We have yet another project.  This one involves building 3 dimensional dungeons for our games.  We found a really cool site a little while back that sells incredible dungeon pieces.  However, we don’t have a lot of extra money laying around and they are pretty expensive.  We were pretty sure that we could do something similar and then I was talking to my brother Shaun.  He had purchase some mold from another site a while ago.  So I looked it up and there was a lot of information on making castings and some on making your own molds.

When Adam came over for Thanksgiving he brought some silicone mold material with him that my Dad had.  Jake and I poured a mold this weekend and yesterday did our first plaster casts.  They turned out really nice.  I even painted the first set last night.  Here are some pictures.  When we have more of them, we’ll put them together to make a small dungeon and I’ll post more pictures.

Jake and I worked on the trebuchet some more today and were actually able to dry fire it.  Here are a couple of pictures after we got it put together.

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We then did some adjustments to make sure the arm was swinging how we wanted.  Every looked good.  So we loaded it with some weight.  We used a couple of cinder blocks.  In hind sight I think we should have used something lighter since the blocks were about 50 lbs each.  So with 100 lbs or more we lifted it up as high as we could which was only about eye level.  That should have been our clue.  We counted to 3 and let it drop.  It dropped much much faster than we expected.  The arm rollers unfortunately went off the front platform and onto the ground with such force it split the arm in half lengthwise.  It was a little scary how fast it moved.  We thought the weight would keep the arm from going too far forward.

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The next step is to rebuild the front with longer 2×4s and replace the broken arm with a 2×6.  I think there was enough force to throw a bowling ball a long ways.  Live and learn.

Jake and I started a new project on Saturday.  A floating arm trebuchet.  Here are some pics of our base.