physicist call

Timstone · #1 January 12th, 2003, 09:16 PM

Ever tried building your own railgun? Now that's cool!
Me and some friends did it. It took almost three months to build the monster, but when it was finished we could fire 9 inch nails (no, not the group, heh) completely through 18 mm. plywood. This was with the help of a 24V battery. When we plugged it into the electric mains, we could fire the nail completely through three seperate pieces of 18 mm. plywood. The pieces were seperated from eachother by aproximately 5 cm..
We didn't make any photo's because we made the monster on school. When the teachers found out what we had constructed from schoolmaterial, we had to dismantle it immediately.

There are masses of sites on the on the net with good guides how to build such a device.

rdouglass · #2 January 12th, 2003, 10:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
rdouglass, how do you have a 23 minute separation between double Posts, with a post by SJ in-between? That is amazing!

Dunno' 'bout amazing but it sure is weird...

Kamog · #3 January 13th, 2003, 10:07 AM

I would like to build a railgun, that would be fun! At one point I almost built one. When I was a student, I got together with three other guys to do a project. Our initial idea was to build a railgun, and I started doing some research on how to build one. Then the "politically correct" guy in the group had second thoughts and started to say that we shouldn't build a weapon because that's violent. He convinced the other two guys to abandon the idea and I was overruled. We ended up building a musical instrument instead.

Timstone · #4 January 15th, 2003, 02:54 AM

Kamog: Damn, political correctness is such a party crasher. Damn pascifism!

dogscoff · #5 January 14th, 2003, 05:44 PM

That spudgun link brought tears to my eyes. Thing is I'm at work so I have been painfully trying to surpress laughterfor the Last 20 minutes.

Would it be possible to build one of those using scaffolding pipe as the barrel? I guess it would be heavy, but you wouldn't have to worry about muzzle explosions.

DirectorTsaarx · #6 January 14th, 2003, 09:43 PM

Another link for spudguns...

Air Spud potato cannon

Dralasite · #7 January 14th, 2003, 10:16 PM

Just a thought relating this to the orignal post. You could build a gravity railgun. Have a point of extreme gravity attraction at the tip of the barrel, the potato/nail/object will accelerate towards the point, then right as it gets to it, you turn the gravity point off and let inertia do its trick.

Of course, having the same weapons as everyone else but "gravity powered" might be boring