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Rubber Band Machine Gun

stdenisg writes: "From the website: '...a fully functional machine gun with TWELVE rotating barrels and a live action trigger. Loads 12 bands per barrel for a whopping 144 rubber bands that shoot off as fast as you can turn the handle!' This article gives some background info. Impressive..."

7 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Very Hoaxy feeling by k2enemy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    not a hoax. my friend built one of these in elementary school for a 4h project. it was pretty impressive, but not too effective. the rubber bands that you have to use are so big they don't hurt much when they hit you.

  2. Variation: Lego machine gun by kbonin · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I built something similar to this Lego Machine Gun once, though his is far prettier than mine was! Self-loading from a gravity-fed magazine of bricks, crank power, internal rubber band.

    Quote from page: "I can empty the 17-round magazine in about 1.9 seconds, which translates to a rate of fire of over 500 rounds per minute."

  3. Subscription?? by JWSmythe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I paid my subscription, I wanna see porn!
    Oh wait, that's our customers...
    (Psst, /. is free..)

    This is actually the perfect technology toy for my office. Our tension breakers are rubber-band wars.. We've been using a yard stick to stretch out large strong rubber bands.. We get some good distance with those, but with 144 shots, I'd definately dominate.. I need to be able to carry it though, these are moving battles! I wonder how long til ThinkGeek start carrying 'em. :)

    (BTW, anyone wondering what to buy me for xmas, this is it!)

    --
    Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  4. Not the only legal machine gun... by Abraxis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For that price, I'd buy myself another airsoft gun...
    For those who don't know what airsoft guns are: think highly detailed replica guns that shoot 6mm plastic BBs at 200-300fps. Mine looks something like this.
    Full auto capability (600+ shots per minute) powered by a rechargable battery similar to those used for radio controlled cars.
    I play with a group called PSAC. Beats the snot out of paintball on the fun scale... and much more affordable (once you make the initial investment). Anybody who might want one: please, please, please don't do something stupid with one and get them banned. You'd be ruining a great hobby for a lot of people.

  5. Re:Right. Animal Cruelty is a Laugh a Minute. by motherhead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hey I love your reactionary, knee-jerk observation! Allow me to make one of my own: Any poster that quotes Nietzsche in his sig and whines about harassing a cat did not get the Nietzsche he read.

    The Uberman has no need for "Animal Rights", as Human rights are what the weak hide behind from Darwin.

    Personally I don't harass my cat, as he would claw my face off gleefully. But that's just me.
  6. Re:Oh My! by Mars+Saxman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I built myself a rubberband machine gun when I was in my early teens. It started when we found a bag of rubber bands at the local park, probably dumped by some newspaper delivery person. We couldn't just leave hundreds of thick rubber bands sitting there, so we hauled them all home and began shooting each other with them. I got tired of snapping them against my thumb and decided to build a gun. My dad had a decent wood shop in the garage, so I got some wood together and built myself a single-shot rifle.

    This of course gave me a competitive advantage, and pretty soon everyone wanted guns. I built up a pretty little arsenal, and things were good. But I was ambitious and wanted to see just how cool a gun I could make. So I designed and eventually built a machine gun.

    It was a crude weapon compared to my original gracefully sanded and curved rifle, but the results were dramatic. It was a length of two-by-four with a firing mechanism in back and a row of pegs at the business end. The mechanism was a thick dowel studded with a spiral of half-inserted wood screws, mounted on an axle perpendicular to the gun's line of fire. A small crank and ratchet controlled the dowel's spin. You loaded it by hooking rubber bands, one at a time, from the pegs at the end to the screws on the dowel, then advancing the ratchet one click. It took more work to load the more rubber bands you put on, so I was never able to load more than a couple dozen onto it.

    To fire it you simply released the ratchet, and WHAM! The dowel turned in a blur, the rubber bands went everywhere, and it made this cool thrumming and clacking noise. Accuracy sucked, but that was fine; in fact once I loaded the rubber bands crossways, so that instead of being parallel to the gun's "bore" they angled back and forth across it. No need to wave the gun around that way - it would "spray" its shots automatically, a nice feature considering the gun would dump its entire ammunition load in a couple of seconds.

    The gun was very impressive and frightened the other kids but I abandoned it shortly because it took too long to load. It's not much good blowing off all your ammunition in the first few seconds of a firefight when the other kids can pick up the rubberbands you've just plastered all over their clothing and fire them right back at you while you stand there for ten minutes getting ready for your next shot.

    Anyway, I remember seeing this guy's Gatling at the California State Fair a few years back. I could have sworn it was the 144-shot model even then, so either I'm remembering wrong and it was actually the 72-shot model, or there's some other nutcase out there building 144-shot rubber band machine guns with a similar design.

    -Mars

  7. Re:First Amendment. by susano_otter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's funny, but everybody seems to forget the "well regulated militia" part of this article.

    See if you can follow the steps:

    1. We want a free state.
    2. A free state needs to be secure.
    3. A well-regulated militia guarantees that security.
    4. A well-regulated militia needs to be armed.
    5. Therefore, the right of citizens to bear arms is guaranteed, so that they may form a well-regulated militia for the purpose of guaranteeing the security of a free state.

    Then, whenever the government cracks down on unregulated militias, these groups complain that their right to bear arms has been abridged.

    And what about the National Guard? Guard units fall under the jurisdiction of the states, and certainly fill the role of a well-regulated militia.

    --

    Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.