The Rubberband Minigun

I build this a couple summers ago just for kicks, to challenge myself. It is a 6+ foot long minigun (gatling gun) that shoots industrial sized rubber bands at rates of up to 60 bands a second. Theoretically, it can hold 2000-3000 rubber bands, but, for the sake of my sanity, this has not been tested (reloading is a slow process). The gun works by stretching rubber bands around pegs with a slot in them and then running a ribbon through the slot, when the ribbon is spooled in, the barrel spins, and the ribbon is pulled out of the slot, thus firing the rubber band. The gun Is powered by a cordless drill.

Coming Soon!

I am in the middle of building a Farnsworth Fusion Reactor. I will get around to posting it soon, I am a bit delayed in my projects because midterms are fast approaching. In the meantime, to learn more about what exactly this is, visit www.fusor.net.

10' Air Cannon

Well, I figured I might as well start this blag off with a quite literal bang. This is an air cannon I made about a year ago that fires projectiles at 800 feet per second. The barrel is 10' of either 1.5" or 2.5" PVC pipe and the chamber is a total of 10' of 4" PVC pipe (All the components on the cannon are pressure rated). This cannon doesn't use a ball valve or any other slow opening valve to fire, instead it uses a chamber sealing piston valve to quickly dump the air pressurized  to 120 psi in the chambers out the barrel. The effects of all this energy imparted on a tennis ball or arrow are quite substantial, as evidenced by the video below.(+1 Internets if you caught the XKCD reference.)