Even if you don’t have the best poker face, you know there’s a lot of fun to be had with playing cards. You can use them as bookmarks, fling them into open hats, or with your card-flicking accuracy, pelt your friends with a ninja-flurry of hearts, spades, and clubs.
While DIY YouTuber BLACKHAND’s new card shooting gun does just this, you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of these cards:
The gun uses a spring mechanism to launch cards. By taking into account the rotational and forwards forces, BLACKHAND is able to create a slicer, vegetable dicer that shoots high-velocity cards capable of popping balloons and cutting cucumbers at long range.
He starts by making the housing of the gun. Inside this housing is a stopper which will halt the launching mechanism, allowing him to approximate the trajectory of the gun. BLACKHAND also drills a tiny hole in the middle of the housing for the launching mechanism to fit in.
The mechanism itself is made out of two parts: a “shoulder” with a spring and an “arm” with rubber holders to house the cards.
By connecting one end of the spring onto the shoulder and the other on one end of the gun housing, BLACKHAND has effectively created a shooting mechanism which launches cards whenever the arm is pulled and released.
He adds a few more decals on the gun as well as two strips of Velcro so he can strap the mechanism onto his arm, making it part of himself.
As I mentioned at the start of all this, BLACKHAND’s card shooting gun makes short work of his targets; which in this case are a bunch of balloons, a lit candle, and a poor, single cucumber.
It takes next to no effort to pop the balloons and extinguish the lit candle. The cucumber on the other hand, takes a little more effort.
After making numerous slices around the cucumber, BLACKHAND eventually makes a cut deep enough that it topples and is cut in half.
If you want to make your own card shooting gun, BLACKHAND has made the plans available here. He has since improved upon the initial design in a more recent video which you can find on his YouTube channel.
