Rubber Band Based Pistol Project (One Day Challenge)

thingiverse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhslHK4820I&feature=youtu.be Hello! As a part of the one day Project challenge I made a rubber band pistol that can shoot anything from paper balls to pens! Please be careful with it, it's not meant to harm others, I just wanted to see if I could make it work I'm a 16 years old student from Israel playing for the local robotics FRC team as the head CAD department. Time to design and tinker: 4 hours Time to Print: 7 Hours Clean-up and video making: 4 hours Have a nice day! Print Settings Printer Brand: Printrbot Printer: Simple Black Supports: Yes Infill: ~10-15 Notes: the Infill and Resolution depends on how many rubber bands do you plan to use, mine slightly broke with 8 bands but my print wasn't as invested in. This print will take a lot of supports, sadly. Try and print the body of the pistol up-side-down. I deleted the sights for printing convenience. Post-Printing Supports As I said, there will be a lot of them. try and take them out and slide the canister across the body of it quickly for a few minuets. Worked wonders for me! How I Designed This I Used Inventor 2016 in order to make this, and had a lot of fun doing so! I sketched roughly the mechanics of it on a piece of paper and threw it into the program as a big and ugly blob. Took me some time but I managed to get it to resemble a Desert Eagle (let alone a pistol). There was a lot of math involved, everything from the power of the rubber bands to the friction of the trigger with the canister. To be honest it was not simple at all, and Google helped with the math more than I'd like to admit. I had to redo and reprint the parts many times for it to work and even more times to make it look like a pistol again. I had fun and that's what matters. :) Custom Section Project Project Name: "Rubber Band Pistol" Overview & Background: We've always used those old rubber bands to make a "gun" with our hand. Time to take it to the next level! Objectives: Scaling designs to human proportions, basic Engineering, tension between objects and balance between tensions. Audiences: This is a great project for anyone who is at 9th to 12th grade. More or less. Even though I am the head of the CAD department in our local school FRC team, I think anyone with basic knowledge would be able to invent and make his own design with a little more time than just a day, although that would be a pretty nice goal. Subjects: Basic Engineering. Skills Learned (Standards): Creative thinking, there are many ways to make this pistol! While there are not really any new skills to be learnt from this project, but it's a great way to finish off a class with one good end project. I have educated other students how to design in Inventor 2016 and this project covers all the basic and a bit more. Just enough for new students! Lesson/Activity: Now of curse you can just give this to a student and tell them "do that", but personally I think giving them a free hand on this idea might be the best thing here, there are endless ways you can complete this task. Student get tasks all the time that tell them to do something specific and very rarely do they get a task the makes them explore new horizons and try to think for themselves. This project combines everything a students really needs to learn and have a little fun doing so, I know I had fun! Duration: For me It took 3-4 hours to design this top to bottom. Now for a new student that just started my guess would be about 2-3 days of easy and relaxing work, and giving them more time to think. When I started I had one Idea in mind and developed it while I was working. New students might have a little problem with that sort of thing. Preparation: A 3D printer or a woodworking shop would be a good start but not a necessity. If you're working with Inventor or other programs they need to know how to work with more than one object and thinking outside the box! This task could be really easy or challenging, that depends on the student. And of curse, a handful or rubber bands! References: none. Rubric & Assessment: The general idea that I really liked is to just give them the name "Rubber Band Pistol" and telling them to be creative and go from there. The design I went with works pretty much like that one of a crossbow but each student can take it down a different path and make a thing of his own. Now grading this might not be as simple. I think the teacher should grade each work based on the simplicity of the design, how efficient it is and other things like those. Another important thing is to not grade it based on how much power it can output, that will take away all the creativity away from it and everyone will make basically the same thing, but that is my opinion and you're welcome to feel free to do whatever you like with that idea.