In June 2005 my brother Greg came out from California, and we spent time shooting the catapults. I recorded the results for Baby Ballista.

Greg prepares to launch small rock with Baby Ballista. I welded an old steel tube to a medium sized barn-door style hinge, and that slid into the shaft of a broken halogen lamp. (The kind with the bowl turned upwards.) A bit of wood with a 45 cut into holds the ballista at a nice angle.

While waiting downrange, a view of the tape measure and the ballista aimed at me. We had a narrow path cut through the meadow we aimed for. Sometimes it landed in the trail, sometimes it got hung-up in the trees, and other times it landed and disappeared into the shrubbery.

Results

A table of the results. Tightened means the bundles were torqued up just before that shot. If it wasn't tightened, then usually the distance dropped a little as the nylon relaxed.

Tightened	Rock Weight in onces	Distance in feet
X	1.5	144
	1.5	133
X	1.3	185
X	1.3	196
X	1.3	195
	1.0	212
	.6	212
X	.5	252
	1.3	204

Additional Pages
Bowstring Upgrade	After Mista Ballista had a arm failure on it's second year out at the 2003 Punkin Chunk, we decided to use Baby Ballista as a test platform for a new and lighter bowstring attempt. We took our basic design from _The Book of the Crossbow_ and enhanced it based on the materials we hoped to use on the big guy.
Test Firing (This Page)	In June 2005 my brother Greg came out from California, and we spent time shooting the catapults. I recorded the results for Baby Ballista.