Bottle Top Shooter

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

This was my entry to ultimaker design challenge:-

The bottle top shooter is a hand held miniature crossbow which utilities milk bottle tops and an elastic band to launch them. I had the idea of making some kind of toy gun whilst away on holiday with my family - my young cousins had 'Nerf guns?', which we had great fun ambushing each other with.

We soon found the problem was that the ammo would get lost under the sofa or down the back of the radiator. I though it would be good to use something that was easy to obtain and that was a waste product, having thrown away hundreds of milk bottle tops I thought they would make a good projectile without hurting anyone - so the bottle top shooter was born!

Here in the UK all the milk bottle tops are approximately the same size, so any tops should fit the Bottle-Top-Shooter, hopefully they are the same in other parts of the world, but if not the design can easily be changed to suit other lids too.

As well as using bottle tops as projectiles I though creators could design custom ammo pucks (CAPs) with individual designs - I remember a brief craze we had at school - Pogs - these were similar shaped objects a bit like casino chips, kids would collect them and trade the different designs with their friends, although i don't remember any other specific purpose for them. It would be cool to experiment with different designs of CAPs, for example you could play with different aerodynamic shapes, weights, balance etc. Or you could have a small PCB integrated with a few flashing LED's or even sound effects? All of which could be collected and traded in the same way as the pogs...

The design of the shooter is in 8 pieces, which are printed onto the flat surface of the machine, they will be assembled with machine screws and glued for extra strength.

I hope you like my idea and it would be awesome to start a Bottle-Top Shooter craze and make a tiny dent on the amount of waste products which we throw away by re-using them for something fun.