When pumpkins fly: UNC students held 'Punkin Chunkin' record

Pumpkins bring memories of trick-or-treating, hay rides and warm spiced drinks. For three UNC students, however, pumpkins serve a much more competitive purpose.

On the weekend after Halloween, the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Association hosts its annual three-day pumpkin-launching event. Punkin Chunkin is an engineering competition in which teams build a machine with the goal of launching a pumpkin as far as possible.

“It’s the love child between the state fair and a bunch of redneck engineers seeing how far they can launch a pumpkin,” first-year Daniel Margolis said.

In the 2012 competition, which was held in Delaware, current UNC students Hastings Greer, Alex Cecil, Margolis and three other team members not only took first place, but also set a record for the youth division with their machine, the Whomping Willow.

Greer said that he initially became interested in Punkin Chunkin after his father built and entered his own medieval trebuchet into the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Association’s competition. Greer wanted to build a trebuchet to rival his father’s and decided to enlist the help of his high school friends.

The team built the 25-foot-tall Whomping Willow on farmland belonging to Greer’s family friend.

Because the machine was big and could launch a pumpkin far, the team was unable to run any trials before the actual competition, Cecil said.

The Whomping Willow is a trebuchet powered exclusively by gravity. It uses a counterweight attached to an arm to swing the pumpkin around and release it at an optimal pin angle.

The three-day competition kicks off at around 9 a.m., and each team gets only one official throw per day. The team that launches its pumpkin the farthest, in one of its three attempts, wins.

“There’s something about all the complexity of the designs that people use and different strategies that arise when the goal is so simple,” Greer said. “It just makes Punkin Chunkin really fascinating.”

The Whomping Willow’s swing broke on the first day of the 2012 world championship.

“It was a freezing October night in Delaware and there we were, 20 feet in the air with wrenches and saws trying to fix the broken swing,” Cecil said.

Once the arm was fixed, just in time for the last day of competition, the Whomping Willow successfully fired its first shot and launched the pumpkin 1,526 feet.

The students set a new world record for the trebuchet youth division on their first attempt.

The competition hasn’t been held for the past two years due to liability issues, but Greer hopes the team can punkin chunk with the Whomping Willow again sometime soon.

“Coming together as a team and seeing something we built from the ground up was one of the best feelings in the world,” Margolis said. “The feeling was equivalent to that of winning the Super Bowl; it was the best moment I can remember in my life.”

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