Build a Gauss Pistol

The gun works by accelerating a projectile through a pair of coils. Is it dangerous?

Sure, mechanical sentries and AirSoft turrets are novel, but there's nothing like whipping out an electromagnetic pistol to show folks you mean business. The Gauss GP-219 looks like it came straight from level 5 of Duke Nukem 3D, and rocks a PIC microcontroller, dual coils with "precision pulsing" to fire steel projectiles, twin infrared sensors to assist in positioning, and even a laser sight to keep your enemies pegged. Powered by an NiCd battery pack, this bad boy also features a bar display to track "capacitor bank charge progress," battery and fault LED indicators, and is "completely silent" when fired. The wildest part about this science-fiction dream come true is how effective it actually is, so be sure to click on for a few more pictures, and hit the read links for all the nitty gritty and even a few live action videos.

# Two coils are precisely pulsed in sequence (350 Amp peak) to fire a steel projectile # Two infrared sensors detect the projectile position within the firing tube # Controlled by a PIC microcontroller

This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed. The toy is very simple to build, going together in minutes, and is very simple to understand and explain, and yet fascinating to watch and to use.

First portable semi-automatic coilgun pistol finaly complete. This long overdue project started out 6 months ago. Initial the pistol was designed for a lower bank and energy shot level just to demonstrate 5 shots per second at 2 joules. As time passed and parts perished, the orginal designed transformed into a higher shot level and lower rate of fire. The next design will more than compensate for it all.

A coilgun (also known as Gauss gun, Gauss cannon or Gauss rifle) is a type of magnetic accelerator gun (MAG) or magnetic accelerator cannon (MAC). It uses a series of electromagnetic coils to accelerate a magnetic shell to very high velocities. The name "Gauss gun" comes from Carl Friedrich Gauss, who formulated mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic effect used by coilguns.

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What is a coilgun? It accelerates a piece of iron or steel down a tube. The tube runs through a series of electromagnetic coils (like solenoids). There are no sparks or noise or impressive side effects (or parts to wear out). Some careful timing circuits energize each coil in sequence. The principle of magnetic attraction draws the projectile along at rapidly increasing speed.

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Coil Guns, (also known as "gauss guns", or "coaxial accelerators", or "linear electromagnetic accelerators") are extremely easy to make, a fact that explains their popularity on the Internet and as a science project in general. Basically, all one needs to build a coilgun is to wrap a couple turns of wire around some type of tube and run electricity through that wire with a piece of iron inside the tube. However, as with most things, when it comes to making a coil gun that performs well, that is, converts a significant portion of the energy stored in the capacitors into kinetic energy, even the best designs -the ones on this web site included- achieve at best a meager couple of % efficiency. Although a comparison with conventional electric motors and transformers, which can perform at efficiency levels as high as 90% and above, is not appropriate since they are completely different devices, some governmental institution coil gun designs have been quoted as achieving efficiencies as high as 26%, which makes it very obvious to me that there is something seriously wrong with the current amateur designs.