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A railgun needs a pretty beefy power supply that’s able to dump loads of current across the rails. Trying to keep costs low, I decided to borrow the charging circuit of a disposable camera. I removed the capacitor, xenon flash lamp, and a bunch of nonessential parts. Then I soldered on some switches, resoldered the indicator LED onto longer wires, and added alligator clips that will lead to the capacitor bank. Obviously, the capacitors are also to come from disposable cameras.

Here’re some pictures.

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Happy New Year, all! And in the spirit of starting the year with a bang…

I felt like having some fun, so I started designing a tiny railgun. A tiny, kid-safe railgun. Eh, who am I kidding?

Anyhow, I imagine a small power supply based on the charging circuit in a disposable flash camera and a capacitor bank made from capacitors found in more disposable flash cameras. The rails would be short copper bars — somewhere in the range of three inches long, positioned about a millimeter apart. They’d be secured in a glass and plexiglas barrel using cheap clamps, and connected to the circuit using alligator clips. Unfortunately, there won’t be a real high voltage switch until I find something like an SCR rated for high currents; instead, I’ll just make do with a spark gap trigger.

What about the projectile? Ha. What projectile? The power supply should be able to dump 330V of high direct current across the rails for a split second. I imagine there to be just enough oomph to vaporize/ionize a tiny piece of aluminum foil and sling the plasma a couple of feet. Not bad for a baby model, eh?

The power supply’s pretty much done; now I just need to get me some copper bars and really thick copper wire…

DIYer Kipkay extracts the laser from a DVD burner and mounts it in a small flashlight to create a handheld laser burner that can light matches and burst balloons. Hit the play button to see how he did it. This project isn’t for the faint of heart: it involves pretty specialized components and soldering, but that’ll all be worth it when you’re camping with your pals and you start the fire by pointing your homemade handheld laser at the tinder. For more info, Kip posted the laser mod over at Instructables, too.

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