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Homemade CD Shooter?

Posted by Cliff on from the careful-you-don't-take-someone's-head-off dept.

Rinisari asks: "I've recently come into a very large amount of defunct, yet still structurally intact, CDs. I did some searching about on Google, but turned up nothing on my goal: A Compact Disc Cannon. Has anyone ever built a device for shooting CDs in a horizontal or vertical fashion? I'm thinking almost something like one of those foam disc shooters..."

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Uses for CDs by mbstone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The World Series of Poker on ESPN features a poker player who can slice a banana with a thrown playing card. Maybe you could try slicing a raw potato or other object in this manner with a CD. Then you could organize a contest and sell the TV rights.

  2. Shazbot! by Dfiant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was going to make a disc launcher a la Starsiege Tribes, but never took the time to find/make the proper gun structure. My idea was to cut the top off a CD-R spindle full of AOL CD's and mount it upside down on the gun so gravity would feed ammo into it.

    What I'd have is a typical gun structure, but with a loading mechanism made to support stock spindles (of 25, 50, or perhaps even 100 CD's). When recoiled, the CD should fall into place onto a small bolt or something. The trigger would drive this bolt forward sharply along a rail by a spring or rubber band. At the end of the rail, the bolt would have to drop down so the CD can fly free of the mechanism. I hadn't put much thought into a semi-auto system, though.

  3. Combo Railgun and Dremel by R2.0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm thinking the following:

    1) Magazine feeds a CD to a dremel motor which spins the CD in place to about 5000 rpm. As it is spinning up, the...

    2) capacitors in the railgun are charging. Since the disk has an aluminum layer, it should be able to be ejected from a railgun. So when the capacitors are charged...

    3) a switch kills the dremel motor, which drops the disk into the railgun receiver. CD shoots off, rack another one into the spinner-upper.

    4) Repeat.

    Alternately, hack an old CD drive to spin and release the cd.

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  4. Think spinning tops, not frisbees. by sakusha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can easily think of a mechanism to make this gadget work. Let me give you a few hints and you can work out the rest.

    Think about tops, not disks. You guys are all thinking about spinning a CD down a slot. Instead, think of it as a spinning top revolving on its axis, like a CD is designed to do. Nothing says you can't modify the CD slightly. You could glue a small spindle into the center of the CD, or just cut a small slot in the edge of the center hole, so you can make a removable spindle with a keyed rod that goes in the slot to keep the CD from slipping.

    So if you've understood what I'm getting at, you now have a CD with a little wooden spindle sticking up from the top and bottom. Essentially you now have a very thin, wide top. It used to be fairly common to have wooden top "launchers" or "brackets" with notches that held the top and bottom spindle on a top. In this case, you'd need a piece of wood about an inch thick and about 1 foot long. Cut a slot down the center of the wood to allow the CD to pass through. Cut a V shaped notch across the end of the stick, perpendicular to the slot.

    Now you can set the spindle of the "CD top" in the notch. Wrap some string around the spindle, pull, and you've got the CD spinning at high RPM. flick the rod and your CD is flying.

    I looked around the web and this page is about as close as I came to finding a top bracket.

    http://www.turnertoys.com/tops4_toddlers.htm

    You can kind of see what I'm getting at, but this version just drops the top down, it's not intended for tossing, and the plane of the top isn't centered in the bracket, it's below. But I think you'll get the idea. Now go build it..

  5. Old skewl by billcopc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Call me hardcore, I remember a little Ninja Turtles toy that did just this, but with smaller, pizza-colored hard plastic discs that hurt like @*#^$. I think it used small motors to spin and launch the discs because the pizza thingies would fly everywhere, bouncing off walls/expensive vases/my forehead. Now those things were about 2" wide, and 1/8" thick, so they were relatively "dull". If you did this with CDs, I think it would be a safety risk because CDs are thinner, thus "sharper" and lighter so they fly faster and farther and dig deeper into your victim's skin if properly aimed.

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com