3D Printed Blaster Does It With Compliant Components

December 17, 2024 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The ease of integrating bendy parts into designs is one of 3D printing’s strengths. A great example of this is [uhltimate]’s six-shot blaster which integrates several compliant mechanisms. The main blaster even prints in one piece, so there’s not even any assembly required.

The ergonomics are unconventional, but the design is pretty clever.

The blaster itself has three main parts: the trigger, the sear, and the striker. Each of them rely on compliant mechanisms in order to function. The user pulls back the trigger, which hooks into and pulls back the striker. When the trigger is pulled back far enough, the sear releases the striker. This zips forward and slams into a waiting projectile, sending it flying.

The other interesting part is the projectiles and magazine in which they sit. The magazine fits onto the front of the blaster and pulling the trigger allows the magazine to drop down, putting the next projectile into firing position. After the final round is fired, the empty magazine falls away. It’s a pretty clever design, even if the ergonomics are a little unusual and it relies on gravity in order to feed. Tilt it too far sideways or upside down, and it won’t load properly.

We’ve seen compliant mechanisms used for projectile firing before, but this design really raises the bar in the way it does more than just firing the striker.

3D printing allows rapid iteration of designs, which makes devices that rely on compliant mechanisms much easier to develop and fine-tune.

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Cardboard And Paper Gun Shows Off Clever Construction

June 14, 2017 by Donald Papp 22 Comments

This project by [blackfish] shows off a cardboard lookalike of an MP5 that loads from a working magazine, has a functional charging handle, and flings paper projectiles with at least enough accuracy to plink some red party cups. It was made entirely from corrugated cardboard, paper, rubber bands, and toothpicks.

In the video (embedded below) you can see some clever construction techniques. For example, using a cyanoacrylate adhesive to saturate areas of wood, cardboard, or paper to give them added strength and rigidity. The video is well-edited and worth a watch to see the whole process; [blackfish] even uses a peeled piece of cardboard — exposing the corrugated part — as a set of detents (6:56) to retain the magazine.

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Supersonic Speed Measurement With A Sound Card

March 10, 2017 by Jenny List 17 Comments

You might think that if you have a need to measure the speed of a projectile that is too fast for your high-speed camera, you would have to invest in some significantly expensive equipment.

That was the problem facing [Nick Moore], and the solution he arrived at is extremely elegant in its simplicity. He’s arranged a pair of foil tapes in the path of the projectile, as it passes through them they break, and he measures the time between those breaks. The clever bit though lies not in the tapes, but in how he measures the timing. Instead of relying on a lab stuffed with equipment, he’s using his computer sound card. The outputs send a tone through each tape to the inputs, and using Audacity he can capture both tones and measure the time between the end of each one on left and right channels.

In the video below the break he demonstrates measuring the speed of a supersonic particle at 496.5 metres per second, which for such relatively simple equipment is rather an achievement. He could certainly improve his resolution by increasing the sampling frequency, but we are guessing that the choice of 48 kHz owes much to the quality of his sound card. Still, to achieve this with such a relatively basic piece of equipment is a neat achievement.

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Projectile Speed Sensor

September 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Mike] built a sensor rig to measure projectile speed. The setup uses a tunnel with two sensors in it. Each consists of a laser diode on one side focused on a photodiode in the other. The two are monitored by an op amp and measured by an ATmega128 microcontroller. When the beams are broken the elapsed time between the two events is measured in order to calculate speed. There is a setting to adjust the calibration for a range of speeds, which came in quite handy as [Mike] initially tested the device with rubber bands before moving on to a pellet gun and then a rifle.

It seems like he’s tempting fate by shooting a target just a few inches below his exposed circuitry but his marksmanship prevailed. We’ve seen bullet speed detectors in the past, used just for the delight of seeing how fast the projectile is moving, and also to capture an impact at just the right instant.

Beauty In Destruction

October 9, 2009 by Phil Burgess 49 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDoQwIAaXg]

This is not a hack. In fact it’s a promotional montage for a collection of scientific equipment that few of us could likely afford. But like yesterday’s giant marionettes over Berlin, sometimes even a costly and delicately-orchestrated achievement transcends its own not-a-hack-ness, fulfilling our brains’ lust for wonderment all the same.

Kurzzeit of Germany produces ballistics measurement equipment. The video depicts various combinations of projectiles and targets at up to one million frames per second, revealing unexpected beauty in hitherto unseen phenomena, and is the best damn ten minutes you will waste on the internet all day!