By Chad Neal
This past Saturday at the Ellicottville Distillery on Robbins Road, a group of likeminded young men brought a trebuchet, a 14,000-pound machine they fabricated to launch pumpkins, and launch they did. This group of fellows call themselves “Team Urban Siege” and have been engineering and building trebuchets since 2005. Bryan Scharf from Ellicottville Distillery invites Team Urban Siege this time of year to have an expedition pumpkin launching show knowing these guys have won competitions with their pumpkin hurls. In case you don’t know what a trebuchet is, it’s a machine used in medieval siege warfare for hurling large stones or other missiles.
The group of inspired young freshmen at Rochester Institute of Technology (R.I.T.) started Team Urban Siege as Students of Mechanical Engineering and Environmental Management. The original members, DiFrancesco, Jason Nichols, and Chris Nastasi started their endeavor in the trebuchet world in the early 2000s. DiFrancesco built a small trebuchet when he was younger and was inspired when a watermelon launching competition came along and he and his long-time friends decided to build a bigger one, and they built the “Melon Felon”. They went on a year later building Jekyll and Hyde as their first “foray into advanced trebuchet designs”.
When they heard about the World Championships of Punkin Chunkin in Delaware they made a decision to build a full scale “punkin chunkin trebuchet” and compete in 2008. They became part of the medieval machine community soon thereafter and in 2011 Nick Wendel joined the team as he learned of the phenomenon and found Team Urban Siege and asked to join them. He has a welding expertise. He had built a “human-powered centrifugal catapult named the Buffalo Wing Slinger” and then in 201?…, they built the hurling machine they brought to Ellicottville Distillery on November 4th called NASAW (North American Sliding Axel Whipper).
With NASAW they topped the world record of 2034’ in its first competition shooting an orange gourd 2316’ to garner second place and won the World Campions of Punkin Chunkin in 2012. The team is competitive in their undertaking, but loves to demonstrate the awesome launching power and sheer magnitude of their apparatus. While at the demonstration at the Ellicottville Distillery, Nick Wendel who is also owner of Wendel Poultry Farms and Wendel’s Maple and More in East Concord, New York gave a spiel about the machine and how it works. There’s a large weight that is lifted after the pumpkin in placed in the launching basket. The slide arm on the top of the trebuchet is brought to the front of it on special vinyl wheels that can hold all that weight as it rolled on the tracks as the trigger is easily pulled to start the reaction and launch.
A 12-pound pumpkin was the first launch of the day. It was placed and the machine readied to fling it. Wendel told the crowd the pumpkin leaves the trebuchet at over 200 mph and watching it happen you didn’t question that fact. He also warned that if the pumpkin were to shoot straight up in the air, which it hasn’t yet from the NASAW trebuchet, not to scatter as it will be in the air for a few seconds, but to just watch it and proceed away from where it looks like it’s going to land. Then we counted down from five as Wendel’s 7-year-old daughter pulled the trigger starting the device in action. Watching the weights come down and the arms start to move is fascinating, but the end result as the arm comes around and whips the gourd toward the hill behind the distillery was awesome. It smashed into a tree on the hill halfway up and disintegrated. The second throw sent the pumpkin a little higher cresting the hill and the third flew well over fifty feet above the trees on top of the hill. It was amazing to say the least.
They spent a few more hours launching the orange missiles into and over the hill for the entertainment of the onlookers. They will be invited again next year along with the food truck/s and their bar serving craft cocktails made with spirits made on site. Team Urban Siege is willing to do more demonstrations and charity events as well. Their website teamurbansiege.com has information on how to contact them.
