Loaded onto the car and ready for a drive to family reunion. I had finished it this morning, and the first test shot was 3 feet. How dissapointing.

Here we are about to fire a rock into a pond at reunion. It was a huge attraction for the kids who ran about collecting rocks for me. After tightening up the rope bundles with the 2x4 in the forground of the image, we were tossing fist sized rocks about 150 feet.

Life is not good for the throwing pouch.

Ready to launch a pouch full of potatoes. Despite the pouch's horrible suffering, it continued to function for a while. This image has a nice view of the trigger mechanism. It is made from an old bed-rail which was cut up, then welded together. My welder is the cheapest gassless MIG available at Sears. (Is a gasless MIG an M?)

To push the arm down, I would pull back on the arm by hand, managing about 2 feet of pull. Next, some brave soul would stand on the onager's arm, pushing on the breaker beam while I continued to push down on the arm. Using this rough technique, we estimate about 200+ pounds of force available at the end of the arm.

Not in the picture are two brave souls with baseball gloves standing 150 feet down range hoping to catch a potato. Little do they realize the rain of death about the fall upon them.

After a long day of tossing potatoes, Roger helps me run the machine up the skids back on top of my car.

By this time, not only had the vertical breaker beam been destroyed and removed, the top beam started showing cracks. We moved the lower support beam up, creating a 4x6 for a breaker beam which continued to function fine. Despite my initial worries, the arm doesn't seem to care that it is only whacking such a small area at the top, as no cracks are currently in evidence on it.

Additional Pages for Onager Jr
Onager Jr	Onager Jr was our first torsion siege-engine of the medium scale that functioned well.
Onager Jr: Construction	Onager Jr's basic construction is fairly simple. I thought it would be neat to make something that didn't use screws, but after assembling the bottom, screws were needed for much of the upper frame, and for the strengthening of structural members later.
Onager Jr : Flinging potatoes	Loaded onto the car and ready for a drive to family reunion. I had finished it this morning, and the first test shot was 3 feet. How dissapointing.
Onager Jr : Rocks in Maine	We rebuilt the machine, and brought it to Maine to fling rocks into the mud flats. We had rebuilt the breaker bar to be sturdier than before, and also added a winch.
Onager Jr : Upgrades	After our trip to Maine, Onager Jr was used again at the 2001 History Channel Chunk, and at the 2001 Bennington High School Chunk. At the end of those two adventures, our third canvas pouch had disintegrated.
Onager Jr : Zucchini Upgrades	In 2005, Onager Jr was destined to go to the zukapult contest in Ludlow Vermont. To accomplish this, Onager Jr needed to be upgraded to throw projectiles smaller than it had done so in the paste.
Onager Jr : Movies	Here are some videos of the little guy in action. They were all taken during the 2001 History Chunk.