Ever since I was young, I've always wanted a real life grappling hook gun, after seeing
them in things like Just Cause, Assassin's Creed, Batman, Overwatch, Titanfall – the
list goes on. But although they’re everywhere in fiction, they’re not everywhere in my
local grocery store, for some reason. So I figured – if I wanted one – I was going
to have to make it myself.
G'day, I'm JT, and about a year ago, at an internship with the YouTube channel Hacksmith
Industries, I started work on this. A real life grappling gun – which can shoot a hook
up into the air, and winch you on after it. And since then, I've made a series of videos
on my attempts of turning it from that proof of concept into the greatest grappling gun
the world has ever seen (and you can find that in a playlist in the description down
below, if you’re interested.) Now, let me demonstrate its qualities for you.
So it’s got a light-weight aluminium chassis that supports all the components, including
a really hefty electric skateboard motor, which gets a torque multiplication of 9 by
a gearbox. There’s a compact CO2 launcher I mounted to the side, made from hydraulic
and paintball parts, and the motor controller sits on top. The whole device can be enabled
or disabled by a small, high current activation key. The grappling hook is a tiny, reliable
and safe design that I invented for my Spider-Man project, and the whole device is controlled
by your thumb operating a small throttle wheel on the side of the handle. Two pulleys are
used to keep the rope perfectly in line with your hand, to stop it twisting your arm. Learned
that the hard way…
The handle is wrapped in leather for grip and style and the motor controller is, in
turn, controlled by a custom circuit board with a microcontroller that I programmed.
There’s an aluminium spool to hold 14 meters of paracord, which is nice because it’s
strong, cheap and stretchy. The whole winch is powered by about 50 volts worth of lithium
batteries, while the launcher is powered by 12g CO2 cartridges. Finally, for extra comfort,
a harness can be attached to a loop at the back. Anyway, let's give this lovely piece
of tech a proper test.
So, this device is very cool, but two things that is not is: well tested, and safe. And
so, for the first test involving dramatic heights, ideally I thought I’d like to keep
the risk of serious injury or death towards the lower side of the spectrum if possible.
So I rang up a local trampoline park and asked them "hey - do you mind if I test this
out using your airbag and auto-belay units?" And surprisingly they said "Yes, absolutely!
Even during opening hours if you like." Which is pretty unexpectedly generous. So let's go!
Once I arrived at the trampoline park, the manager gave me the run down. And understandably,
I had to minimise or avoid shooting the grappling hook near lights, or people – surprisingly! So
for this first test, I climbed up the wall to place the hook manually. Then I hopped
down and clipped in for the first big test. And ...
Pretty good!
“Pretty good” is right! I get 10 meters up the wall in just over three seconds. That
means I could travel up a building at about a story per second. The manager was a bit
concerned by the slack left by the belay unit, but – on the plus side – this way
it's clear that it wasn't assisting me in any way!
We added a chair to give a bit of space before hitting the ground if something were to go
wrong. Not that I have any experience with that. I also tried a hybrid of winching and
climbing, but yeah ... wasn't great.
[Owner] "Spider-Man!” [JT] "Yeah that's me" (forshadowing future video)
Next I wanted to go safety-line-free over at the airbag and – as long as I was careful
[JT] "That's the plan!"
And with the hook up I was free to soar gracefully over the airbag.
"That's the plan and I'm coming back that way. You ready?"
"But can you go high?" "I'll try"
Until the sharp edge of the ceiling beam cut the rope. That is the down side of paracord.
[JT] "Except way more exactly. I wouldn't want to strap a rocket to my arm!"
Ok, so let me tell you something fun. I've actually only been using this at about 75%
power, and right now I can actually reprogram the ESC to get to allow me to get to 100% power. So we'll just
try that out and see how that goes. Don't want to break my ESC.
So having tempted fate a little bit there, I thought would just throw a quick intermission
in here before finishing the rest of the testing. Because basically, I'm not the only one to
try and make a combined grappling gun-winch thing. And I thought it would be really cool
to highlight some of the other attempts I've seen – and also point out what makes mine
different to those.
The first actually comes from one of my favourite MythBusters episodes, along with the paper
crossbow and the leaf-blower hovercraft. And in this one, they tried to build a grappling
winch gun combination, same as me. And although they couldn't quite get the gun/hook part
of it working, they made a pretty cool motorized grappling winch. I do reckon mine was technically
superior to theirs. For one, it was a lot faster, and it doesn't require a battery pack
on your belt, so it is fully self-contained. And also it also let's you go back down again,
which was a bit of a problem for theirs.
[MB Narrator] "Jamie has no choice but to sever the line"
But, on the other hand, I also have 14 years of battery technology improvements on my side as well.
My second pick is what actually appears to be a commercial product from a company "Atlas
Devices". And this one is – you know, being a commercial product – has got to be a lot
safer and more reliable than mine by quite a long way. But, without the launcher and
rope added, it's still huge. And WITH the launcher and rope added, the thing is absolutely
enormous! Can you imagine Batman carting a trailer behind him everywhere he goes?
Another great one is YouTube's very own Colin Furze, who made one out of a cordless drill.
It looked really advanced as far as the launcher was concerned. He made this like custom spool
valve, to keep it compact but also make it really powerful. But, the hook did seem a
little finicky, and it didn't store that much rope (like a couple of meters maybe) so he
didn’t have the greatest range. Seemed like there were a few belt mounted components too,
so not self-contained either. Also; cordless drill, like 600-700 watts. This is 10,000!
So a bit of a power difference there. But nothing against the guy, because Colin made
his in a couple of weeks, whereas this has taken me about a year. And plus, he left a
really nice comment a little while ago which I found really encouraging. So, if you’re
watching this Colin: Cheers mate! I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant here.
And speaking of YouTube giants, Hacksmith Industries also gave it a shot, with a batman
grappling ascender. This one was like the Atlas Devices one, in that it let you feed
rope continuously, so you could use rope of any length. But it was still pretty big, so
a bit later on, the Hacksmith put up another video of trying to make a smaller, more compact
So there were definitely some solid creations there, but I do think this one could potentially
be the best. Anyway I'll let you get back to testing... Or let me get back to testing?
Ok, we’re now running at ten kilowatts. That's a lot of watts. Cool, so I'm just going
to see if I can go and get up that wall! Again, pretending if there’s no belay here; it’s
just for my safety. Alright, let's go! See ya.
Well there you go! I reckon that was a pretty good test. Big thanks to Olivier and the rest
of the staff at Be-Up for being such a great help. But, I still kinda want to try it out
a bit more in a real world situation.
Ok, so I'm out at the park, and I'm going to aim at that really high tree branch up there.
So let's see how that goes…
Alright, well we’re over – beautiful!
And that is now hooked on.
Well, I guess I'll see you up there!
Hmmm
Beautiful, just like a real superhero! With slight coordination issues.
Alright, so you may have noticed: in that last shot, it made it over, I started going
up, all was good - but I wasn't wearing the harness. And that’s fine, but you can probably
imagine, it’s quite hard to precisely position your thumb when you're hanging all of your
weight off of these four fingers. So, the harness just makes that a lot easier.
There we go, and then attach that back on the carabiner, and now I'm hooked on.
Hmm, this inconsistency that started showing up earlier... is getting worse.
So turns out, I think 200 amps was a bit too much for the ESC. It said it could go up to
600 in short bursts, but ESCs are always finicky and it has just slowly been getting more and
more unpredictable, as you just saw. I really would have liked to gotten one final scene
of like: shooting, winching up, climbing onto the branch, then returning back down to the
ground – all in one quick shot. But unfortunately, I think I missed my chance for that. There
are a few small things I would have changed, like I wanted to clean up the wiring just
that bit more, and I was also going to add a spring-loaded cutter, so that – even while
winching, like halfway through – I could cut the paracord. That would have just given
me that bit more freedom to not be tied to a tree the whole time. But generally, I'm
really, really pleased with the work I've put in, and I think it's turned out
really well. I'm very proud of it. And it's kinda one of a kind - and possibly even best
of its class! So, I think I'm happy to put this project to rest now. And the next one
is going to be resuming Spider-Man, so check back in the next video if you want to see
some of that! All the best guys, thanks a lot! See you then.
[JT] "Ok, uh -"
[Cameraman Jeremy] "I’ll stick with my E-bike."
[JT] "No, no this is the future I tell you! But the future is… not quite working right
now, just give me a second!"