Real Piano Throwers and much Throwing !!!!
....there, there my confounded and confused man.....Get ME the Catapult !!!!
As some of you out there may know, I play in this wonderful group called "The Piano Throwers" which currently consists of the wonderful Scott Law on Guitar,
"low end theory" Tye North on Bass, and yours truly in the drummer-at-large role.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the great Danny Barnes on Banjo and history.
A great musician and honorary Thrower, if there ever was one....
but I digress....
A great gig was had by us last night at the Goodfoot Lounge here in the City of Roses.
(thanks once again to Neil Leeborg and the always wonderful staff at the Foot...),
and while I was basking in the after gig -wind down glory (short lived, as always with the basking) I found myself looking on the net and doing my usual surfing.
Google was the next muse of my direction, and I suddenly came upon this bit of info from our world wide web.
I knew this stuff existed from watching "Monty Python & The Holy Grail", but please enjoy this for yourselves.
I especially like the last line of this copyrighted piece from the Wall Street Journal...
It was "devilishly delicious", as the great Jon Lovitz would say as the powdered wig wearing, overly bawdy introducer of saucy tales on SNL from time to time.
c
From The Wall Street Journal
A Scud It's Not, But the Trebuchet Hurls a Mean Piano....
Giant Medieval War Machine Is Wowing British Farmers And Scaring the Sheep
By Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACTON ROUND, England--With surprising grace, the grand piano sails through the sky a hundred feet above a pasture here, finally returning to earth in a fortissimo explosion of wood chunks, ivory keys and piano wire.
Nor is the piano the strangest thing to startle the grazing sheep this Sunday morning. A few minutes later, a car soars by - a 1975 blue two-door Hillman, to be exact - following the same flight path and meeting the same loud fate. Pigs fly here, too. In recent months, many dead 500-pound sows (two of them wearing parachutes) have passed overhead, as has the occasional dead horse.
It's the work of Hew Kennedy's medieval siege engine, a four story tall, 30 ton behemoth that's the talk of bucolic Shropshire, 140 miles northwest of London. In ancient times, such war machines were dreaded instruments of destruction, flinging huge missiles, including plague-ridden horses, over the walls of besieged castles. Only one full-sized one exists today, designed and built by Mr. Kennedy, a wealthy landowner, inventor, military historian and - need it be said? - - full-blown eccentric.
A Pagoda, Too
At Acton, Round Hall, Mr. Kennedy's handsome Georgian manor house here, one enters the bizarre world of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. A stuffed baboon hangs from the dining room chandelier (``Shot it in Africa. Nowhere else to put it,'' Mr. Kennedy explains). Lining the walls are dozens of halberds and suits of armor. A full suit of Indian elephant armor, rebuilt by Mr. Kennedy, shimmers resplendently on an elephant-sized frame. In the garden outside stands a 50-foot-high Chinese pagoda.
Capping this scene, atop a hill on the other side of the 620-acre Kennedy estate, is the siege engine, punctuating the skyline like an oil derrick. Known by its 14th-century French name, trebuchet (pronounced tray-boo-shay), it's not to be confused with a catapult, a much smaller device that throws rocks with a spoon-like arm propelled by twisted ropes or animal gut.
Mr. Kennedy, a burly, energetic 52-year-old, and Richard Barr, his 46-year-old neighbor and partner, have spent a year and #10,000 ($17,000) assembling the trebuchet. They have worked from ancient texts, some in Latin, and crude wood-block engravings of siege weaponry.
The big question is why?
Mr. Kennedy looks puzzled, as if the thought hadn't occurred to him before. ``Well why not? It's bloody good fun!'' he finally exclaims. When pressed, he adds that for several hundred years, military technicians have been trying fruitlessly to reconstruct a working trebuchet. Cortez built one for the siege of Mexico City. On its first shot, it flung a huge boulder straight up - and then straight down, demolishing the machine. In 1851, Napoleon III had a go at it, as an academic exercise. His trebuchet was poorly balanced and barely managed to hurl the missiles - backward. ``Ours works a hell of a lot better than the Frogs', which is a satisfaction,'' Mr. Kennedy says with relish.
How it works seems simple enough. The heart of the siege engine is a three-ton, 60-foot tapered beam made from laminated wood. It's pivoted near the heavy end, to which is attached a weight box filled with 5= tons of steel bar. Two huge A-frames made from lashed-together tree trunks support a steel axle, around which the beam pivots. When the machine is at rest, the beam is vertical, slender end at the top and weight box just clearing the ground.
When launch time comes, a farm tractor cocks the trebuchet, slowly hauling the slender end of the beam down and the weighted end up. Several dozen nervous sheep, hearing the tractor and knowing what comes next, make a break for the far side of the pasture. A crowd of 60 friends and neighbors buzzes with anticipation as a 30-foot, steel-cable sling is attached - one end to the slender end of the beam and the other to the projectile, in this case a grand piano (purchased by the truckload from a junk dealer).
``If you see the missile coming toward you, simply step aside,'' Mr. Kennedy shouts to the onlookers.
Then, with a great groaning, the beam is let go. As the counterweight plummets, the piano in its sling whips through an enormous arc, up and over the top of the trebuchet and down the pasture, a flight of 125 yards. The record for pianos is 151 yards (an upright model, with less wind resistance). A 112 pound iron weight made it 235 yards. Dead hogs go for about 175 yards, and horses 100 yards; the field is cratered with the graves of the beasts, buried by a backhoe where they landed.
Mr. Kennedy has been studying and writing about ancient engines of war since his days at Sandhurst, Britain's military academy, some 30 years ago. But what spurred him to build one was, as he puts it, ``my nutter cousin'' in Northumberland, who put together a pint-sized trebuchet for a county fair. The device hurled porcelain toilets soaked in gasoline and set afire. A local paper described the event under the headline ``Those Magnificent Men and Their Flaming Latrines.''
Building a full-sized siege engine is a more daunting task. Mr. Kennedy believes that dead horses are the key. That's because engravings usually depict the trebuchet hurling boulders, and there is no way to determine what the rocks weigh, or the counterweight necessary to fling them. But a few drawings show dead horses being loaded onto trebuchets, putrid animals being an early form of biological warfare. Since horses weigh now what they did in the 1300s, the engineering calculations followed easily.
One thing has frustrated Mr. Kennedy and his partner: They haven't found any commercial value to the trebuchet. Says a neighbor helping to carry the piano to the trebuchet, ``Too bad Hew can't make the transition between building this marvelous machine and making any money out of it.''
It's not for lack of trying. Last year Mr. Kennedy walked onto the English set of the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie, volunteering his trebuchet for the scene where Robin and his sidekick are catapulted over a wall. ``The directors insisted on something made out of plastic and cardboard,'' he recalls with distaste. ``Nobody cares about correctness these days.''
More recently, he has been approached by an entrepreneur who wants to bus tourists up from London to see cars and pigs fly through the air. So far, that's come to naught.
Mr. Kennedy looks to the U.S. as his best chance of getting part of his investment back: A theme park could commission him to build an even bigger trebuchet that could throw U.S.-sized cars into the sky. ``Its an amusement in America to smash up motor cars, isn't it?'' he inquires hopefully.
Finally, there's the prospect of flinging a man into space - a living man, that it. This isn't a new idea, Mr. Kennedy points out: Trebuchets were often used to fling ambassadors and prisoners of war back over castle walls, a sure way to demoralize the opposition.
Some English sports parachutists think they can throw a man in the air *and* bring him down alive. In a series of experiments on Mr. Kennedy's machine, they've thrown several man-sized logs and two quarter-tone dead pigs into the air; one of the pigs parachuted gently back to earth, the other landed rather more forcefully.
Trouble is, an accelerometer carried inside the logs recorded a centrifugal force during the launch of as much as 20 Gs (the actual acceleration was zero to 90 miles per hour in 1.5 seconds). Scientists are divided over whether a man can stand that many Gs for more that a second or two before his blood vessels burst.
The parachutists are nonetheless enthusiastic. But Mr. Kennedy thinks the idea may only be pie in the sky.
``It would be splendid to throw a bloke, really splendid,'' he says wistfully. ``He'd float down fine. But he'd float down dead.''
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 30 -
As some of you out there may know, I play in this wonderful group called "The Piano Throwers" which currently consists of the wonderful Scott Law on Guitar,
"low end theory" Tye North on Bass, and yours truly in the drummer-at-large role.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the great Danny Barnes on Banjo and history.
A great musician and honorary Thrower, if there ever was one....
but I digress....
A great gig was had by us last night at the Goodfoot Lounge here in the City of Roses.
(thanks once again to Neil Leeborg and the always wonderful staff at the Foot...),
and while I was basking in the after gig -wind down glory (short lived, as always with the basking) I found myself looking on the net and doing my usual surfing.
Google was the next muse of my direction, and I suddenly came upon this bit of info from our world wide web.
I knew this stuff existed from watching "Monty Python & The Holy Grail", but please enjoy this for yourselves.
I especially like the last line of this copyrighted piece from the Wall Street Journal...
It was "devilishly delicious", as the great Jon Lovitz would say as the powdered wig wearing, overly bawdy introducer of saucy tales on SNL from time to time.
c
From The Wall Street Journal
A Scud It's Not, But the Trebuchet Hurls a Mean Piano....
Giant Medieval War Machine Is Wowing British Farmers And Scaring the Sheep
By Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACTON ROUND, England--With surprising grace, the grand piano sails through the sky a hundred feet above a pasture here, finally returning to earth in a fortissimo explosion of wood chunks, ivory keys and piano wire.
Nor is the piano the strangest thing to startle the grazing sheep this Sunday morning. A few minutes later, a car soars by - a 1975 blue two-door Hillman, to be exact - following the same flight path and meeting the same loud fate. Pigs fly here, too. In recent months, many dead 500-pound sows (two of them wearing parachutes) have passed overhead, as has the occasional dead horse.
It's the work of Hew Kennedy's medieval siege engine, a four story tall, 30 ton behemoth that's the talk of bucolic Shropshire, 140 miles northwest of London. In ancient times, such war machines were dreaded instruments of destruction, flinging huge missiles, including plague-ridden horses, over the walls of besieged castles. Only one full-sized one exists today, designed and built by Mr. Kennedy, a wealthy landowner, inventor, military historian and - need it be said? - - full-blown eccentric.
A Pagoda, Too
At Acton, Round Hall, Mr. Kennedy's handsome Georgian manor house here, one enters the bizarre world of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. A stuffed baboon hangs from the dining room chandelier (``Shot it in Africa. Nowhere else to put it,'' Mr. Kennedy explains). Lining the walls are dozens of halberds and suits of armor. A full suit of Indian elephant armor, rebuilt by Mr. Kennedy, shimmers resplendently on an elephant-sized frame. In the garden outside stands a 50-foot-high Chinese pagoda.
Capping this scene, atop a hill on the other side of the 620-acre Kennedy estate, is the siege engine, punctuating the skyline like an oil derrick. Known by its 14th-century French name, trebuchet (pronounced tray-boo-shay), it's not to be confused with a catapult, a much smaller device that throws rocks with a spoon-like arm propelled by twisted ropes or animal gut.
Mr. Kennedy, a burly, energetic 52-year-old, and Richard Barr, his 46-year-old neighbor and partner, have spent a year and #10,000 ($17,000) assembling the trebuchet. They have worked from ancient texts, some in Latin, and crude wood-block engravings of siege weaponry.
The big question is why?
Mr. Kennedy looks puzzled, as if the thought hadn't occurred to him before. ``Well why not? It's bloody good fun!'' he finally exclaims. When pressed, he adds that for several hundred years, military technicians have been trying fruitlessly to reconstruct a working trebuchet. Cortez built one for the siege of Mexico City. On its first shot, it flung a huge boulder straight up - and then straight down, demolishing the machine. In 1851, Napoleon III had a go at it, as an academic exercise. His trebuchet was poorly balanced and barely managed to hurl the missiles - backward. ``Ours works a hell of a lot better than the Frogs', which is a satisfaction,'' Mr. Kennedy says with relish.
How it works seems simple enough. The heart of the siege engine is a three-ton, 60-foot tapered beam made from laminated wood. It's pivoted near the heavy end, to which is attached a weight box filled with 5= tons of steel bar. Two huge A-frames made from lashed-together tree trunks support a steel axle, around which the beam pivots. When the machine is at rest, the beam is vertical, slender end at the top and weight box just clearing the ground.
When launch time comes, a farm tractor cocks the trebuchet, slowly hauling the slender end of the beam down and the weighted end up. Several dozen nervous sheep, hearing the tractor and knowing what comes next, make a break for the far side of the pasture. A crowd of 60 friends and neighbors buzzes with anticipation as a 30-foot, steel-cable sling is attached - one end to the slender end of the beam and the other to the projectile, in this case a grand piano (purchased by the truckload from a junk dealer).
``If you see the missile coming toward you, simply step aside,'' Mr. Kennedy shouts to the onlookers.
Then, with a great groaning, the beam is let go. As the counterweight plummets, the piano in its sling whips through an enormous arc, up and over the top of the trebuchet and down the pasture, a flight of 125 yards. The record for pianos is 151 yards (an upright model, with less wind resistance). A 112 pound iron weight made it 235 yards. Dead hogs go for about 175 yards, and horses 100 yards; the field is cratered with the graves of the beasts, buried by a backhoe where they landed.
Mr. Kennedy has been studying and writing about ancient engines of war since his days at Sandhurst, Britain's military academy, some 30 years ago. But what spurred him to build one was, as he puts it, ``my nutter cousin'' in Northumberland, who put together a pint-sized trebuchet for a county fair. The device hurled porcelain toilets soaked in gasoline and set afire. A local paper described the event under the headline ``Those Magnificent Men and Their Flaming Latrines.''
Building a full-sized siege engine is a more daunting task. Mr. Kennedy believes that dead horses are the key. That's because engravings usually depict the trebuchet hurling boulders, and there is no way to determine what the rocks weigh, or the counterweight necessary to fling them. But a few drawings show dead horses being loaded onto trebuchets, putrid animals being an early form of biological warfare. Since horses weigh now what they did in the 1300s, the engineering calculations followed easily.
One thing has frustrated Mr. Kennedy and his partner: They haven't found any commercial value to the trebuchet. Says a neighbor helping to carry the piano to the trebuchet, ``Too bad Hew can't make the transition between building this marvelous machine and making any money out of it.''
It's not for lack of trying. Last year Mr. Kennedy walked onto the English set of the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie, volunteering his trebuchet for the scene where Robin and his sidekick are catapulted over a wall. ``The directors insisted on something made out of plastic and cardboard,'' he recalls with distaste. ``Nobody cares about correctness these days.''
More recently, he has been approached by an entrepreneur who wants to bus tourists up from London to see cars and pigs fly through the air. So far, that's come to naught.
Mr. Kennedy looks to the U.S. as his best chance of getting part of his investment back: A theme park could commission him to build an even bigger trebuchet that could throw U.S.-sized cars into the sky. ``Its an amusement in America to smash up motor cars, isn't it?'' he inquires hopefully.
Finally, there's the prospect of flinging a man into space - a living man, that it. This isn't a new idea, Mr. Kennedy points out: Trebuchets were often used to fling ambassadors and prisoners of war back over castle walls, a sure way to demoralize the opposition.
Some English sports parachutists think they can throw a man in the air *and* bring him down alive. In a series of experiments on Mr. Kennedy's machine, they've thrown several man-sized logs and two quarter-tone dead pigs into the air; one of the pigs parachuted gently back to earth, the other landed rather more forcefully.
Trouble is, an accelerometer carried inside the logs recorded a centrifugal force during the launch of as much as 20 Gs (the actual acceleration was zero to 90 miles per hour in 1.5 seconds). Scientists are divided over whether a man can stand that many Gs for more that a second or two before his blood vessels burst.
The parachutists are nonetheless enthusiastic. But Mr. Kennedy thinks the idea may only be pie in the sky.
``It would be splendid to throw a bloke, really splendid,'' he says wistfully. ``He'd float down fine. But he'd float down dead.''
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 30 -
Labels: piano throwers carlton jackson tye north scott law steve berlin hornings hideout
posted by Carlton Jackson at 11:59 AM
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