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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..."

4 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Clay Pigeon Chucker by jtev · · Score: 5, Insightful

    CDs fit perfectly into a clay pigeon thrower, not the mechanical type, but the spring loaded type you use to throw them by hand realy far. I don't know how much this helps though. Clay pigeons are cheap, but I guess if you realy want to take out frustration on AOL this works.

    --
    That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
  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. 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.

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    -Billco, Fnarg.com