[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] Boing.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator]
I am denting the wall.
Hey guys, I'm Nate.
Welcome back to the workshop,
where today we're going to be making a cool pocket-sized coin launcher
out of used gift cards.
This is a fun little weapon that's built from things
you probably already have lying around your house.
And it uses nickels as ammunition.
For any non-Americans out there, a nickel is what we call our five-cent coin.
The actual launcher is made from
four rigid plastic cards, two rubber bands, and some super glue.
We'll also use scissors to cut them up.
And of course, we're going to need some nickels as our ammunition.
I recommend using used gift cards for this.
In the past, I've had a tendency to throw away gift cards
when I'm finished with them.
But I did have these for arcade cards left over from a trip.
They're the same size and thickness as a gift card or a hotel key.
To start, let's take one of our cards, one of our coins,
and something with a straight edge we can use to trace against.
Technically, you could probably use just about any coin to make this shooter work.
I went with the nickels for a couple of reasons.
One of which is that the thickness of a nickel
is almost exactly the same as two of the cards.
Whatever coin we're using, we want to put that onto our card,
and then use our straight edge to draw two parallel lines down the center of our card,
approximately the same width as our coin.
There's a little bit of extra space to either side of our nickel,
but that won't be a problem.
I'm leaving about 80% of the card just as straight lines,
then we'll make sort of a curve flare on both sides.
We now want to cut along the curve flared portion,
and meet up with the straight portion,
all the way across the card.
Our card will end up divided into three sections.
Now we want to divide a second card exactly the same way.
So let's fit our first card center piece onto a second card,
and then trace the outline.
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You should now have two pieces that are basically identical.
You can see how nicely they line up.
There may be a few imperfections
where we didn't cut them out quite perfectly the same,
but we'll be able to fix that later.
Now let's take some super glue, and glue our two pieces together.
Super glue will react fairly quickly with this type of plastic card.
So I find the easiest thing to do is apply the glue to one card,
then line up two of the edges on the table,
and then press the cards together.
This will help make sure you have them properly aligned,
and that you don't miss while you're trying to glue them down,
because once they're glued,
you won't really be able to adjust them back to straight.
Now let's grab another one of our cards,
and begin to glue on the four pieces that we cut from the sides of this centerpiece.
We'll use a similar technique applying glue,
then lining up the edges before we move the two pieces together.
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Now we do the same thing with the two card pieces on the other side.
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We do want this Center piece to fit nicely in the Gap that we've cut,
but oftentimes, our gluing will be a little bit imperfect
or the sides will just be a little too close.
And in that case, we can take some sandpaper,
and just take down the edges of the centerpieces a little bit.
Sand the center portion until it doesn't catch or snag on any pieces of card.
Before we attach our last card
onto the three that we've already attached together,
we want to cut out a little bit of a notch at the bottom.
And that'll make it a lot easier to grab onto our firing mechanism.
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With the notches cut out of the bottom,
now let's glue our top card on to the three we've already connected.
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The center tab should now fit easily into the gap between the other cards.
We now need to add some spring power.
To do that, we're going to be using a couple of rubber bands,
but we want to make sure that they're going to stay in place
right where we put them.
Just by stretching our rubber band over the cards,
We can see a good spot to put the notches.
We don't want the rubber band to be covering the gap,
because that's where we're going to fire the nickels.
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To cut these four notches out,
We can use a knife, or a saw, or a file.
The notches don't have to be very deep.
They just have to hold a rubber band in place.
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With our notches cut,
we can now stretch the rubber band between the notches on both sides,
and they should be held nicely in place.
Two normal rubber bands should give us all the power we need
to launch our coins pretty far.
At this point, the basic version of our coin launcher should be ready to use.
Let's give it a try.
To load in a coin,
let's just pull back the launcher a little bit,
fit a nickel into the opening,
and then drag it back the rest of the way.
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That works great.
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This thing works pretty well,
but I've got a couple ideas of some upgrades
that will make it work a lot better.
I would say the two biggest problems are that it can be a little bit hard
to hold on to since it's such slick plastic.
And of course, that you have to reload the coin individually every time.
And I think we've got solutions for both of those problems.
I have here the two pieces of plastic that I cut off of the ends of the card
that make it easier to grab on to the launcher.
Let's cut out a small piece from each of these
and glue them on to the back of the launcher on both sides
so it's a little bit easier to hold on to.
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Those two notches should give us much better grip.
We also want to make the body of our coin launcher easier to hold on to.
Let's see if we can cut a couple of notches
into the sides of our coin launcher
that makes it easier to grip.
This curved file should give us a nice profile that's easy to hold.
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These two curved notches are easy to fit my fingers into,
and they give much better grip.
That solves our first problem of how easy it is to hold on to
the coin launcher.
But at this point, we're still loading our nickles individually,
And I've got a good solution for how to get past that as well.
We can add a semi-automatic launching attachment onto the card.
But to do so will require a little bit of surgery.
We're going to have to remove the top card,
drill a hole into it, and then glue it back in place.
Let's use an exacto knife to see
if we can fit it in between the top card and the next layer down,
and see if we can split through the superglue to get this off.
Now of course, if you're going to be making
these modifications at home, you can just do this from the beginning,
and add all of this before you glue it on in the first place.
When we're firing our launcher,
pulling it back about that far seems to be a good distance.
We can see that the curved notch
we've cut out of the card goes right about like that.
So if we have a hole the exact size of a nickel
just above there,
we should be able to drop nickels down into our launcher
through a hole in the top just by pulling back the firing mechanism.
To drill that hole, I have a 7/8 inch Forstner bit.
And we're going to be using that size because it's just barely larger than
the diameter of a nickel.
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That line will mark where we should start drilling that hole.
To be able to drill cleanly through our card,
let's secure it in place to a block of wood,
and that whole block to our desk.
That should let us drill nicely into it
without it moving around too much.
Alright, right about here,
It looks like our bit is fitting nicely between all of our markings.
So let's start drilling.
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There we go.
We are through.
That might take a little bit of cleaning up with a razor blade.
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Perfect fit.
The nickel just drops right through there.
Let's also hit that with a little bit of sandpaper
to take off the burr.
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If we line all of the pieces of our launcher back up together,
we can see how this will work to drop coins down inside.
You have a nickel on top,
when we draw it back,
nickel drops in and then gets fired out the front.
But we don't want just one nickel to be able to launch from the top.
We want to add a whole magazine on to this.
And so to do that,
we're going to cut off the neck of a standard water bottle
and attach that on to the top of the cards.
Stay hydrated kids.
Most standard water or soda bottles,
should be able to fit a nickel nicely through without much space on the sides.
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After we cut off the neck of the water bottle,
we want to remove any of the plastic that starts flaring out sideways.
We don't want these pieces that get wider.
We just want the same width of the neck all the way down.
I'm doing some rough trimming with the razor blade,
and then we'll move on to using some sandpaper to get a nice even flat edge.
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The bottom of our bottleneck is sanded,
and it should fit just perfectly over that hole we drilled into our card.
Let's use some super glue to glue that in place on to our card,
and then glue that top card back in place on to our coin launcher.
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Just to reinforce the connection
between the neck of the bottle and the top card,
let's go around the base with some hot glue
because the plastic is so thin.
That should be a little bit more secure of an attachment than just super glue.
With the bottle neck,
we now have a magazine that could hold up to seven nickels,
And we can put a lid on top of it,
so they don't spill out while we're carrying this around.
Some taller types of water bottle neck may be able to hold even more.
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We've got one thing left to do before testing this out,
and that of course is to paint it.
We love to give things a little bit of decoration here.
Let's just lightly hit the surface
with some sandpaper first to make the paint grip nicer.
I'm going to paint it with the firing mechanism in,
which wi'll add some black paint on to the back of it,
but won't get any paint onto the body of it.
That's because if there was paint on the body of it,
it could bind up inside the mechanism.
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Our coin shooter is painted up,
and ready for some firing.
Let's load up our ammunition.
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Oops, pulled that too far.
If you want additional power,
try just adding a second rubber band each side.
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That was way better.
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This mifty little coin shooter is
just made out of a few cards and a rubber band.
And if you want the added magazine,
a piece of a water bottle.
It works really well,
it fits in your pocket and it can carry up to seven shots
with just the short little water bottle neck that I have on it.
And like I said,
you can probably extend that magazine size
by just using a taller water bottle neck.
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That's it for today.
Have fun.
Be safe and see you tomorrow.
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