McConnell Grace FMC Youth Group Takes First Place at Morton, IL “Punkin Chunkin” Contest
Each year contestants from around the Mid-West gather near Morton, Illinois for a truly unique contest. “Punkin Chunkin”. You may ask, “Why would people do this?” Well, Morton just happens to be home to the Libby’s pumpkin canning plant where most of the world’s holiday pumpkin pie mix is canned. To celebrate their distinguished place in the world, the Morton Chamber of Commerce sponsors an annual Pumpkin Festival, this year’s event being September 14-17. In addition to the Pumpkin Festival parades and the crowning of the Pumpkin Princess, is an event dubbed “Punkin Chunkin” where teams gather to see who can throw their pumpkin the farthest. (Pumpkin is purposely misspelled to match “Chunkin” in the name.) This year’s “Punkin Chunkin” was held over the weekend of October 22-23.
Over twenty teams gathered from around the Mid-west this year to try their hand at flinging the tasty gourds. The participants were divided into various categories based upon their ages and the type of machine they use to make their tosses. Every type of device was seen, from spring loaded catapults, to a large crossbow put together by a highschool physics class, to a giant air gun capable of hurling a 10 pound pumpkin three-quarters of a mile, although for this meeting they only threw one, a half mile.
Grace Free Methodist Church in McConnell, IL was represented by its youth group who took down their trebuchet. A trebuchet (tre-bu-sha) is a device developed during the middle ages to throw large boulders at castles to break down their thick walls. The trebuchet built by the Grace FMC youth group is somewhat smaller, but the working principle is the same. There is a long pivoted throwing arm with weights at one end and a sling holding the projectile at the other. When the arm is released the weights fall generating force which is used to throw the projectile, in this case a pumpkin. In the adult and open categories a 8-10 pounder is thrown, in the youth categories a 4-8 pound pumpkin is used. Most of the teams at this year’s “Chunkin” brought trebuchets.
“We built our first trebuchet this summer as fun project during our weekly youth activities,” said the pastor of the church, David Mann. “We used it for throwing water balloons to the kids during the hot weather. When we found out about the Morton contest we got hold of the rules and found out that the kids had to be the ones putting it together and designing it. Since there had been a good bit of adult input in the first one, we took it apart and set to work building a bigger better contraption. The best part about this project is that, except for a couple of boards and some hardware, we basically made it from scrap iron and old lumber. We went to Morton just hoping to make a respectable showing, which we did.”
During the competition the Grace FMC trebuchet threw a very respectable 412 ft. That is a good bit farther than the length of a football field. That toss was enough to garner the first place prize in the youth division for Saturday’s contest. Not bad for the first time out.
“It’s great to win,” said Logan Birr, 15 and a sophomore at Orangeville High. “It took great teamwork to pull it off.”
“We know this machine can throw farther,” Mann says, “since we actually removed weight from the throwing arm for the competition, to make it easier to set the arm.” The contest rules state that the machine in the youth division must be “human powered” and use the stored energy that one of the kids can put into it in two minutes. “We had our winch break a week before the competition. We were using a pulley system to pull down the arm Saturday and none of our kids is heavy enough to set the arm using the pulley system with all of the weight we had originally planned to use. We did a test throw before with several people setting the arm and it was even better than the winning 412 ft., but it would not have counted because of the one person rule.”
“It was really fun. I hope to go back next year,” said Steve Zimmerman also 15 and a sophomore at Le-Win High School.
Despite having the winning combination this year the kids know that other teams are out there and they are already making plans for the next competition. Trebuchets are a wonderful conglomeration of simple machines, so if any area schools or science teachers would like to schedule a demonstration of the trebuchet feel free to contact the church at 815-868-9213.