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World Championship Chunk 2010: Mista Ballista
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Mista Ballista returned to Delaware for the 2010 Punkin Chunk. After our success with pretensioning bundles Last Year, we reused the same pretensioning system but did double-pulls for every strand, getting closer to 1000lbs tension per strand.
Eric, Jeff, Amy and Trevor all drove down Wednesday night/Thursday morning to get things set up for Mista Ballista, which was arriving later in the day. We arrived to a soggy field and rainy weather.
Eric and Dave worked late into the evening on Friday fixing the broken bowstring to get ready for Saturday.
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Contact: Team Tormentum Copyright © 2000-2022 Eric M. Ludlam All rights reserved. Twas' brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe... | Last Modified: 05/10/09 |
The first thing we did was stand in line for our badges with several other chunkers. The weather made the wait a bit muddy.
Naturally, 
Ick. We were one of the few teams that had a giant mud hole in our pit, in addition to on the road behind our pit. On Friday, several of us spent the entire morning raking up old corn husks from out in the field, and filling in our mud holes. That helped a lot.
We worked late into the night getting 
On Friday the sun came out, but the field was still a giant mud pit. We then put chip-board down on all the corn husks and started setting up 
This year we added twice the pretension we had used in 2009. We used big wooden wedges beat in with 
We begin the winding process. Using a trunion mounted cylinder on the front of the machine, we use giant roller chain to add twist.
Suddenly there is a pop, and the clevis welded to the end of our winding hydraulic cylinder breaks off.
Fortunately our team member 
With the arms in and the bowline on, we continued to wind our bundles until the hydraulics were just short of maxed out. It turned out that was just under 3/4 of a revolution. Our redoubled tensioning system has worked giving us a very powerful machine!
Another of our improvements for the year was to use the new jack stands not only for deploying our cribbing for a raised machine, but they also support the center of 
Everything was finished, and inspected for safety. This allowed 
We not only pied our shot, but broke our bowline! In this picture, you can see that the bottom corner of the pouch is no longer attached to the bowline itself. The intermediate line broke through at the end of the throw, likely causing much harm to the pumpkin as well!
After installing the bowline, and testing things out, we spent the day watching the other machines, and taking nice pictures of 
Note the amazing gripping power of torsion, and 
Always decorate your pumpkin with your pit number so that the spotters can find it. Also note our use of a bullet shaped lumina pumpkin instead of the blue we used yesterday.
Jamie Hyneman watched our pumpkin go flying off into the field... but I didn't get to talk to him. Too bad. :(
And here is our new personal best! 803.84 feet! As you can see from other years, we tend to be just shy of the "next big number", like 580, or 690. It was great to get something just past a big number like 803.
Sunday morning, the torsion team got together and petitioned the 
Naturally, for the last shot of the day, we added more twist to 
We prepared to fire our final shot. Unfortunately, this resulted in another pie, and for good reason. We had over 6800 lbs of force on our trigger, more than we'd ever seen before.
Since we were in pit 109, it was pretty late in the day, and the sun set while we were trying to pack up so we could go home.
The torsion class had a fabulous year with multiple machines breaking 2000 ft.