Adding a longer barrel or a springier spring to your Nerf gun is cool, but I think inventor Rob Flickenger’s Nerf-inspired, 200,000-volt Tesla coil gun takes the cake.
Read all about it at Pop Sci.
The current flows into what Flickenger calls the “hockey puck of doom”—an end cap of PVC pipe filled with silicone. Inside the gun, a transformer from an old television and additional circuitry repeatedly doubles the current and then pumps it to a capacitor bank. When the six capacitors hold 20,000 volts, the gun starts firing. All that electricity still blew a few pucks, so Flickenger recently tested a mixture of silicone and hexagonal boron nitride that draws away the heat, preserving electrical components.
ADVERTISEMENT
