electromagnetic coil gun
posted Feb 17th 2005 3:00am by Jason Striegelfiled under: misc hacks
remember greg the high voltage hacker that brought us the homemade night vision scope? one reader commented:
Greg is a great guy with a ton of ingenuity. He is an inspiration for all high-voltage enthusiasts, and is the only person i know to have constructed a working Tesla coil out of nothing but junk. He is a Class-A hacker!
with a comment like that, and a few other tips i’ve recieved, i figured i should take a closer look at the other articles on his site. his electromagnetic coil gun howtos are of particular interest. on his site, they come in two sizes, small and large.
The total peak energy storage for this system is 1874 Joules, the same amount of caloric (not mass) energy found in 4.7 tablespoons of SKIPPY peanut butter. For reference, my other coil gun’s peak energy was 55 Joules or 0.14 tablespoons of peanut butter
When i first came across Greg’s page about 3 years ago i became interested in coiling. Want an easy proof of concept? I built a small 1-stage coilgun using a disposable flash camera and photoflash caps scavenged from other cameras. It would actually launch a small nail about 100 feet using a bank of about 10 caps.