What can you do with needles, disposable syringes, superglue, cotton swabs, and scissors? If you answered ‘get hassled by TSA agents’, you’d be right, but you could also do what [Mski] did and make a pocket dart gun!
[Mski] used a 10mL syringe and a clear BiC pen body. He glued the pen barrel to the needle adapter on the syringe to make the chamber. He made the darts by cutting cotton swabs in half and inserting glue-covered needles. If you’ve never cut a cotton swab in half, they are hollow inside. What he has there are actually straight pins, which are cheaper than needles and come in larger quantities. The good news is you can make a bandolier of darts without breaking the bank.
Load your gun by shoving spitballs and/or darts up the chamber with a thin wooden stick, like a bamboo skewer. If you use your wife’s knitting needle, we recommend putting it back where you found it.
Do you prefer flaming projectiles and find clothespins easier to come by? Are you a hemophiliac or needle-phobic? Make this mini matchstick gun instead.
There are some stupid things HAD should show some editorial gumption and just outright reject the submission. This is one of them.
+1…. What “Mr Name Required” said… ;^)
You could really get some speed on the projectile if you used a 60 mL luer syringe, with a luer stopcock in between the syringe and the pen body. Just compress the plunger as hard as you can, then open the stopcock.
Yup, that works really well though a lot of pressure might make your aim shaky holding it down.
What brand cotton swabs? all the ones around here are solid paper.
Years a go, sometime in last years of the 60s I made darts for a Red Ryder BB gun out of small wood match sticks. I cut off the fire making end, cut a split in one end to insert paper fins that would wrap around the dart when muzzle loading the BB gen, for the business end I cut off the head of a straight pin and pushed to dull end of the straight pin in the other end of the match stick dart. I took a couple to the parochial school I went to. Because I was tall enough to jump up to retrieve them I just stuck them into the suspended ceiling panels. When I bunch of jackasses took things to the extreme I quit taking them to school. They would throw them at people, ultimately making large “caliber” versions, by grinding a point on a nail that would fit into a Bic pen barrel, throwing those at people as well. An earlier lesson how a group of an ignorant few MF’rs thinking only about themselves can ruin something for all. When the reckoning came I didn’t have any Darts at school.
You’ll put out your eye!
I used to do something similar when I was a kid in elementary school. I had a small syringe barrel like this from some weather station experimenters kit and later again from a baby feeder… Somehow I put together I could make tiny spit balls, wad them into the syringe tip while fully extended, and then just plunge it to fire them. It makes a really cool and loud pop! If the spitball is too dry though, it will sometimes just explode in a cloud of dust. Also cool!
This is why I love HAD, such diversity in hacks
I’m kinda an old fart. Back in the day, we would take the end off of the old aluminum tube Berol Markers. They were huge, roughly 3/4 of an inch diameter. We would make a plunger from a pencil or a bent piece of coat hanger wire and then you would make 2 spitballs, one for the projectile and one for the plunger seal. The projectile got packed into the end where the wick for the ink was. The other one was put into the other end. you would line up your target and put the plunger onto the seal spitball, give it a quick smack with your palm, and BANG! These things were loud and could give a classmate a welt from 20 feet away.We never added pins or anything like that to them.
Not being 8 years old, this is interesting why?
“Because it’s there.”
Yup…something to do; now he just needs to milk some snakes for something to put on the needles.
Well… macgyver_opening_theme.mp3
Honest to gosh! Who’s driving?!! What the hack is this? It’s beyond simply obvious that the darts can be used without the cotton swab tip… and the instructions are being spread as a fun hack? This is no hack! It’s time to clean house.
Of course it’s a fucking hack, not a single component is being used as originally intended. You could argue that it isn’t an interesting hack but simply claiming
“Not A Hack!” is stupid.
This is cool! Reminds me of the soda straw darts I made as a kid. Take a 2″ piece of yarn and tape it to a sewing needle. Insert into soda straw and blow! They flew quite well and stuck into things nicely. We never shot hem at each other because we had a thing called common sense back then. I think it’s good that HAD post stuff like this. The safety police can go piss off!!! I mean, get real!! We live in a country where kids bring guns to school and blast away at their classmates and you’re worried about some freakkin darts????
I’m not worried about the darts at all. Scroll up… read a bit… it’ll come to ya! It’s not in any comment I made, but it’s there more than once. It’s not near as obvious as guns…
HAD should indeed have an editorial policy/restriction that covers pernicious hacks.
HAHAHAHA!! I’m so glad I stumbled upon this thread! As an outsider reading my first experience of Hackaday hackery I can’t stop laughing! “Because it’s there”, and “Well…macgyver_opening_theme.mp3”!!! Funny fkrs HAHAHA!! I can appreciate the thought put into this and am grateful to see that spitballs are still relevant nowadays and contraptions for them have become more innovative.
Still laughing HAHAHA!!