Up Close: Chris Gerow
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Tuesday, September 9, 2008
In 1984, Chris Gerow decided to leave his hometown of Greenwich, Conn., to seek a change in lifestyle and a change of scenery. Along with his wife and daughter, Gerow landed on a Leesburg farm, setting foot in crop fields for the first time in his life.
After a 34-year career with IBM, Gerow, 64, recently retired and left the farm for a more manageable piece of property off King Street in Leesburg, equipped with plenty of space for his wife to continue growing flowers for wedding arrangements and for him to pursue his unique hobby – or obsession, to be quite frank.
For the last 10 years Gerow has been building trebuchets – medieval catapults that use counter-weights to launch projectiles great distances. Every year, Gerow and several close friends travel to the annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin in Delaware to test their machines against the best of the best from the East coast. And every year Gerow seems to come back with a bigger trophy and a better result from his pumpkin-hurling machines.
LoudounExtra.com recently visited Gerow to get a first-hand look at his process of taking an original engineering idea and bringing it to life in the form of a giant trebuchet, all in his own backyard.
Q: Most people spend their retirement playing golf, fishing or traveling. How did building trebuchets become your hobby?
A: I saw that series called Northern Exposure and one of the guys from that show, his name was Chris too, and he had a trebuchet that he threw a piano with. I thought that was pretty cool. That's where I learned the word "trebuchet." So I went online and I checked it out and I found all kinds of stuff, and so I built my first machine.
Q: What was your first design and how did it fare?
A: The first model was called Prince Valiant. I made it out of wood, 4-by-6 pieces of oak, so it was pretty substantial. It was more along the lines of a traditional trebuchet. And it really turned out to be a dismal failure. It went into the barn and it was going to stay there as far as I was concerned.
Q: What modeling tool do you use to create these machines and how were you able to acquire it?
Photo Gallery
Chris Gerow and His Trebuchets
In Gerow's office, he keeps two computers that run the engineering program AutoCad, to help him work through his trebuchet designs. (Meghan Louttit)
Gerow shows off the lathe that he uses to create parts for his trebuchets. He bought the machine from a man in Youngstown, Ohio. (Meghan Louttit)
King Arthur is Gerow's second attempt at building a trebuchet. The machine has won Gerow and his team several trophies since he finished it. (Meghan Louttit)
A hat for Gerow's Merlin team sits in his workshop among his tools and welding helmet. (Meghan Louttit)
Merlin is Gerow's latest creation and is a brand new design. His team worked with engineers in Philadelphia to complete the design. (Meghan Louttit)
Merlin sits in Gerow's backyard with King Arthur. He hopes to win first place with Merlin at this year's Punkin Chunkin in Delaware by tossing his pumpkin 2,000 feet. (Meghan Louttit)
A: The software that I'm using is designed for anything involving forces and motion and gravity. It's $4,500 worth of software and I certainly don't have the wherewithal to fund something like that – we're totally funded by me. So it's sort of an interesting story. The guy who was the head of the marketing division for NSE Software, the ones marketing this product, I told him that I could throw a pumpkin over 500 feet with only 400 pounds of counterweight and my axle was only seven feet high and he said I was full of it. He said that's not possible. He said they used trebuchets as a teaching aid in their classes and nobody has ever gotten it above 200 feet, so how could you possibly get it to 500? I said, if you send me a copy of your software, I'll show you. And he did. So I put it together and sent it back to him and that thing could not have been on his desk for two milliseconds and he said that he'd give me a copy of the software provided that I give him a press release and let him use my model in his classes. I said, sure.
Q: Tell us about the design for King Arthur and how the design affects its ability to outperform other, bigger machines.
A: King Arthur was a smaller machine – only about 10 feet high – and it used much less counterweight compared to other machines – only 600 compared to 4,000.
The other thing that was innovative about this machine was that most people, when they cock the machine, they take the main throwing arm and they pull down on it. This doesn't do that. Basically what I do is use a long piece of aluminum as a boom, and instead of pulling the arm down, I pull the weight up using that boom. That way I can keep the arm nice and light and it doesn't have to be strong enough to hold all that weight.
The prototype was really pretty good. Instead of going 120 feet, which was the best I could do before, it started going 500. Back in those days I only had 400 pounds of counterweight.
When we built King Arthur, things started to change. It was a spindly little thing sticking out of the ground. It was much smaller than all the other machines, but with that arm being all the way up like that, and then gathering that kinetic energy as it comes down, that made a huge difference. We won again in 2001. We won again in 2002 and again in 2003. So we were four-time world champs.
Q: Your most recent design, Merlin, is unique. What makes it different from other trebuchets, and where did the inspiration behind its design come from?
A: We were feeling pretty good with King Arthur until this beast called Yankee Siege showed up in 2004. The wheels on this thing are 10 feet high. The axle is taller than my machine. It is a beast, and they beat us by 250 feet. We were sending it out over 1,000 feet at this point. So for them to beat me by 20 percent was quite a tribute to King Arthur.
Watch a video of King Arthur here.
So I had to do something. I could either try to build up King Arthur into a much larger machine, or try a new machine altogether. That's much more challenging, so we started working on Merlin. It's a totally new design. We worked with some engineers in Philadelphia to help us, because this is a much bigger machine with much stronger forces at work.
Q: What kind of pumpkins do you launch?
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A: Instead of using orange pumpkins – which have a very thin rind, and are what they call carving pumpkins – we use white ones. The white ones are much denser, the rind is much thicker. They're physically smaller and the hole in the middle is a lot smaller too, so they go substantially farther and they also stay together. The forces we're dealing with out here are really quite phenomenal. That 8-pound pumpkin will generate 2,000 pounds worth of pressure just before it gets released. It's going so fast and so hard, so you've got to have something that's going to stay together. Those oranges ones just won't do it.
Q: How much work goes into building a trebuchet? How much time is spent conceiving the idea versus building it and making adjustments?
A: They're all different, but Merlin has taken the longest. We started conceptualizing Merlin in 2004, we actually started the building in late 2004. So I've been working on it for four years…every bit of four years. It ain't quite there yet, but I'm close. I'm real close.
Q: What other skills and knowledge have you picked up through your construction of these machines?
A: I went to NOVA and took a class in welding, because King Arthur wasn't going to be made out of wood – it had to be metal. I built all my own wheels and bearings so I needed to learn how to do that.
Q: From the sounds of it, many your competitors at the Punkin Chunkin try to build the biggest, strongest machine they can to throw the longest distance. Why have you chosen to use different techniques with smaller machines?
A: Anybody can power it through, that's easy. But to build something designed to do it differently, that's a real challenge. That's the whole reason why I do it.
Q: You had hoped to hold a pumpkin chuck in Leesburg this October, but that fell through. What are your future aspirations for attending and hosting competitions? Do you think a Leesburg chuck would be possible down the road?
A: Most of the guys around here are a little afraid of the liability issues. They'll manage you up to $1 million, but if someone gets really hurt, the liability would be there. I think that's going to be the biggest hurdle and I don't know if we can get enough people together that will get us around that.
Q: You have talked about wanting to teach young people about the art of building these machines. Tell us a little more about that.
A: One of the things that I didn't know as a kid – I wanted to be an engineer but I didn't know why. I had no idea why, it just sounded like a good idea to me. I was told engineering is the kind of thing you do if you're mechanically inclined. I let my dad talk me into going for a business major.
The schools today do not really support engineering. They do lip service to it but they don't really tell you the excitement of it and the joy of it. That's what I want to get across to the kids. Actually doing these drawings is part of the fun of it. You make changes and then you just move the thing, you don't have to tear it about and re-weld it, you just move it. It's so much easier. And those are the kinds of things you learn after doing it for a while.
Most kids love working on computers anyway, but this is the real live kind of issues, solving real problems.
Q: How does your family feel about your hobby?
A: Chris's wife, Judy Gerow: My mother summarized it … she said it's a lot better than fast women.
Gerow and his team will cart both Merlin and King Arthur up to Sussex County, Delaware this fall for the 23rd annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin, which will be held the weekend of Oct. 31. Yankee Seige won the 2007 title with a throw of 1,658 feet. Gerow hopes to eclipse 2,000 with Merlin in 2008.
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Nice Job - well done
Posted by cgerow (anonymous) on September 10, 2008 at 1:01 p.m. (Suggest removal)
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