Question

A war-wolf, or trebuchet, is a device used during the Middle Ages to throw rocks at castles and now sometimes used to fling pumpkins and pianos. A simple trebuchet is shown in the figure. Model it as a stiff rod of negligible mass 3.00 m long and joining particles of mass 74.0 kg and 0.110 kg at its ends. It can turn on a frictionless horizontal axle perpendicular to the rod and 13.0 cm from the particle of larger mass. The rod is released from rest in a horizontal orientation. Find the maximum (a) angular speed. (b) linear speed that the object of smaller mass attains.

Answer 1

http://www.physics.umd.edu/~richman/phys141/hw8.pdf