape from the previous bending it got.
 

However, strengthen one thing and the next goes out on you; the hinge opened up and all but dropped the counterweight off the throwing arm. This picture was taken after the two were separated.
 


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