Kitted Burst Cannon

'Kitted', as I define it for my little hobby, means 'bunch of gizmos added'. This little side project started as a 'wouldnt it be cool if..' replies in the forums... The idea was:

"Mount a motor inside a burst cannon so that the barrels spin. AND, have one spot on the gunbarrells lit up by an led, so that as the gun spins, the light looks like the gun firing."

So, I just jumped right in!

First, I had to find a motor small enough to fit in the small small area of the burst cannon 'breach', and luckilly I found a neat, cheap little toy that might do the job!

Opening it up, I isolated the motor, and tested its sie to see if it would work. (a term called kit-bash), and looking at it, the motor may juuust be small enough!

Getting the motor free, I got to planning on how to make the idea actually work in practice. Above is the general layout, in relation to the gun itself. I really would have loved to use that 5mm LED, as its bright and very very blue. But, all things tested, only a 3mm would actually fit without massively changing the appearance of the whole gun (making it look stock is one of the primary goals)

Finally, I settled on this config, and reamed the plastic out to fit the motor within. The cylinder at the back of the gun was removed, and I plan on using the body of the motor itself as part of the gun body, and would fit the cylinder over the end of the motor. The power wires for the motor will be coming out of the rear of the gun, and slung under, and back up to the 'magazine', where the wires would run up and inside the vehicle where the batteries are.

The barrells will be made of clear plastic flying base rods, which actually conduct light very well! In this pic they are roughly ruberbanded together, and need to be made with a stiff and strong centered axle, and be balanced for spinning. This was actually harder than it even sounds.

Here is the near final test fit for all the components. I got the barrell arrangement all finished, and actually quite balanced as well.. while at the same time looking not too shabby if I do say so myself... hehe You can see the green LED tucked in, and its 'wires' bent and fitted to route up the magazine feeder as planned. The superglue left some frost visible in this pic, but thats easilly scraped away after drying. The plan is to greenstuff the rear of the led and wires to blend them into the bottom of the gun: all told, the only change will be a slight bulge on the underside of the gun.

If you look closely, you can see that there are two separate pairs of wires going to these two systems: light and motor. That was because, after many attempts, there was just no way for a 3v pair of AAAs to power both at the same time. So, for purposes of this project, it had two separate battery packs.

Here is the view with the LED lit up, obviously, and you can see, with high speed grinding/polishing of the rear, how well it conducts light! I was impressed with it, to say the least! The light spills out a bit too far to the adjacent barrels and I hope to later greenstuff around the LED to make its light a tighter beam.

Finally, we come to the 'test run', where I got everything moving smoothly, and couldnt wait to fire this puppy up:

WOW that little motor is a speed demon, even with the weight of the barrels it had to spin (the axle and barrell grid weighed about twice what the motor itself did)!! Its more of a phalanx chaingun speed that a gatling gun where you can actually see the individual barrels light up in turn.... but that wont be very visible at 10000 rpm!!

Thats as far as I got with this little project, still with some things to do:

- Try adding a rheostat to the motor circuit, to see if it will slow things down without losing all of its power.

- Try to rig up a 555 flasher chip to the led circuit, to make it flash (even a flast of 40/sec would looke better)

- rig the two separate circuits through a relay so they both activate at the same time.. activated by a pushbutton switch somewhere on the vehicle model itself.

But this little project has stalled. I am in a frenzy (binge?) of lighting projects, and maybe when it comes time to mount this to a vehicle, work will progress on it. But in my head, the challenge was met, and it works.. sorta. and theres more stuff I wanna work on! So, so be it for this!