Weapons Hacks

270 Articles

Brutal Water Cannon Defeats Summer Heat; Kills It On Documentation

June 21, 2016 by 21 Comments

There’s a war on, and while this over-the-top water blaster is certainly an escalation in the Water Wars arms race, that’s not the war we’re referring to. We’re talking about the Documentation War. Hackers, you’re on notice.

Gj3YAOLIf you want to see how a project should be documented, look no further than [Tim]’s forum posts over at WaterWar.net. From the insanely detailed BOM with catalog numbers and links to supplier websites, to scads of build photos with part number callouts, to the finely detailed build instructions, [Tim] has raised the stakes for anyone that documents any kind of build.

And that’s not even touching on the merits of the blaster itself, which has air and water tanks plumbed with every conceivable valve and fitting. There’s even an inline stream straightener made of bundled soda straws to keep the flow as laminar as possible. It looks like [Tim] and his colleagues are obsessed with launching streams of water as far as possible, and although bad weather has prevented an official measurement so far, from the video below it sure looks like he’s covering a huge distance with a stream that stays mostly intact to deliver the full blast to its intended target without losing a drop.

For as much fun as amped-up water guns appear to be, we haven’t seen too many grace these pages before. Going way back we covered a DIY super-soaker. For something much less involved than [Tim’s] masterpiece, you can pull together this pressurized water pistol in an afternoon.

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[Clinton] Builds A Better Handgun

June 20, 2016 by 121 Comments

A few months ago, we caught wind of someone doing something remarkable. [Clinton Westwood] built a pistol from plans he found on the Internet. You can find plans to build anything on the web, from houses to four-stroke engines to perpetual motion machines. Most of the time these plans are incomplete and many of these devices have never been built at all. [Clinton]’s pistol was one of these never-built designs. After months of work, he’s ready to call this project done, and managed to build an awesome rig to rifle the barrel.

Before [Clinton] set out to build this gun from scratch, the only other example these plans could build a gun-shaped object were a few terrible pictures of what appears to be a gun that was thrown into a garbage disposal, then into a creek, then forgotten for several years. There is a distinct lack of workmanship in this one exemplar, but [Clinton]’s attempt at replication is far more professional.

Although this gun is designed to be built using simple tools, there is one aspect of amateur gunsmithing that requires some specialized equipment. The barrel must be rifled if you want any accuracy at all, and for this [Clinton] has come up with a very simple jig made out of a broken bicycle and some threaded rod.

If homebrew gunsmithery is your thing, but you’re looking for something with a little more punch than a .25 ACP, you can beat plowshares into an AK-47. All hail the shovel AK, defender of the motherland and digger of holes.

Feed The Fun With A Semi-automatic Cheesy Poof Rifle

May 23, 2016 by 18 Comments

At Hackaday we think that hackers have the power to make the world a better place with their builds. This air-powered cheesy-poof rifle is not one of those builds, unless making the world a little more fun and slightly messier makes it a better place.

The principle of [NightHawkInLight]’s design is simple – an electric leaf blower provides the power, and a big vat o’ poofs provides the ammo. Getting the two together and providing a barrel is a matter of some simple plumbing with 1″ PVC pipe and fittings. But wait – lest you think this hack, like the ammo, is just a delicious bit of fluff, there’s something to be learned about fluid dynamics here. With a plain tee fitting, the leaf blower would only pressurize the magazine, making it difficult to chamber a round. But by adding a small restriction to the incoming air flow, the Venturi effect actually sucks ammo into the chamber and down the barrel, to the delight of hungry wildlife for yards around. Science!

There’s plenty of room for improvement to the design – something along the lines of this gas-powered, tube-fed snowball gun would be keen. As it stands, the cheesy-poof gun seems like good, unclean fun.

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DIY Cast AR-15 Receivers Are More Interesting Than Expected

May 8, 2016 by 194 Comments

For some reason the US News media decided on the AR-15 as the poster child of guns that should not be allowed to be made for, or sold to, the consumer. The words still out on the regulation, but, in a very American response, a whole market sprang up around people saying, “Well, then we’ll just make our own AR-15.”

Ordinarily, we wouldn’t cover this sort of thing, but the work [AR-15Mold] is doing is just so dang interesting. They sell a product that enables the home user to cast an AR-15 receiver out of high performance resin. In the process they made a really informative three part video on the casting process.

A lot of people are interested in the product, and having fun with it. In this two part video series, [Liberty Marksman] cast their receivers and test them to destruction. In one video they see how many rounds they can fire out of the gun before it breaks. When it breaks, they excitedly tear down the gun to see where it failed.

It’s quite a bit of fun to watch. Videos after the break.

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“That’s Not A Knife…”

April 21, 2016 by 38 Comments

[Robin Baumgarten] likes to play dangerously. His latest creation, Knife To Meet You cuts to the quick of cooperative gaming. 3 humans play together against the machine. The object of the game is to hold your button down as long as possible. The game makes this difficult by sweeping a knife across the play field, right at finger level. (Video below.)

Knife to meet you is controlled by a flesh eating Arduino. In addition to reading the controls and driving a servo to move the knife, the Arduino also displays encouraging messages on a 2×20 character LCD.

The idea is to scare people, not to actually slice them up. To this end, the knife is actually a capacitive sensor. When the game detects the knife has contacted soft human flesh, it stops the knife before blood starts flowing. The game indicates a player has been defeated by making several chopping motions toward the loser. If the losing player still has all their digits, a new round begins.

The project was created as part of a 24 hour game jam. The final product is quite nice, built into a wood case that closes up for travel. It even has a carrying handle, so you can bring it to parties and find fresh victims players.

We’re not sure what it is about knives and Arduinos. It was only a few months ago that we saw an Arduino driving a knife wielding tentacle. Could the world’s friendliest microcontroller board be turning on us?
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Snowball Machine Gun

March 9, 2016 by 24 Comments

[Mark Rober] is an uncle to three nieces and nephews, and when there is snow on the ground he faces the relentless onslaught of three elite juvenile snowball aces. Lesser men would face the fact that they are over the hill when it comes to snow-based combat, but not [Mark]. He has brought technology to his aid, and with the help of his brother created a snowball machine gun capable of firing 13 snowballs at the unruly youths in half a second.

Power for his creation comes from a leaf blower, and the gun itself is made from ABS pipe fixed onto the blower outlet. Magazines made from pipe with its top section cut away are loaded via a 45 degree junction fitting, and the rate of fire is set by how fast the operator pushes the line of snowballs with a wooden block. He has made full build instructions available as a PDF, so assuming you are reading this in a part of the world where it snows, what are you waiting for! Those of us who live in paces where it rarely snows and what snow we get is wet and slushy can only look on with envy.

The video below has the full story, complete with gratuitous destruction of fruit, youngsters cowering in their snow forts, and finally [Mark] receiving his snowy comeuppance.

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Building A Sheet Metal Pistol

February 17, 2016 by 119 Comments

Floating around the Internet are plans for a semi-automatic pistol constructed out of sheet metal. Like so many plans for 3D printed guns, it appears no one has actually built one of these pistols. It exists only as a technological construct, with diagrams you can photocopy, trace onto a few bits of metal, and presumably assemble into a gun. The only proof these parts can be turned into a gun-shaped object are a few random blog posts from two years ago showing a very ugly pistol spray painted matte black.

[Clinton Westwood] decided to take up the challenge of turning these plans into a real, working gun. He’s documented his efforts on YouTube and put a bunch of pictures up of the entire build process. The gun doesn’t work quite yet, but it almost does, and he’s doing this entirely in a garage shop, with tools anyone can pick up from Home Depot.

Most of the construction of this gun is simple enough – it’s just sheet metal, after all. The magazine was constructed by tracing the pattern onto a piece of metal, wrapping it around a mandrel, and welding it together. The side plates of the gun, again, were created with a jigsaw. Rifling the barrel – the thing that makes this gun both accurate and legal – required the construction of a few interesting tools. The rifling tool is just a piece of round bar that fits through the barrel. A small piece of a hacksaw blade was cut to fit inside this round bar, and the barrel was cut very slowly with a shop-built tool.

The finished result is something that looks like it came from the finest post-apocalyptic craftsman. A gun that looks cool is useless if it doesn’t work, and here the DIY pistol falls short. The spent casings don’t eject. It’s still a step up from the first build of this gun that was only rumored to fire blanks.

Recently, the world of gunsmithing has been inundated with 3D printed pistols that don’t work, and 3D printed guns that do work, but are somehow 200 years behind the state of the art. We’re happy to see some people are still building things with their hands, and hope [Clinton] can eventually get this gun to work.

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