Engineering Projects/Rubberband gun/Howard Community College/fall2012/p2-503-n

Problem Statement

Create an automated rubber band gun that loads multiple rubber bands and shoots continuously using a motor attached to a trigger.

Team Members

Naik

Shin

Summary

The fist step of the gun is to recreate the machine gun of the last group and find the problems with there design. Then design a new version of the gun with solutions to the problems of the last gun.

Poster

Put a graphic in wikimedia, include the graphic here or link to it here. The graphic should be suitable for creating a traditional project poster.

Story

The group is recreating a machine gun rubberband gun that is tested for problems. The solutions are then used to create a new rubberband gun. Naik's task with the new design is add an ergonomic grip, fore grip, and find standardized rubber bands. Shin's job is to improve the smoothness of the firing mechanism and find a way to increase rubber band capacity. A "push" for the project was suggested. The goal was to take a gutted out motor, wiring, and trigger and incorporate that into a neat firing/trigger mechanism.

The rubber band gun was constructed, loosely following the design of the rubber band gun called "machine gun." The only difference in the design was more wood in some places, less in other areas, and the addition of a "trigger" shaped piece of wood. All this resulted in a slightly lighter gun as a whole.

We attempted to used a small motor from a remote controlled car to turn the spool that holds the firing string. The motor did not have enough torque and could not turn the bit (attached to the spool). The idea of using a small motor with a low amperage was abandoned. The new idea was to use a small cordless hand-held drill. The drill was powerful enough.

We had problems with the rubber band getting stuck on the dowel and either breaking or not releasing. To address this, we sanded the dowels down and raised the spool height, in relation to the main barrel.

Material List

- wood

- wood glue

- screws

- drill bit

- rope

- string

- duck tape

-electric drill http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiversity/en/thumb/e/e4/2012-11-06_10.16.02.jpg/800px-2012-11-06_10.16.02.jpg

Software List

The software

Time

20 hours

Tutorials

All projects create new tutorials of technical details future participants are going to want to know. They are going to be separate pages that are linked to here.

Next Steps

The next steps for the project would be to create a rubber band gun with:

- a motor built in.

- rubber bands with least friction, and most stretch.

- a more eye appealing design and colors.

- duck tape an electric hand screw driver to the gun.