A group of students at National Sun-Yat-sen University Affiliated High School in the southern city of Kaohsiung have created a rubber band machine gun that can fire 600 rounds of rubber bands.
Their invention breaks the record of a similar device made by Japanese students that could fire 500 rubber bands. The rubber band gun was singled out at this year's Kaohsiung City Science Fair.
Rubber bands are commonly used to bind lunch boxes. The students, including Luo Yuan-xiang, Hu Shun-kai and Wang Bo-jun, often enjoy engaging in rubber band wars with other classmates. This inspired them to come up with a related device for this year's science fair, thinking that a powerful shooter that could fire a large number of rubber bands should be able to make a strong impression and win out over the other entries in the competition.
The trio went on the Internet to collect information, and came to have quite a thorough understanding of the principles involved, such as chain reaction and friction. They divided various tasks among themselves and worked together in collecting a large stockpile of rubber bands, along with making drawings for their invention.
They also did the carpentry work required, and, in order to overcome the challenges associated with the repeated firing of the invention, they assembled 12 barrels for the contraption. They then used a high-speed motor to generate repeated firing of the rubber bands, thereby creating an entirely handmade machine gun that fires rubber bands.
In testing the gun, they discovered that the gun would fire rounds quite quickly, and is able to fire a load of 600 rubber bands. The school's administration plans to notify the Guinness committee to see about having the gun listed in its world records.
Luo, however, is still not satisfied with the gun, saying that since it can take him half an hour just to load all of the rubber bands into the gun, he is now researching methods to speed up loading.
(This article originally appeared in The Liberty Times June 10.)