A DIYer Used a 3D Printer to Create His Very Own Railgun

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A DIYer Used a 3D Printer to Create His Very Own Railgun

What have you accomplished lately?
Rachel Pick
New York, US

While you might have been spending your free time watching TV and puttering around, this guy was busy creating a railgun.

Reddit user NSA_Listbot (a.k.a. David Wirth) used a 3D printer to make the frame of the gun, and an Arduino chip to monitor voltage and temperature. (More pictures and videos of his process are compiled in a gallery on Imgur.) The gun contains six huge capacitors that weigh 20 pounds altogether. It looks kind of like a massive Super Soaker, but this is not a toy—it releases semimetal projectiles at a speed of 560 miles per hour, and fires with 1,800 joules of energy per shot.

Railguns are crazy contraptions that fire missiles using electromagnetic forces, so named for the parallel rails charged with the current that is the source of its power. They can achieve a high level of kinetic energy in the absence of explosives, and are currently being researched by the military for use in warfare.

Even using a relatively soft semimetal like graphite for his projectile, Wirth's railgun still made major indentations in a steel-backed target. According to Wirth, the projectile "vaporized." Dude.

What I really want, though, is Ripley's combo flamethrower/pulse rifle from Aliens. Can someone make me one of those?

Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to graphite as a metal; it is a semimetal.