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 On a good day, we like to think of ourselves as trebuchet engineers, but in reality, we're just a group of guys who get a kick out of building medieval weapons. Our team members have various levels of involvement, but we all contribute an important part to our little idea, turned hobby, turned team, turned business. MichaelI am a PE teacher, politician, coach, husband, father of a 4 year old engineer and 1 year old athlete/musician. I am 27 years old and I live in Lake Orion, Mi. Oakland County (hence the Oakland Ballistics). About a year ago I saw a Junkyard Wars show where they built trebuchets and I thought that it looked simple enough. I called Ryan the next day and 4 days and 12 hours of shopping/building we had a working 6ft tall trebuchet. Since then, I have built several trebuchets in two states with varying degrees of engineering and size. I taught a class on trebuchets to my middle school students where they built pre-fabbed kits that I built and then launched them. We had pretty good success, the farthest being 39ft, with 8lbs of CW and a golf ball projectile. I am very excited about this summer and building our large trebuchet. It has turned out to be a project requiring wide ranging skills including computer engineering, marketing, website building, carpentry and general mechanical know-how, at least, those are the skills to date.  RyanI suppose that I have Michael, Discovery Channel, History Channel, a hyper-active brain, and a few too many failed projects to blame…scratch that…to THANK for my recent fascination with trebuchets. My professional work is full of digital intangibles – documents, graphics, emails, numbers, and the like. It wasn’t until life gave me the occasion to fix, to build, to form that I realized I was missing out on something. Now, I actively seek tangible results of my labor. It’s no surprise, then, that a trebuchet hobby fulfills my amateur workman’s void. And so, I am hooked. If our adventures can inspire you to do likewise with your free time, I am glad to have crossed your path. Thanks for taking some time to learn more about us, and always remember these words of wisdom, spoken by a true kid at heart: Things that explode on impact are always more fun to hurl!!! True, so true.  LarsI am a middle schooler who had been taught by Michael for 2 years. I play many sports. About a year ago my friend Geoff along with Evan, invited me to help build and launch a trebuchet we made. I thought that it would be very fun and in a few Saturdays we finished the trebuchet and got to launch it. I am glad we had Michael and Ryan to help us with some problems and to teach us how to build it. I have participated in one event which we won and was very fun. Trebuchet is a fun thing to do and teaches you different skills for life.  GeoffI am a freshman at Brother Rice high school and as u might have seen mike had a class in which he taught students how to make trebuchets, and I was very eager to be part of this. Once the class was finished I was already attached to engineering behind the trebuchet, and before I graduated mike asked me if I'd like to make my own youth team. I quickly decided on to good friends of mine Evan and Lars, we are a great team and we know how to have fun. We all owe mike a lot of thanks for getting us into this hobby! So anyways I have to say trebuchets are the oddest thing I ever have worked with but once you launch one you will find it is the most fun also. |
