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.
10 thoughts on “The Ultimate Nerf Gun Mod: a Tesla Coil”
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http://blog.makezine.com/2012/05/11/tesla-gun/
If it isn’t too much trouble, could you please link to a page that is viewable by people outside the USA as well?
PopSci forces readers to a “localised” version which most probably does not have this story, as I can’t read it on popsci.com.au (it just puts up a 404 error).
that stinks
will you speak human
The point of modding isn’t to make something deadly.
This is EXACTLY why we can’t have nice things.
If I wanted to make a tesla coilgun, I wouldn’t attach “Nerf” to it at all. Nerf is slang for foam. This is not a foam launcher.