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A Firecracker-Launching Slingshot: Start the New Year With a Bang
An anonymous reader writes "Joerg Sprave is at it again. This time, in order to bring in the New Year, he's got something with a bit more bang to it: a firecracker-launching slingshot. Being German, Joerg has built a slingshot that will accommodate the largest legal firecracker in that country. '2 grams of black powder in a tight cardboard "cigar" make a pretty loud bang! In order to make these bangs more spectacular, it is desirable to shoot them as high into the air as possible. A special slingshot crossbow has been designed, chambered for the strongest legal firecrackers. The weapon is a breech loader, and an integrated storm lighter allows the shooter to light the fuse when the weapon is all ready for the shot. The weapon launches the firecracker with tremendous force. The blunt object easily crashes through a moving card board box, and — equipped with a wooden tip — even goes in all the way into a block of ballistic gelatin.' His two videos are available on YouTube: part 1, part 2."
This is the same gentleman who made a slingshot that launches machetes.
It was designed for killing Solid Snake?
...because this is NEWS.
Looks more crossbow with alternative non-bolt ammo. Slingshot makes me think of the classic wristrocket. Those and fireworks have gone together like peanut butter and jelly for at least a century or so. The only better use for a slingshot is probably water balloons although you've got to be careful not to rip them apart at launch. As kids we also used balls of crumpled paper both in wrist rockets and potato guns for indoor entertainment. Only occasionally broke a window with that ammo. Sometimes the potato gun would set the paper ball on fire if you used liquid propellant which is either a bonus or a problem depending on situation. So this patentable tech has at least 30 years of prior art, at least that I'm willing to admit to.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Has France surrendered yet?
I think between movies and Mythbusters my expectations for explosions are entirely out of whack with "common" explosions in reality, or at least what i expect to be shown off in internet videos. Those firecracker explosions were a lot quieter than i was expecting (at least as recorded in the video) and i was hoping to see either the cardboard box or the ballistic gel actually be broken apart by the explosion, but no such luck.
They seemed like the kind of thing that the Mythbusters would get when trying to reproduce the myth. The kind where they'd decide the myth was a failure and then go on and try to replicate the results with progressively larger amounts of explosive. Although given that they almost always end up having to scale things up i guess it makes sense that a "normal" firecracker just isn't that impressive.
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Those type of devices have been illegal in this area since the '70's at
that time they were a "problem".
Minus the rubber band, add a cover to the breach and you have a "Zip gun"
and a very efficient survival weapon.
shooting a nail with just a black cat fire cracker and a rubber band holding down the breach cover
and "it will pin a person to the wall"* a quote from the local newspaper.
After reading that quote my grandmother says "that must be a very large nail".
Even firecrackers are illegal here! How I envied this hint hint nudge nugde dude when
he mentioned them being legal for a day or two.
Here in the Netherlands a 12 year old boy was badly burnt by fireworks last night. He was helped by the police, who asked the onlookers to fetch a bucket of cold water for him. No one reacted; the sheep were too busy watching. As a thank you for the performance some lunatics found it necessary to ignite some heavy firecrackers very close to where the police were busy with the boy. Imagine what would have happened if one of those drunken morons would have had one of those firecracker shooters! Many more badly injured people, because those things will be used to see how far you can shoot a 'live' firecracker; not how high. And this time it will be innocent people on the streets who will get injured instead of the morons themselves.
-- Cheers!
Unless he's putting these things down his pants, I don't see the Darwin connection.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
This happened to me. At a concert a few years back, some fucking idiot behind me decided to light off bottle rockets. One landed on my shoulder, went off, blew a chunk of my chin off, and blew out my right ear. I can live with the deafness, but the constant day-in day-out ringing is most irritating.
By the time the cops got to me, the fuckers had absconded. BTW, the local Free Clinic, with the help of some volunteer doctors from the local Veterans Hospital, provided first rate care until the ambulance arrived.
Due to funding issues, that Veterans Hospital has been closed, as has the Free Clinic.