Being the plebs we were...
... my family couldn't afford to send me on the school trip one summer, so myself and five other unfortunates had a week of very happy busywork at school. Apart from making suspension bridges out of spaghetti and cranes out of newspaper, we were asked by the tech teacher to make a device for throwing polos into a tray from a distance. Three teams of two and the winner got a roll of polos each. Battle was joined.
The two other teams plumped for a barely-developed put-a-ruler-on-the-table-and-hit-it type of catapault, but this was no good for me, oh no.
We scrounged some nuts and bolts, bits of wood and half the school's supply of rubber bands. In the end, it was like some kind of super-powered trebuchet that worked sideways. Come the final demonstration and the other two teams had landed one polo in six into the tray. We, however, had built a weapon that placed three polos into a five millimetre circle over five meters. The only way you could tell where they had landed was that there was a small white chalk mark, the rest of the polo having been instantly pulverised by the impact to give a minty cloud of dust.
All very good and polos were delivered to us as promised. My partner on the project decided to take the polo death machine home with him. The next morning, he came into school looking a bit depressed. Turns out he'd earnt the hell of a bollocking for having put a penny through the fence panels in his garden with the thing...
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Thu 13 Aug 2009, 18:22, 1 reply)

Awesomeness

( evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 0:07, closed)