Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and in the interest of a healthier planet
we're starting to transition to solar-powered weaponry.
Alright, before we do any shooting with this, let's take a look at it up close here.
This is Arcflash Labs' EMG-02,
and it is a real-life coil gun, or Gauss rifle.
Rifle is not technically an accurate term,
because it's not actually rifled, it doesn't spin a projectile.
At least, not yet in its current iteration.
But fundamentally what we have here is a device that accelerates a ... magnetic metallic projectile
by using a series of electromagnetic coils that are discharged or energised in sequence
to pull a projectile down a bore (sort of a barrel),
and then throw it out the end of the thing at high velocity.
... A lot of people will use this and the term "rail gun" interchangeably,
and they're not the same thing, they're in fact fundamentally very different.
A rail gun uses a pushing force and actually has rails,
... the electromagnetic discharge is in conjunction with the rail.
It's a long story: this isn't a rail gun, this is a coil gun.
So I did a previous video. I had an opportunity, which was really cool,
a little while back to take a look at Arcflash Labs' very first coil gun, their GR-1 Anvil.
And did a video on that that was pretty cool,
and if you haven't seen it you should check that one out.
What they've done here is take some of the best elements of the GR-1 Anvil
and their EMG-01 (which was their small, almost pellet rifle style, coil gun),
and combine them together into a new design that has the best of both worlds.
So this has the same muzzle velocity as the GR-1, although it's using slightly smaller projectiles.
This is "chambered" for ideally 5/16 inch in diameter metal rods.
It can also fire anything down to 1/4 inch in diameter.
So the ammunition from the original EMG-01s can be used,
and EMG-01 magazines fit in this.
But you can also scale it up to 5/16, you'll get about the same muzzle velocity
but you can throw a little bit heavier projectile to get more muzzle energy.
One of the interesting things about a coil gun, technically speaking,
is that it's actually the muzzle velocity that is more of a limiting factor
than the mass of the projectile.
So as you add energy, what you tend to do is
you're able to fire a heavier projectile at that same muzzle velocity.
Firearms work a bit differently, with a firearm you have a fixed amount of pressure.
And so if you reduce the mass of the projectile you can increase the muzzle velocity.
That principle doesn't apply to coil guns.
That was something that I think a lot of people didn't recognise.
So there are a number of technical differences ... with this from the ... predecessor designs.
So let's grab an EMG-01 and let's take a closer look at this,
and I'll show you what changed about it.
Alright, so here's our EMG-02, here's our EMG-01.
The biggest technical change between these two (aside from scale which we'll get into),
is that on the 01 there were 8 coils and 10 capacitors basically in line.
Where each capacitor (or pair of capacitors) ran one of the coils.
With the EMG-02 they've been able to make this more efficient, and also better balanced,
by having one really large capacitor on the back, and then 10 coils out in the front.
So where in this one each ... capacitor (or pair of capacitors)
would discharge completely into its own coil,
here each coil basically takes a one tenth bite out of the power available from this capacitor.
Then after the projectile has exited the barrel, the capacitor is recharged from the battery.
And that's where we get the second big change from the EMG-01.
This used essentially something more along the lines of, not a hobbyist,
but like a battery that you had to have a little bit of technical expertise to recharge.
It had its own charging system, and it wasn't just a strictly plug-and-play sort of device.
And that's what they've added on the EMG-02.
This uses off-the-shelf standardised lithium-ion, basically cordless drill type, batteries. ...
This just clips in right to the bottom of the pistol grip, like so.
Easy to get extra batteries, super easy to charge them, it's just a plug-and-play thing.
And like you saw in that little intro,
you can hook one of these things up to a solar charger if you want to do that.
Capacity on this, by the way, is enough for at least 300 full-power shots of the gun.
So it's going to be more of an annoying chore to reload the magazines
and source ammunition than it is to deal with recharging the battery. This lasts a really long time.
The whole body of the gun is still 3D printed.
This has a power switch right here on the back.
That's your main on and off.
We then have a single, sort of a mode button that we'll use in conjunction with the display.
There's your display, that's going to tell you everything that's going on in the gun.
It'll tell you muzzle velocity when you fire, it'll tell you what mode the gun is set to.
Everything you need to know for running it, battery charge level, all that sort of stuff.
The magazine here is basically the same magazine from the EMG-01.
... There's a technical difference to them,
... the 01 magazine has a tall tower here, and the 02 magazine is shorter.
So this will fit in both guns, this will fit only in the EMG-02.
And your ammunition is either 1/4 inch or 5/16 inch dowel pins, essentially.
You have a little bit of leeway with overall length.
But there was a feature on the GR-1 Anvil where you could actually adjust the length of the gun
and use different sized magazines for different lengths of projectile.
... That was a cool feature, but frankly it wasn't really that practically necessary
and it caused a lot of logistical issues that just weren't worthwhile.
So they've left out that capability,
you've just got a single magazine size now for the EMG-02. Frankly, I think that's just fine.
A couple of other technical bits here, we have a ... main fuse for the gun.
So if anything goes really wrong, that fuse will blow
and it will prevent damage to anything else in the gun.
Conveniently, appropriately, located under the cover plate labelled "Fuse".
And that is in fact a 40 amp automotive fuse,
so something super easy to replace if you have trouble with it.
This cable on the outside, this coax cable,
... essentially that's a high voltage cable that runs to a resistor here under the front of the barrel.
And the purpose of this is when you turn the gun off, it actually discharges the capacitor.
You don't want that capacitor to be staying charged over long periods of time.
So when you turn it off it discharges it, ... that's a safety aspect to keep the gun in a safe state.
Well, how do you discharge it, you have to put that energy somewhere.
And so they've routed that power into a resistor here under the front of the gun.
It's worth pointing out that like for me, because I'm used to handling firearms,
my habit is to always put the thing into a safe condition if I'm putting it down and not using it.
So I had this tendency to turn the thing off every time I was done with a course of fire.
That's actually not the best practice for one of the EMGs like this,
because ... every time you're turning it off
you're dumping power into this resistor, and you're heating it up quite a lot.
So better to put the gun into safe,
but leave it powered on if you're not actually done shooting.
Up here ... under the barrel shroud you can see each of the individual accelerator coils.
So there's 10 of those.
Up here on the muzzle there is still a laser for aiming.
But it's a little bit less powerful of a laser than on the GR-1,
and frankly I find it basically useless, I couldn't see it at any sort of practical range.
That's the actual muzzle of course.
However, you don't really need the laser, ... actually there's not a way to zero the laser anyway.
So for aiming it what you would want to do is use the 3D printed Picatinny rail here.
... Personally, if ... this were mine to keep, I would just drop a little inexpensive red dot on it.
Frankly, one of the red dots that has the circle dot reticle would be just about perfect.
The circle would do really well with the level of inaccuracy that this still has.
It's not firearm accurate. It's not bad, we'll take a look at it out on the range in just a moment.
But a circle dot reticle I think would work really perfectly with the EMG-02.
Overall, the balance and the handling of this thing are
like an order of magnitude better than the GR-1 Anvil.
And frankly, I think it handles more nicely than the EMG-01.
... The capacitor in the back gives you something to actually use as a point of contact for aiming.
Having the battery right under the pistol grip is really convenient,
it keeps the balance of the gun very nicely centred.
Same thing with having the capacitor back here instead of having ... a bunch of them mounted out front.
So it's a better looking design, which isn't really all that important,
but it's also just a much better handling gun.
One of the other nice improvements is the trigger is now built much more like a real trigger.
It's a 3D printed component, but it's an actual trigger-like piece of material.
On the EMG-01 here, the trigger was actually just a piece of
frankly kind of flimsy sheet metal there bent into shape. Not the greatest solution.
This is much better.
And now that I've got a battery in it, we can take a look at the terminal screen.
So I'm going to turn it on, and oop, there it goes: EMG-02.
It's going to charge up the capacitor initially, ... there we go.
So last shot was 0.0 metres per second.
You can see we have our status, or the mode that the gun is in: it's safe.
And I can push this little button down here to switch to single,
burst, which is 3 round limited,
or just open full automatic.
And then down here you have the number of gates that discharged on the last shot,
... zero, because ... there hasn't been a shot yet here.
And then the battery capacity, which is currently 76%, and the battery is registering 59.1 volts.
It is nominally a 60 volt battery.
So when it's fully charged it's a bit over 60, and as it discharges it goes down into the 50s.
Alright, let's do some shooting.
The change to a just a real standard commercial
basically power drill battery is a really cool improvement.
I can snap that on.
The whole design of this thing just balances much better,
it's about 5 pounds lighter than the GR-1.
I have magazines that hold 15 rounds,
except for the one that I just bounced out of it.
So this is 15 rounds of 5/16 dowel pin. It would be 18 rounds of 1/4 inch.
... We'll go ahead, and turn it on.
Doop. The screen comes up there. Charging.
We did a little bit of shooting out here before we started filming.
So the battery's had a little bit of charge taken out, looks like we're at 86% charge.
Got my button on the side here to change modes: single, burst, auto.
Let's go ahead and start with single.
I don't have sights mounted on this. So it's just kind of aiming down over the top.
The accuracy of this is about the same as the GR-1 that came before it.
So this is not a precision weapon yet, it's not actually rifled.
And you can't actually rifle it because,
well, the barrel doesn't work the same way as a pressurised firearm.
But I should have no trouble hitting that steel target.
Too high.
Switch this to 3 round burst.
Alright, yeah, we got 71 metres per second there on our semi-auto shooting.
So that's pretty good, that's like 200 feet per second.
3 round burst.
A little high again.
And I believe I am now out of ammunition.
But I have more magazines.
So back to single, and I'm going to try ...
shooting a group on one of my paper targets here,
and let's just see what sort of accuracy we can get.
I'm assuming these projectiles are still going to be tumbling.
Ah, once again I've broken the stick on the target. Let's go take a look at that.
So like an open bolt firing gun, you can safe this simply by removing the magazine.
There is no chamber to it, so if the mag's out, there's no way for there to be anything in the gun.
So that was about 15 yards. And I've got - this looks like 7 hits in the target.
And I lost count of how many rounds I actually fired at it.
But that's not actually terrible, I think that's actually a little bit better than we were doing
with the GR-1 and the EMG-01.
Alright, so here's a potential dilemma. I've run out of ammunition.
However, the EMG-02 will fire either 1/4 inch or 5/16 inch dowel pins.
And we actually have some screwdriver bits, well, that's 1/4 inch flat to flat,
and it's under 5/16 corner to corner.
I can't load more than one in the magazine at a time, because it's overly long.
But this thing will actually fire drill bits. Let's give that a try.
Go to single, since we only have one to work with here.
Argh, I missed. Alright, try another drill bit.
I'm a little off to the left this time.
Nicked the top of it.
So cool, improvised ammunition.
There we go, that was a solid hit with a drill bit.
Alright, let's go to auto.
One of the cool things about the EMG-02 is they've improved the recharge rate.
So the EMG-01 had a full-auto capability, but it was relatively underpowered.
This has substantially more power in full-auto,
it's able to recharge the capacitor more quickly for follow-up shots to give you that cyclic rate.
Where the GR-1 didn't even have an automatic mode, because it just took too much time to charge.
Alright, so auto, magazine, paper target.
That's pretty slick!
Let's go take a look at that group.
So there's essentially zilch for recoil, like there is no recoil from this thing.
There are no moving parts to come hitting the back of the gun to make it bounce off target.
And you can actually watch the projectiles in flight at 200 feet per second
and just kind of direct the stream like a hose. That is quite a lot of fun.
Alright guys, so a big thanks to Arcflash for coming out to let me play with their brand new EMG-02.
They've got this available for pre-order, with deliveries expected in December of 2022.
This is their next project.
So I think it's a pretty cool iteration on the GR-1 and EMG-01.
Of course at the end of the video, what are we going to do? We're going to do a mag dump.
And we'll do it on steel this time, this should sound pretty cool.
I'm still on auto. I still have 78% battery life.
So I got a lot more battery than I do ammunition today. Here we go.
That's just really fun!