[Captions by Y Translator] Marshmallow guns are always fun,
and in today's video, we're taking a look
at how we can upgrade the standard model
to have semi or fully automatic firing,
and add some cosmetic upgrades as well.
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To get started, you're going to need a trip to your local hardware or plumbing store
to gather up a variety of pipe pieces.
Which pieces exactly you get depends on the design of your gun,
and there's a lot of ways you can add variety to these things.
But the important thing is that you get 1/2 inch pipe and 1/2 inch pieces,
so they all fit together nicely,
and the marshmallows fit nicely in the tubes.
Here's the basic idea.
A small piece of dowel on a hinge will work as a sort of interrupter
for the magazine full of marshmallows.
With a quick motion, we can either have a short burst fire,
or by holding it open, we can have a fully automatic marshmallow gun.
Something that's kind of interesting about marshmallows that you
never really think of is that they're really not a uniform size at all.
There's quite a variety.
Now, this is a particularly small one, and this is a particularly large one.
Even if you aren't using a cool mechanism that drops
marshmallows individually, if you have one that's too big,
it sometimes won't even fit down in the tube.
You can usually squish it because it's a marshmallow,
and it will still go through.
But it's going to have a harder time making it past any twists or turns,
so it is better if you can get the slightly smaller ones
that can generally just drop right down through any of the pipe.
There's several different ways to cut the PVC pipe.
A hacksaw works great.
Pretty much any saw works great actually.
My favorite of course is this little tool that's designed for cutting through PVC.
It ratchets.
It does a really good job of cutting easily without leaving
much that has to be cleaned up.
Let's start by building a fairly typical marshmallow gun,
and then start modifying it until we have the final result that we're looking for.
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This is a fairly typical marshmallow gun, as I first used them.
You simply put a marshmallow in this end,
blow here,
it travels down through all the piping and out the barrel.
Pretty simple, and like I said, it does work.
But there are some improvements that we want to make.
First of, I don't really like the 90 degree angles
that the marshmallow has to travel.
It can occasionally get stuck,
and I don't like the aesthetic of it as well either.
So instead of these 90 degree pieces, we're going to add some 45 degree pieces.
[music]
Also, it kind of looks like Brachiosaurus.
The next thing I wanted to try was to see if we can add a magazine
made of the PVC pipe, so that we can shoot more than one shot at once.
To do that, we're going to take another T shaped piece,
and put it right in the middle of the gun body.
We'll then add a pipe on the top of the T, and fill
that with marshmallows with a cap on the top, and see if we
can't get them to drop down in, and all fire out at once.
All right, that's full.
Pop on the cap, because if we don't put the cap on,
there's a good chance that all of the marshmallows
are just going to blow right out the top.
In theory, the marshmallows should be falling right down this tube,
into the path of the moving air.
We'll see how well this works out.
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Hey!
That shot a lot of marshmallows.
Adding a magazine through a T piece definitely works for making a sort
of fully automatic marshmallow gun.
So we're going to build an interrupter of sorts that gets in the way,
and stops marshmallows from falling right here.
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I also think I want a slightly larger magazine in this.
Not much, but just something an inch or two longer.
To start, we'll take the T piece that we want, and the section
of pipe are using as a magazine, and press them really firmly together.
The next step is to find a dowel and a drill bit the same
size as that dowel.
I'm using a 3/8 inch dowel and drill bit because I have those handy.
If you have something a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller,
that should still work pretty well.
With the hole drilled, we now want to disconnect the two pieces,
and clean up all the way around the hole as much as we can
so it's really nice and smooth.
We want this to be really smooth because the marshmallows are gravity fed,
and if there's anything that's sticking out or really rough,
the marshmallows can catch easily,
and that will stop them from falling down into the gun,
which is where we need them.
One more adaptation I like to add is I have this tapered drill bit,
which does a very good job of widening the hole on the inside of the PVC.
That will just add a sort of conical opening to the bottom of this pipe
on just the last half inch or so, and I think that will help make
the marshmallows drop more smoothly.
After drilling and cleaning out this piece, let's connect it back to the T,
so the hole lines up perfectly.
Just a quick little test.
[music]
Marshmallow drops all the way down through, nice and smoothly.
That's exactly what we're looking for.
Now, let's grab our dowel that's the same diameter as our drill bit,
and cut off a piece that's about an inch, maybe an inch and a half long.
Now, using some sandpaper, we're going to round this down.
So it's not just a flat end.
Now, we've got our little would peg here,
and it does fit down into the hole
that we drilled in the PVC.
But it's not an easy fit.
So, let's use our sand paper and take this down so it fits
a little more easily.
Our little wooden peg is now sanded down, so it easily fits.
The peg doesn't reach to the other side of the pipe.
It's just in there enough it'll stop a marshmallow from falling through.
With the little piece of dowel in place, a marshmallow doesn't
fall all the way down through.
But if we just pull it out of the way, marshmallow falls right where we want it.
We now need to add a mechanism that will let us pull this in and out,
without having to awkwardly reach up on the top of the gun.
To do that, we're going to be using a piece of hanger wire
and some small screws.
First, we're going to mark on the dowel.
A spot to drill a hole through one side and out the other.
We want to use a drill bit that's the same size as our hanger wire.
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The hanger fits into the drilled hole, and it's loose enough that it can spin
a little bit, but there's not a lot of play.
That's just what we want.
Leaving ourselves about three inches of wire on one side, we now want to
bend the piece of hanger so it goes down below our PVC pipe,
extends underneath by a couple of inches,
and then comes back up on the other side.
As much as possible, we want nice square angles that fit perfectly
flush up against the sides of the PVC,
but don't have any gaps,
and aren't pushing so hard that they're bending.
Measuring on another piece of the PVC can help you get a really accurate
squared up measurement that fits just right.
Now that we've come back around,
we want to bend this wire so that goes back through the dowel,
just a couple of millimeters away from the first wire,
and extends through to the other side.
Of course to do that, we're going to need to drill a second hole.
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We've got some extra wire here.
Let's just clip that off, because otherwise,
we'd never be able to get it through.
As a final bend, let's take this short piece of wire,
and bend it up,
so that our peg isn't sliding back and forth on the wires.
The trigger mechanism as it were for our device is now working pretty well,
and all we need to do is have an anchor point that we can push against as sort
of a lever, and it should pull the peg out, and then back into the hole.
Let's take our drill bit and four of our small screws to add those pivot points,
one on each side of each wire.
These screws I'm using are pretty little, and there's a reason for that.
We don't want them to go almost any farther than just
this one piece of PVC.
If they do touch the other pieces that are connected to it, that's okay.
But of course, we would have to screw them in after they attach there.
What's really important is that it doesn't go all the way
through this side, and into the next pipe.
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The screws now act as a fulcrum, which lets us push and pull on this wire
to let the peg go in and out of the tube.
What we want to do is push the trigger back, and make sure that the peg
is all the way out of the hole.
We don't want to even be able to see it when we look down the barrel.
Another good test of course is to put a marshmallow in, and pull
it back far enough that the marshmallow falls all the way through.
With the peg pulled back that far, we then want to bend this wire
around the PVC into sort of a hook shape.
That will work to stop it from pulling any farther than we need.
We've now built our semi-automatic mechanism that lets us just
drop one or two marshmallows down through the tube at a time.
Let's add this back onto the gun, and see if it's working the way we hope.
Now, at this point, there shouldn't be any marshmallows in the chamber.
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Or there is one, and I wasn't paying attention.
All right, now there aren't any.
But if I pull this back, and then drop it forward, hopefully,
we have a couple in there.
There it goes.
This is working really well, and I'm loving the design.
It's easy to reach with your hands, so when you're ready to fire,
you can just drop another couple of marshmallows in.
But I think we can take the overall build of this,
and make it even a little bit cooler.
I want to use some more pieces to add a shoulder rest for this gun.
[music]
Nice.
Everything about this design so far seems to be working well.
There's one more thing I want to add,
and that's exchangeable magazines.
So what we're going to do is we're going to cut this pipe off
right here near the bottom.
We're going to add a coupler onto it,
and then we'll be able to take other pipes full of marshmallows already.
So now let's say you're firing, this one's all out.
You can take this off, it's got no marshmallows in it.
You can grab this one, which is full of marshmallows,
fit that into place,
and you should be ready to go.
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So the last thing I want to do is take this tapered drill bit,
and drill out the PVC anywhere that a marshmallow may be traveling.
So instead of running into a hard sharp corner, it's running into a funnel shape.
[music]
It's all built.
It's all working, and I think it needs a little bit of decoration.
[music]
That's our version of the souped-up marshmallow gun.
If you have any cool ideas of how you would take this to the next level,
let us know down in the comments.
I'd love to hear your ideas.
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