[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS4RKoRyTik]
We received an excited email from [Noah] regarding a gentleman who works with crossbows and crossbow pistols. Begrudgingly, we took a look and what we saw made our day. [TheDuckman666] must have an insatiable love for all things crossbow. His webpage has details and pictures covering seven different models that he built. His YouTube channel shows off three more models, all with magazines for multiple bolts.
Seeing the electrically-cocked, automatic projectile launchers wets our appetite, but we do wish there was more background info about the build process.
Love crossbows. Love this!
Nice! Faster!
A suitable weapon for the dawning zombie apocalypse.
That is AWESOME!
Anyone else thinking VanHelsing?
What a champion!
I’d prefer it if it went:
cock -> trigger -> fire -> cock…
rather than
trigger -> cock -> fire…
I wonder why he chose to make it this way?
Now if only crossbows weren’t even more illegal than guns here. :(
Saddly since he seems to be in England he’ll be put in jail any day now.
sweet!
@burnsy: because “trigger -> cock -> fire” is safer, since it won’t leave your crossbow armed if not fired
AWESOME!!
awesome.. give this guy a time machine & a clock & he’ll do well in medievil europe..
crossbow looks a little weak though, @ end u can see a definite arc of the arrows. Should that really happen with a crossbow. My 50# compound bow seems to shoot faster..
oh yeh & a rockin’ soundtrack would have been cool, maybee some deathmetal, as well as a bit of cos/role play, the whiirrr, click, thunk got a bit repititious for me.
Should maybe have a button for load then.
The draw weight of the crossbow isn’t much, looking on his page he did manage to get it to 100lbs though which is good, but no where near as powerful as some crossbows
This said I still want, no.. Need one.
Pixelwhip: I don’t know what the speed is like, but the arc you’re seeing is mostly distortion from the wide angle lens.
I hate to judge someone on first impressions…BUT…from the looks of this crazy proff…I would not trust him with a soldering iron :)
Props to the maker, lets just hope the cops don’t find you, same category as a handgun in the UK.
Steampunk goodness. Heck, it’s even pre-steampunk.
Trixy pulley design. Nice find. I was hoping to see co2 instead of elec draw, ahh maybe next time.
Jammin’ facial hair, dude.
Also: 50 pound draw weight? I thought the point of crossbows were that they could have superhuman draw weights, since you used winches to cock them.
Also: His site misrenders spectacularly in Firefox.
I hate to burst this mad scientist’s scofflaw image, but it appears to be quite legal to own a crossbow in England, as long as you are over the age of 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbows_Act_1987
Has anyone else thought of Half-Life 2? haha all it needs is the part that heats the bolt up and it’s set :D
@Ph1l:
If only it took rebar bolts and was powered by a 6-volt lantern battery taped to the bottom.
van helsing first thing i thought too
Interesting, but totally useless. Low draw weight, yet heavy overall weight. And the bolt velocity was practically a crawl. As long as he’s never attacked by anything tougher the marshmallows, he’s all set.
i love the crossbow, but someone should feed this poor guy!
I just wish he had some sort of hair guard over the motor. It’s fairly obvious why his beard is so short, but it must have hurt the first couple of times.
A truly weapons grade gentleman! Its guys like this that made a difference in the middle ages. Love it. Also prooving the British superority over other nations. Ohh other than the chinese empires.
why is this not in assasins creed 2? god, i hope i find the codex page with the diagrams for davinci to build this for me.
@rd:
We can only wish…
Am I the only one thinking of Dr. Zaius?
Nice pre-/post-/whatever-apocalyptic tech :)
van helsin would be proud…
Too bad crossbows are illegal in my state… :(
Muhahahaha pedosmile 120% does he use this for hunting down little kids?
I guess we know who’s training buffy now! lol
I hate to be “that guy,” but I HAVE to make a correction:
The video whets your appetite, it does not wet it.
Yep, whet as in sharpen.
Also, this thing is SLOW. A good archer could outshoot him three to one.
>”wets our appetite”
That should be “whets our appetite”. I’m not a copy editor but I play one on the internets. ;)
I’ve always wanted to make an auto crossbow. It’s damned cool that someone out there has done it.
@Sam: Damn it! I was going to be the pedantic jerk and point out the wet/whet fail.
Very cool project. Even if it has a low pull weight, that’s just an engineering problem.
Hopefully he’ll finally catch something with it and EAT A MEAL. Poor Chap looks like he’s missed a good few meals in his day. Noah is his name? Hmmm maybe preparing for 2012. But we all know electronics will cease to operate after that…
@Sam – its Internet not internet :P
Wow that is cool!!
Not a projectile launcher but you can win a gadget each month at http://green-gizmo.com/giveaway.php
and to the above you can call it internet, interweb, online, fiber optic digital goodness who cares!
How the heck does he trim those hedges?
Tehgringe,
I know. I ignore the spelling checker anyway. My rationale is that the original meaning has been lost. If one said “we need to establish internet access” then it’s almost certainly going to be taken to mean “the Internet.” Network geeks usually just call localized networks LANs and WANs nowadays.
All cellular phones offer internet access, but not all offer Internet access. Most of us would almost certainly consider an ad which promoted the former as masquerading as the latter. Anyone suckered in by that would sue, and indubitably win.
Anyway, it’s “it’s” not “its.” Your ball. ;)
Vonskippy,you’re missing the point. He needed a weapon to kill twilight vampires. And the silver bullets didn’t fire correctly.
What a pity that you need to have a special license/permission for a crossbow in Poland :/
I’ll take three. One to display, one to play with and the last one to use after a furious hacking session to improve the second one. If he had a Gatlin-like set-up the way Van Helsing did, he could have been able to use a higher weight pull for the bolts.
Didn’t see any shots of the target… Not very accurate?
@Android
More likely no good targets to use. This would be best used against fast/multiple moving targets.
Look like this weighs more than my ar-15 and ak combined… The electronic loading system takes away the stealth appear of the crossbow…
When it can throw a lightning bolt let me know.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD BUILD SOME KIND OF TOOL FOR CUTTING YOUR BEARD FIRST?
Nice weapon, but 50 dart shots and then need for newly charged bateries? It does not seem realy reliable to me. Much better are the windlass powered ancient greece/rome”polybolos”, ancient chineese lever powered “chu ko nu”, or pump action repeating crossbow on one of “wintage designs”. There is also new modern looking crossbows (cobra or python, or something like that name). It can be googled on youtube.
Van Helsing’s FULLY AUTOMATIC crossbow is on whole different level. But really fully automatic crossbow is inefficient toy, because every way of non-manual automatic recocking used – gass, or electricity – cold be used for DIRECTLY propelling the projectile.
– to the bottom line – if you are looking for weapon, which could be used at survival situations, shortage of newly charged bateries, or of functional gaspumps will be fatal. In non-survival situation, may be the crossbow archer simply shot by gunman, rifleman, or anybody else with gun-powder utilizing weapon.
When there are troubles with “legal status” of repeating crossbow, one can go completely ilegal by utilizing explosive bolts… Then even bulletproof vest is ussless aginst this murderous combo. Con of it is fact, that fired explosive bolt canot be reused by any means.
The reason he makes an automatic crossbow is that he is an archer having problem shooting a bow, not to use as self defense or “at survival situations”.
The comparison one should make is to a bow which is hard or impossible to use with advanced arthritis.
This is stated on his website BTW.