Building A Coil Gun

To ultimately shoot someone in an environmentally friendly way:

hahah the video is pretty good… electrocution, fires, a dancing unibrow etc…

You can check out his blog post on how to build it… but a word of caution, you might want to do your own calculations. ;)

Building-A-Coil-GunI believe coil guns have great potential for civilian use in the future once we can reduce the size of some of the components, and increase the current.  Someone actually did build a portable rifle version that seemed to be fairly powerful, which I blogged about a while back. We definitely aren’t quite there yet though…

Thoughts?


Comments

11 responses to “Building A Coil Gun”

  1. We’re far away from away from any sort of railguns in a man portable version.

  2. Haha! Nice. Humor AND science!

  3. And he wonders why guns are illegal there. he nearly killed himself with his toy gun

  4. This guy is awesome! I can’t wait to see more how-to videos from him. Assuming he doesn’t accidentally kill himself in the process… ;-)

  5. Anthracis Avatar

    Idea = great
    Execution = FAIL!

    1. Anthracis Avatar

      Idea = great
      Execution = FAIL!

      Eyebrows…= PRICELESS!

  6. frank rizzo Avatar
    frank rizzo

    They are closer then you think.

    simple google search turned up this site:
    http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/01/27/top-5-coil-guns/

    Rail Gun Naval Test Shot
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54aLcC3G74

  7. That rifle coil gun you linked couldn’t be considered “powerful”. They claim 1.25kJ of stored energy with a estimated 1% efficiency, meaning the projectile has 12.5J of energy. By comparison a .177 spring powered air gun has 20J of energy and a .22LR pistol has 159J of energy.

  8. have to agree with matt here, it’s hard to beat the energy stored in gunpowder.

    Until we can come up with some kind of regenerative power supply that doesn’t make you glow in the dark we’re stuck on gunpowder.

    Ships are a slightly different story because it’s easy to float a nuclear reactor and capacitors which can generate the energy needed for shots. but even then there are some delays from recharging the capacitor banks which makes them inferior to classic gunpowder.

    Navy seems to be more interested in rail guns, which are very similar. here’s a guy who homemade a 20kJ version:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4CNldTbYy5A

    Even that had to be carried around on a flatbed cart. sorry, man portable rail and coil guns are firmly in the sci fi/ game fantasy world.

    1. lol yeah, and that was just the coil assembly on the cart, think of how big and heavy the capacitor bank is.

  9. Hunter57dor Avatar
    Hunter57dor

    please don’t give this man anything more dangerous than a blunt crayon.

    we already have a hard enough time convincing non gunners that what we do is safe, without people like him being clowns on the internet.