This week’s selection is the awesome Rubber Band Gatling Gun by Kirby James Downey.
This design is, of course, purely for fun. As you might guess, after assembly you’ll have a powerful weapon capable of rapidly firing a number of dangerous rubber bands in an occasionally accurate track towards your target. Like a real gatling gun, this one also requires you to operate a crank to power the firing. It’s a great design.
This is definitely not something you can print in final form; there are sixteen separate parts to print, some of which are reasonably large. You’ll likely require 7-10 print jobs with plates full of parts, as you can see in this view generated by Simplify3D using a standard MakerBot Replicator build plate. If your build volume is less than 275mm long, than you may have trouble printing some of the longer parts.
It does require some work to assemble, but not too much. There’s also some hardware shopping you’ll have to do to obtain the required three M5 threaded rods and two M5 nuts.
Note that the design appears to be for right-handed people only, but it may be possible to mirror a couple of parts to generate a left-handed version.
Finally, once assembled, you can load it up with rubber bands and seek a target. Here’s a video to show how it works:
Downey produced the design and initially shared it on MyMiniFactory, where it proved quite popular. Now he’s attempting to build a business from the design by launching a Kickstarter campaign to sell customized 3D model files or printing completely assembled versions. However, at this time the campaign doesn’t seem to be taking off, perhaps because the files are still available for free download at MyMiniFactory.
Yes, this could indeed be the most annoying thing you’ve ever taken to work.
Via MyMiniFactory and Kickstarter
