Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at
what was, I believe, the first actually commercially
available electromagnetic coil gun on the market.
This is the Arcflash Labs EMG-01B.
Now Arcflash Labs, we've talked about them in the past.
I did some videos on one of their other guns
and an interview with one of the founders.
They were formed in 2017
as essentially a partnership between two electromagnetic accelerator enthusiasts, I suppose,
to create a company and actually work to really professionally develop
the technology required for a device like this.
And fundamentally ... the technology that was developed
to make this possible was power charging equipment.
So fundamentally battery technology has been advancing quite well,
especially because of things like renewable power requirements, electric car requirements.
And so there are very good high density batteries to power a weapon like this.
What is lacking is a way to be able to charge capacitors quickly
in order to have a rate of fire that people will deem acceptable
in relation to things like air guns and firearms.
So the EMG-01 here was released for public sale in 2018, and remains available today.
They've done, I believe, five batches of them as of this recording.
And it was intended to be a very light, handy, fun ... essentially a toy.
I don't want to take it too lightly because
... essentially this is similar in power to a simple BB gun.
And like a BB gun you do have to treat it with an element of respect.
This "You'll put your eye out kid," is actually true.
You could certainly injure someone with the projectiles from this,
however it's a pretty darn low-power thing.
So it fires a three-quarter inch by quarter inch in diameter,
or approximately 5x15mm, 6x18mm, steel dowel pin.
Let's go ahead and bring the camera in, and I'll show you this
and the magazine, and how this actually works.
Alright, so you can see we definitely have a bunch of sci-fi cues
taken in the design process here, which is kind of fun.
It looks cool, there's nothing wrong with that.
The body of the device, in fact almost all of the non-electronic parts, are 3D printed.
That's because production volume on this has never been very high,
and ... can't justify the cost of injection moulding equipment.
So in theory that's something that could be done with future products, but hasn't been on this one.
The controls here: the magazine has no actual magazine release.
This is just held in place with friction and a spring ball detent up there.
We'll take a closer look at this in a moment because it's a neat magazine design.
There are two controls on the outside, one is a switch, one is a button.
The switch has its settings actually 3D printed into the body here.
"On" is backwards and "Discharge" is forwards,
and I'll touch on that in a moment, but essentially when you turn it off
... you're turning off the ... on-board computer up here,
but more importantly, you are discharging any remaining charge in these capacitors.
And so that's why the switch is labelled "Discharge".
It is exceptionally important to have the switch on discharge when you put the battery in.
If you have the switch turned on and plug the battery into this thing
you will immediately and catastrophically destroy it.
So, let's go ahead and safely turn it on.
We have a battery cover back here.
Note that there is actually a dovetail for a shoulder stock,
although I think because of the sci-fi styling that
shoulder stock has never seemed to be a particularly important thing to Arcflash.
And frankly, given the power level of this and its accuracy, it's not that important.
This rear cap is just a protective cover for the battery,
and it is also held in place simply by a pair of ball detents right there.
So our switch is set to off, we're going to take the battery
and it plugs in right in that socket.
There we go. This plug is just for charging, so we don't need to worry about that.
Put the battery in there. There is a dovetail down here that holds this case properly in place.
And ... there we go.
Now if I flip the switch on, we will actually boot up the gun - which is such a cool thing.
So "Semi-Automatic Coil Gun", it initially charges up the coils,
and then we have a display here.
It's going to give us a velocity of the most recent shot,
and current status of the battery. So the battery's at 81%.
Notice that when the gun is on, the button lights up to show you that.
There's a bit of red illumination in the barrel, again as a visual cue
that this is powered on and needs to be treated like a loaded firearm.
Now pressing that button will allow me to cycle through the different modes.
Auto mode is not particularly fast.
This is still limited fundamentally by the speed that the capacitors can be recharged.
And burst mode, it's a 3 round burst,
and you do have to hold the trigger down for the entire burst.
If you let up, I guess the ... comparison here is to a mechanical trigger, it is a resetting burst trigger.
So if you feather the trigger and fire only one round in burst,
(which is extremely easy by the way)
as someone who is focused more on firearms
I would say ... the burst mode in this is really unnecessary.
Because the rate of fire is definitely slow enough that
you don't actually need a specific mode for it.
It might come in handy with future iterations that are able to fire at a higher rate of fire.
But not for this one.
Now ... electronically the way this works is
we start with a battery back here that is going to store a large amount of charge.
Batteries are good at holding energy, their downside is
... you can't pull the energy out of a battery very quickly.
And that is where the fundamental technology from Arcflash Labs is relevant.
Because what they have developed is a charging mechanism
that allows them to pull energy very quickly from the battery
and use it to ... charge this bank of capacitors.
Capacitors are also energy storage devices,
but their ... use is that they can dump energy very, very quickly, almost immediately.
So now the firing process really starts with the magazine.
This one has a transparent magazine body, which is cool because you can see how they did the spring.
There are actually a couple of firearms magazines out there that use this mechanism.
This is a coiled flat piece of metal that is going to slowly unwind itself
as you put ... quarter inch dowel pins into the magazine.
We have a 3D printed follower there.
This is a single-stack magazine, and it will hold a total of 18 of these dowel pins.
And you can see as I put these, whoops,
there's no rear set of feed lips so they can slip out the back.
And you can see here that this coil is connected up at the very top of the magazine,
and it's unwinding itself and wants to wind back up.
And that's what provides the force to ... push these armature rods up to the top of the magazine to feed.
Now in order to fire you put the magazine in here,,
that's going to present the top projectile ...
right there. That presents the projectile in line with the barrel.
When you pull the trigger there's a mechanical solenoid back here that is going to trip.
And a solenoid is essentially a linear motor that pushes, again a metal dowel pin really, forward.
That is going to ... bump the top projectile into the barrel
where the first ... capacitor is going to dump its power into the first coil,
creating an electromagnetic field that is going to suck
that magnetic steel projectile into the coil.
As soon as the projectile ... starts to transit out of the coil,
an optical gate is going to send a signal to the computer
which will shut off this capacitor and engage this capacitor.
And essentially in sequence the projectile is accelerated down this series of eight coils
with eight capacitors until it reaches the muzzle.
And goes flying out that little hole in the front.
And that is how a coil gun works.
So let's take this out to the range and try it out.
Not bad, right? I am getting 43.7 metres per second.
So that's 140-ish feet per second with a quite light projectile.
This is more like a BB gun than a firearm.
Still absolutely something you need to treat as potentially deadly.
If you hit someone in the eye with this, you could really seriously injure them.
So, how about auto?
Ah, that's just really cool!
And I think I have some feed issues at the end here.
Yeah, now I have a feed issue that is I'm out of ammunition. These only hold 18.
Yeah, very consistent.
That whole magazine took me from 97% battery to 90% battery.
So you've actually got quite a lot of fire in here before you have to ... change out the batteries.
It was incredibly dumb of me not to just bolt a little red dot on here for looks.
But frankly, this thing is wildly inaccurate, so.
And the projectiles are all tumbling, here take a look at this.
Ignore these big ones, those are from the GR-1 Anvil.
It's these little ones that I've been shooting, and you can see almost all of them are tumbling.
So a future iteration of this technology I'm sure will incorporate a spin to the projectile
to essentially give it rifling, and that'll be a big help for accuracy.
But ... that's so fun.
This is just like awesome kid at Christmas time with a full-auto BB gun kind of fun.
But it's a coil gun because we live in the future!
While Arcflash continues to make these,
the feedback from them was that people really wanted something with more power.
And so that is what led to the GR-1 Anvil (which I have a separate review video on),
which is far heavier, it's about five times heavier, but it's also significantly more powerful.
And over time Arcflash expects that high voltage capacitor technology will continue to increase.
And I think we'll be able to look back on this
as one of those really cool, very first prototype, proof of concept sort of designs.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, this was a lot of fun to take a look at
and a lot of fun to take out on the range and do some shooting with.
Thanks for watching. And thanks to Arcflash Labs for loaning me this for the video.