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.
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 ounces | 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 for Baby Ballista
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Baby Ballista
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Baby Ballista was constructed while we were trying to design Ballista
Jr. We had realized part way through that we weren't quite sure what
was up, so we built Baby Ballista in an attempt to figure our what was
going on.
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Bowstring Upgrade
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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.
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Test Firing
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In June 2005 my brother Greg came out from California, and we spent time shooting
the catapults. I recorded the results for Baby Ballista.
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