To start with we had some string and some lolly sticks, but those were just too difficult to work with, the lolly sticks were really too flat to be able to get the right sort of shape. Fortunately I remembered that we had some a load of wood left from an ash tree that I had cut down and that some of those were about finger thickness. So I popped out into the garden and cut some of the wood up to the right length. Five minutes later, with the aid of knots remembered from my Scout days, we had a working catapult!

It shoots one of the plastic balls that came with the castle playset about a yard or so (metre if you are metric). Best things about it are that Alexander played with it as much as the other parts of the set and that the balls are shot at low velocity so they don’t hurt when they hit you…