It Takes an Hour to Load This Dart-Blasting Minigun but 9 Seconds to Empty It

Hasbro tends to creation its dart-firing Nerf blasters to look for illustration toys, aliases classic sci-fi props, pinch capacity geared towards keeping kids safe. Grown up dart blaster enthusiasts, by comparison, strive to create perfectly terrifying, over-powered, foam-flinging weapons. The second approach, acknowledgment to YouTuber GatlingTommy, has now yielded a fully functional replica of nan military’s M134 Minigun, made celebrated successful movies for illustration nan original Predator.

For those not acquainted pinch nan military’s type of nan gun, it’s known for having an incredibly precocious complaint of fire, shooting retired up to 6,000 rounds each infinitesimal by utilizing six rotating barrels. You ne'er want to find yourself connected nan incorrect extremity of one, and nan aforesaid goes for nan MOAB, aliases Mother of All Blasters, which functions much aliases little nan nonstop aforesaid way, but pinch foam darts blasting retired of nan barrels.

It took GatlingTommy (you tin find their YouTube transmission here, and their Instagram relationship here) 2 years to design, 3D print, and combine nan MOAB, and nan first functional prototype was precocious tested by nan squad down nan YouTube transmission WalcomS7, who screen dart blaster news. Based connected nan ear-to-ear grins connected nan faces of everyone who gives it a try, it’s clear nan MOAB is an awesome portion of engineering.

Powered by a rechargeable battery, nan MOAB uses a spring-based firing mechanism. With its electrical centrifugal cranked to 3,000RPM, it has a firing complaint of astir 58 darts each second. Darts are fed to nan blaster from a 500-shot backpack utilizing a 3D-printed concatenation provender mechanism, and arsenic each dart is fired, nan concatenation and each dart’s casing is disassembled and ejected. Holding down nan occurrence fastener (which is hidden beneath a information cover) will quiet nan backpack successful astir 9 seconds, but it takes 1 personification astir an hr to reassemble nan concatenation and reload each 500 darts.

To make nan MOAB much useful successful a dart blaster conflict (you don’t want to tally retired of ammo 9 seconds in), nan firing complaint tin beryllium adjusted utilizing a mini LCD screen, truthful alternatively of moving until it’s empty, it tin beryllium programmed to occurrence a short burst of darts each clip nan occurrence fastener is pressed.

It is some an perfectly absurd and an amazingly awesome feat of homebrew engineering, and while you can’t bargain 1 yet, aliases moreover download nan basal files to 3D people your own, GatlingTommy is exploring ways to get this into nan hands of nan astir devoted (and well-funded) dart blaster fans, either arsenic a fully-functional completed build, aliases arsenic a DIY 3D-printable kit that includes nan various physics components that can’t travel from a 3D printer.