GearBits

Siege Machines in Our Schools?

You betcha! My sister is a middle school technology teacher. As part of one of her lessons, she decided to introduce her students to an ancient war machine, the trebuchet (pronounced treb' ya shay"). The photo to the right is the relatively tiny model that her students built -- it's 14 inches front-to-back and about 8 inches high at the main axle. As small as it is, it can still hurl 1" diameter wooden balls 25-30 feet with decent accuracy.

I can hear your questions now: So where'd she get this? How much does it cost? More importantly, are there bigger ones we can build??

She found the Desktop Trebuchet at trebuchet.com (of course!) and the unassembled kit costs $59.00. But wait, there's more.

Trebuchet.com is just a small part of, you guessed it, catapultkits.com! At their website, they offer assemble-yourself kits of everything from Greek Ballista (shown below) to Roman Mangonels to a 1/10th scale model of the mighty Scottish trebuchet called Warwolf (even at 1/10th scale, the model can send a 1-lb. projectile over 100 feet). Nice.

So, if you're feeling simultaneously scholarly and violent, and you'd like to build scale replicas of ancient war weapons in your own back yard, then this is the place. They seem to have just about everything one might need to tick off one's neighbors and/or get arrested.

Update: My sis just corrected me on the price of her mini-trebuchet kits -- they're $10.95 and available from pitsco.com. Now you can use all that money you saved on ammo and band-aids.