Over the past year or so, I have been concocting an idea in my head for a trebuchet using old broken computer parts. This week, with most people away at a conference, it was pretty quiet, so I put it together in the time I had between work.
Here's some pics... the projectiles I used were some spacers from old 4gig hard drives, one with a paper clip to attach to the arm, the other with a more plyable strand of cat 5e wire.
Side view of trebuchet, loaded and ready for action. The counterweight is a collection of magnets from those 4gig hard drives, nice and easy to add/remove weight, stuck to a screw in the end of the pencil. The base is a hard drive caddy with an old 40gig hard drive, with 2 56k modems as the uprights. 
As can be seen here, I have used a wooden stem cotton swab as the axle, replacing the screw driver I initially used. I needed the screw driver elsewhere. I rigged a firing pin using a paper clip and a strand of cat5e ethernet wire attached to the modems. Video clip of trebuchet in action... not very clear. The distance between the 2 benches is about 8 ft, and I consistently hit the same target area in the corner in my test firing.
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