I was looking to make something mechanical and fun. I’d seen some cool rubber band guns recently and wanted to see if I could work out the basics of making one with the Glowforge. I grabbed a picture off the web to use for tracing an outline and then added some ridges on the front and back to hold the rubber bands. I figured I could make a 3 layer sandwich of 1/8" plywood and 1/4" plywood with a sliding piece for the trigger mechanism. I cut out the design and an extra piece of chipboard to give the sliding component more space to move in the body.
I didn’t want to use any springs so I designed it to use a rubber band to pull the trigger back forward. It holds 4 rubber bands to shoot one at a time each time you pull the trigger.
the trigger sliding part was a bit unstable so I put another piece in to help keep the back end down. It helps, but still working out some of the tolerances. I think I may move that part further back in the gun to track better. It does seem to mostly work how I was hoping though so I’ll call it a successful experiment
Don’t forget to paint the barrel end orange if you plan to give it away. Someone will probably complain that it too much like a real wooden gun shooting real wooden bullets.
It’s a game-changer, but not due to multiple bands at once. The neat thing about this design is that its ‘semi-automatic’, each trigger pull ratchets the rubber band array up one notch, and the top-most band is released.
That is a cool design - I like the mechanics of it. Making simple (non-electrical or electronic) toys is something I’m going to do more of with my kids when the GF arrives. We made some quick slingshots the other day on the K40.
- Rich
