![]() There was no buying what I wanted on Amazon. And none of the designs used the trigger mechanism of the trap, which in my view, is half the fun! Nothing available on the internet, either for sale, or for download, would suffice! So I could tell myself I was fully justified in spending the effort on this. So I turned to the internet and did an initial search for mouse trap catapults. The lesson here is not to engineer things when you can just buy them for a lot less time and trouble. I'd look on Amazon to see if I could just buy one." "Well, chicken incubators sound like a thing that already exists. "So the chicken egg is safe for a little while, and I have a few days to come up with something nicer?" The best answer by far though, went something like this. This question certainly weeds out bad engineers, and most mechanical engineers can start talking through what would be necessary for a more repeatable, scalable, durable, attractive build. Once the chicken egg is safe, I start asking the candidate to start thinking longer term, and maybe not having an ugly recycled cardboard box and a heating pad in my living room. The question starts with a scenario where it's necessary to hack something together with materials from around the house, then progresses to more and more sophisticated builds. This is a total tangent, but when interviewing engineers, I often asked a question about keeping a chicken egg warm and incubated until it hatched. Mouse trap powered cars were a thought, but catapults just seemed more fun. So I started thinking about what I could make with them. To their credit, it's been several months, and nary a mouse has been seen, live or dead, but from my point of view, these mouse traps are now being underutilized. My wife has a true, stomach churning phobia of mice, so we hired a service that came and filled up all the air gaps around the house and left around 60 or 70 traps in every nook and cranny. I mean, we found evidence of droppings, and some mouse sized holes in an instant ramen packet and a box of Cheerios, and then one day I actually saw one scamper across the kitchen. The story starts several months ago with the discovery of a mouse in the house. Oh, and my favorite design feature, is that the mouse trap's trigger mechanism is kept intact. It features a snap-on throwing arm that fits over the kill bar of a traditional "snap trap", and then the trap itself snaps into a plastic frame which controls the throwing angle and keeps fingers safe. ![]() We'll meander for a bit and talk about the backstory and motivation, but the punchline is that I have a design for a mass producible, injection moldable catapult. Today's post is about advancing the state of the art in mouse trap driven catapult design. ![]()
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