56 replies to this topic

[taita cakes]

well i finally have time to do some of my projects over the coming weeks and holidays... they include re-spraying a retro phone... reconstructing my website.... and most importantly making a cost effective, ACTUALLY WORKING model of grenade...

researching past posts and the like i found that no-one actually agreed on a design and if i can proove one to be cheap and operational i guarantee i will pimp it around until it is commonly accepted...

i originally set out to use wind up toys... [yeah i no it sounds stupid but you use them in bottle rockets] but i realised that all these impact designs aren't half bad...

im sick of this topic being brought up every 6months and yes i no i will probably another attemptee but i feel im sick of this shit and we have to stop it.....

umm well yeah im going to post pics and most importantly video [small] so thats wat will make this one different... i promise i will explain it in pure english and it will be simple to build... [im sick of zero's cool, but fiddly designs].... if anyone can recommend a media host please do because my current host wont allow anything over 1MB per file and no mp3, avi, mpg, wmv etc. etc.

if you have any other proven techniques please post them and suggest them...
my dad is an artist who paints from photos so i have tons of film canisters....


this one is gonna work i can feeel it....
im excited.....
im shitting on...

[six-hungry-ducks]

Well, the only suggestion I have for you is that you should use Yo Crunch yogurt containers, because the lid is easy to put on, the lid pops off pretty easily with force (but not too easy),. and doesn't pop of without force, like when you are running. I have actually built a grenade from a Yo Crunch yogurt container that worked pretty well, but the problem was that it didn't have as much spread as I wanted, and it didn't shoot the flak (is that what they are called?) pieces out very high, but it might have been because the pieces didn't have enough weight. Also I was lazy and didn't post anything about it, then I forgot about.

Good luck.

[Jangadance]

the problem was that it didn't have as much spread as I wanted, and it didn't shoot the flak (is that what they are called?) pieces out very high...

I think you mean shrapnel. The problem with shrapnel is that it's a pain to clean up. That's why I'm not sure how effectively a grenade could be used in a Nerf war.

[taita cakes]

well the stupid thing deleted my post again... because the subscription opens in a hotmail window... you reply and then it asks for username and password and your message doesnt get posted....

any way, back to the matter at hand.. i had originally planned to use foam as shrapnel about --- yay thick and the same width as the film canister but as soon as you mentioned weight it snapped in my mind...

the main point with all this is that i refer to film canisters as the main product because they are readily available to everyone and are either cheap or can be picked up from a photolab person for free, as oposed to using yoghurt containers only available from certain stores and that would cost the yoghurt as well...

for shrapnell i just plan to head down to the local "Clark Rubber" [which is foam and rubber retailer] and get offcuts which they practically give away... considering most things in Aus here are just rip offs of Yank stuff i spose you guys have some sort of equivilant...

will start on project in coming weeks and post pics and vids but not too soon as i have surf camp and this challenge program shit with school....

[sporkboyofjustice]

OK how about vending machine capsules. These are cheap and you can usually find them littering the area around those stupid machines. As for cleaning up shrapnel you could hot glue several pieces of string (dental floss would work well) to one piece of foam and additional foam on the end of each string. This would effectively be a foam bolo weapon but easier to clean up.

[taita cakes]

i like the way that man thinks...
somebody get him a peanutbutter sandwich... **about the schrapnel**

otherwise i have no idea about what your talkimn about with the vending machine capsules... are you talking about soft drink or food vendors ... pics would help... other wise i think ill go with film 'nades... but this is good all the same.... people are inputting.... thats what i want...

[sporkboyofjustice]

Usually at grocery stores and in the mall there are coin opperated vending machines that dispense toys to little kids. They'll have some cheap thing in there, usually you can find them for a US quarter but more often they are 50 cents and a dollar for the toy. Usually kids take the toy and leave the capsule on the ground. The capsules range in size from the size of a thumb to the size of a raquet ball (sp?). I know they have them in Japan and I saw them in Canada last week but I don't know about the rest of the world. Most sizes would allow a larger foam capacity than film canisters and they are hard plastic and will shatter against a hard surface which would aid in exploding. The seal is pretty tight on them though.

On the film canisters are you going to use 35mm or the new advantix ones?

[Zero Talent]

Ah, yeah, the little clear plastic bubbles that contain cheap little children's toys, like those at Walmarts and such. Definitely a good idea, provided you could get two of them, one slightly smaller than the other, with the inner one able to hold around 60psi without damage...

Or, just the conventional grenade designs you guys seem to be thinking. Whatever works in the end, right?

Yeah, statocyst-style shrapnel is definitely a good idea. May look like a hairy mess after detonation, but that's better than killing 10 minutes looking for little bits of foam. I'd also suggest fishing wire, but dental floss seems to be the light cord of choice in this particular case.

If you do happen to use air pressure to fire small bits of shrapnel from multiple barrels, I suggest a system similar to this to ensure everything gets an equal share of the pressure [Nevermind the misspelling of "cord" ].

[taita cakes]

well, i know roughly what you mean, in australia they appeared in "yowies" and would hold a please assemble toy... if i remember rightly there a bitch to open but easy to close, with the rounded ends they would be hard to put a spring in... but i might investigate...pretty lame and would be hard to find in aus... adn thats the point, i want something that everyone around the world can access for free or really cheap...


i wil be using the old 35mm as they are the easist to find...

[sporkboyofjustice]

Sounds good, it's hard to know what is available worldwide when you only live in one place. Putting air pressure in one of those containers is an option isn't it. I think we have been going about this in the wrong way. Instead of starting with a container we should start with what is going to be doing the 'sploding.

From what I've gathered you can use a spring (I don't like the idea of bits of metal flying around), foam tension (pack it with lots of foam), and now there is this air pressure idea (please explain). Any other ideas would be great.

I'd use dental floss as it's cheap, soft and available where people have teeth. Fishing line is pointy and can poke an eye, though that kid should be wearing glasses anyway so it serves him right.

[taita cakes]

Fishing line is pointy and can poke an eye, though that kid should be wearing glasses anyway so it serves him right.

he he he... true enough... i will probably use dental floss, its just the breakages will be annoying. The spring itself will be stationary, but to explain better im going to have a flash animation describing all this, but im finally busy for once so i cant do it, [soon that is]....

[sporkboyofjustice]

Dental floss is plenty strong so you should have minimal breakage. I use it to sew on buttons on my heavy jackets and have never had one of those pop. It's also easier to tie than fishing line and comes in an easy to cary dispenser in case you need to carry it with you in a war.

[taita cakes]

lol, no shit, they've never broken???
i actually thought about tennis ball designs as well because of this whole davis cup thing they've been handing out free tennis balls in australia, and of course i;ve got about 5 free ones, any plans with these??? because of course there easy to throw and not too bulky to carry...

but im still drawn towards the film canisteers because i can launch them from a rifle like a pc as a secondary fire...

[Mantis]

Ok guys, I got an idea.

Imagine this (since I cant draw):
you take a small ball and glue springs onto it, such that there is no spot without a spring covering it. Next you glue a plate of some kid, cardboard or whatever floats your boat, as the base, onto the springs. Then you load the ammo on the base, which is glued to the springs, which are glued to the ball. All you need after that is a cap to go around the whole thing. Maybe if you used a small bouncy ball as the spring supporter, you could use a hollow plastic wiffle ball as the cover. Of course, the cover would need to be cut in half at the equator, and have a latch of some type to hold it on.

The materials will come to me in the middle of the night, so expect an update on this design before sundown on Sunday.

[Zero Talent]

Isn't the latch (the trigger mechanism) the hardest part of making a reliable grenade? I've heard kids successfully use scotch tape to temporarily latch the fuzzy sides of a halved tennis ball until a sharp impact, but I'm sure it's a bit more of an art form than just that.

[RAMBLE]

As soon as Cads' Brass gets to my post office, and I get a weekend, I'm going to make an air actuated breech that depends on friction force between brass and compressed O-rings, and possibly some external springs (if the o-rings are not enough) to time the air release. Handily, I can also mathematically describe it's triggering (except for Friction force... We'll have to empirically determine that one):

(2*m*d / (p * A - F))^(1/2) = t

Where m is the mass of the trigger rod, d is the distance it must travel to detonate, p is the pressure of the tank, A is the diameter of the trigger rod, and F is the rather mysterious friction force, which *should* be described by:

[mu] * F[n] = F

Where [mu] (my lack of cool Greek symbols is annoying) is the friction coefficient between brass and rubber, and F[n] is the constricting force exerted by the O-ring on the brass trigger rod. That implies the friction force is constant, so we can treat "F" like a constant, and only empirically determine it from multiple trials.

Point is, despite the fact that we left out the fact that expanding volume will decrease pressure, and therefore time will decrease exponentially, we can approximately tailor the length of trigger rod and pressure we need, so we can design something that might actually work properly, or compensate with external springs.

...And yes, the design itself is actually simpler than the math implies . I'll post a 3D model, 'soon as I finish it. Really simple. Like, 8 pieces. Might as well be a Duplo tower.

...For your convenience, I'm adding [ramble] tags.

[/RAMBLE]

[taita cakes]

Mantis: A ebaumsworld pic would fit in very nicely right now, but i wont be flamed for it, so in other words, wat did you just say, are you takling about like a party plate...???... so you have say a tennis ball with shitloads of springs on it and a cardboard plate taped to one side, and how exactly is this meant to fire projectiles...???

Zero: -Ummm exactly how old are you???
-Trigger system, actually wont bother explaining, i will start making the flash animations today i guess, **warning** they will be extra lame....

[Zero Talent]

Zero: -Ummm exactly how old are you???
-Trigger system, actually wont bother explaining, i will start making the flash animations today i guess, **warning** they will be extra lame....

Too old. Though, when you factor in Cxwq and Pinapple, I guess a young whipper-snapper. But those equations are just basic kinematic equations one can learn in highschool Physics. They don't even include gas laws, so don't mind them too much.


Here's a cheap idea of what I'm talking about.

Tennis balls and scotch tape sound a lot cooler.

[Mantis]

I actually worried the plate reference would confuse someone.
No, not like a dinner plate, its just a base or whatever you wanna call it the shrapnel sits on. I'll draw something out, hold on.

[Zero Talent]

I actually worried the plate reference would confuse someone.
No, not like a dinner plate, its just a base or whatever you wanna call it the shrapnel sits on. I'll draw something out, hold on.

http://www.geocities...ntisGrenady.txt

Something like this, with the duct tape hinge and scotch tape temporary latch of a Tennis Ball grenade?

[Langley]

Zero, that statocyst grenade is great, but I don't think actually lobing it at a group of enemies would be a good idea. The first time you accidentally make direct contanct, the person who get's hit is going to have a nice little pattern of holes in their face where the exposed brass took out chunks of thier flesh.

Personally, I don't think a practicall grenade is ever really going to happen. Even if you could find a way to make zero's grenade safe for throwing, you've got a problem:

Okay, so you've got this air, and it's in this tank. And it's going to go through a bunch of little tiney pin holes in a brass tube. This same air is going to then push darts out of several brass tubes. There are at least as many brass tubes as there are pin holes.

And if that wasn't enough, theres a trade off between barrel saturation (the number of barrels and the area that will actually get hit by the grenade when it fires) and range. The more barrels you put on that thing, the less range you get from the same amount of pressure (and I'm sure this thing is going to have low limits in terms of how much pressure it can hold) and the fewer barrels you put on, the less likey you're going to actually hit anything. Thusly, the range you get from fewer barrels isn't going to do you much good because when the darts move farther from the grenade, they also move farther from each other, and can cover less of an area.


And then you've got the grenades that are like the tennis ball or the film canister. If you could get around the problem of detonateing them every time you throw one, the foam in the grenade is still never going to go more than five or six feet from the grenade, and it's only going to go in one direction. And if it hits someone, it's not going to hit them hard, so they're alot less likey to even notice the've been hit, and if they say they weren't, it's kind of difficult to prove they were, what with all the little tiny pieces of foam everywhere.


Okay, I'm getting to the point.......

Hell, if you're going to physically throw something at someone in a nerf war, you may as well throw a nerf football at the person. The velocity is good, the rate of fire is good, the range is at least as good as the range you'd get on a nerf gun, and the accuracy is as good as you make it. But then if we're just throwing shit at each other, is it really nerf?

[Zero Talent]

...Personally, I don't think a practicall grenade is ever really going to happen.  Even if you could find a way to make zero's grenade safe for throwing, you've got a problem:

:snip:

Well, the idea is that you can hit multiple targets, and eliminate the effect of cover. If you can just hit the person with the grenade itself, then I agree, there's no point at all. I suppose it just depends on the type of area one plays in. If it's open, grenades are mostly useless, since cover is sparse. But if you play in an urban war, or indoors, something that spews bits of foam arbitrarily in all directions could be quite handy.

For the brass-flesh issue, you could just nest the statocysts farther into the shell (there's a lot of room), until the outside is as smooth as a normal piece of pipe.

I agree with your airflow theory, and even though that statocyst grenade actually fires when the brass trigger rod is completely beyond the O-ring (thus the air flow is through a 7/16" diameter hole), it is definitely an issue. "Transistor valves" (if we don't like this name, we can drop it), such as those you're looking into for semi-automatic fire, Langley, would suit that purpose quite well.

But we don't know until we try, do we?

Until then, what would everyone think of a "tracer grenade," which detonates when a cord is pulled taut? Think of a harpoon gun, only the harpoon is a pressurized shell with a trigger pin attached to the cord, and a shrapnel payload on the back. I think such a device, though very silly aesthetically, could be quite useful for attacking enemies behind cover. Fire it a few feet over their heads, and pull the cord taut to detonate it over their heads.

As to the hit issue... Well, I guess we need to just trust. What is a game if you can't trust those you're playing against?
...Not fun, just competitive.

...And sorry for the constant stream of posts. Anything to avoid studying for final exams.

[Langley]

you would have to worry about the length of the chord when you use the grenade, which I guess wouldn't be too hard. (ie he's about 8' away so I need to throw the grenade with only 12 feet of chord on it so it detonates 4' behind him) and the grenade is going to be a little spastic when it's on the end of a line (bouncing back, swinging around, etc) so it will be difficult to controll. You could actually in part solve the barel saturation problem though because you could just put barels on only one side of the grenade. In which case you will only be able to hit someone if you detonat the grenade behind them. But that would work well for the perpose of hitting someone who is hiding behind a tree.

[Mantis]

I'm too tired to read the last few posts, but yes Zero, that picture is almost exactly what I pictured. But other than there being separate pieces on top of each spring, there was one large one encompassing them all, if it could be done. Otherwise the picture is what my mind's eye sees.

[Alexthebeast]

Your harpoon mention got me thinkin Zero, what if we launched the Bal(nade) out of a gun(homemade), weakly taped up on one side, strong on the other, and on the weak tape strip, have the string attached, which is also attached to the gun.

This way when you shoot the gun, the string is automatically pulled taught by force of the shot, causeing the nade to open up like this:

(''')_(''') (underscore is the strong tape, holding the 2 halves together)

The only problem would be the ability too customize string length.

Thoughts?

[Langley]

You would be better off just firing the shrapnel from whatever you're using to fire the grenade.