You see, each year Team Tormentum packs up two or three vehicles and heads from New England to Bridgeville, DE for this http://www.punkinchunkin.com/;
1. Dave's Ford F250 pulling Mr. B,
Here's a pic of Mr. B (Mista Ballista), our world record holding (unofficial), punkin' chunkin', torsion class ballista
(See http://www.siege-engine.com/MistaBallista.shtml for more.)
2. A support vehicle (last year it was my Jeep) towing a small utility trailer loaded down with a large Knack metal tool chest, a home brew gas powered hydraulic power unit, a large generator, and sometimes a large MIG welder and/or air compressor.
3. A minivan full of people, luggage and what naught.
Well, Mr. B is estimated at about 8.5k lbs when loaded down in travel mode, the tow limit on Dave's truck. The axles on Mr. B were scrounged from a prefab home hauling trailer and were only intended for temporary duty (i.e. the brakes were not made to be serviceable). Dave's truck usually has a fair bit of support material and miscellaneous items in the bed, so we estimate that we are usually about 800-1000 lbs overloaded. Oh, and yeah, with the fenders and those house moving axles we are about 2 inches over the legal width (but DMV never actually measured so you did not hear that from me
). (We are in the throes of planning a major redesign which will remedy those “little” issues, so don't worry for us too much.)The worst has to be after a long 4 days of loading up (usually into the wee hrs. the night before), hauling the 11+ hour drive down, then setting Mr. B up to be ready to shoot the next morning (about 3-4 hr hard labor… lift that barge, tote that bell), slogging it out for 3 days in a post harvest corn/sorgum field in all kinds of weather (sometimes mud), making field repairs when necessary so we can stay in the fight (or just to be able to drag the damn thing home!), dismantling, packing up all the equipment (lift that barge... again, tote that bell... again), then driving thru the night so those who need to go to work on Monday can get home (I have learned to take the day off, but since we all travel as a group, we all drive all night to get back).
I have a lot of towing experience from driving wrecker full time when I was younger and am brave enough to take the wheel of the "big rig" through the city, so have done it a few times. Going through “the needle” on the way into the GWB (George Washington Bridge) is always exciting. The pavement is always terrible because there is always so much traffic they can’t ever manage to fix it properly. People drive like idiots dive bombing in front of you (“Didn't you notice this huge unstoppable object I’m towing?”). There are several places where the road divides and suddenly narrows as you pass underneath the buildings overhead, and squeezing through the toll booths is usually accompanied by a fender scraping the concrete curb here or there (I think my score is 2 out of 3 on fender scrapes).
It is usually a white knuckle ride and completely unpredictable what the traffic will be like regardless of time of day or night. But it is all part of the adventure and I would not miss it for the world. There’s just something about seeing and hearing a pumpkin going speeding off into the sky, the cheering crowd of 50 thousand plus, then waiting with anticipation to find out if you’ve out thrown your previous best shot. Makes all the hard work and tribulations worth every moment.
