Egg Launcher

[Jon13]

Listen, I've never made a build-it-yourself-at-home project before i need to build an egg launcher. does anyone know how much it will cost? money's a little tight.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

How far do you want to be able to launch the egg?

 

You could just build a slingshot deal with some oversized rubber bands...

[Jon13]

we need to launch it 30 ft. but i already have a plan for the launcher. i just need to know how much the usual "Project" cost. my plan is to bend a plank of wood on some springs but make plank not able to move so that the surface tension, along with the springs launch the egg. it's a bit more complicated than that but that's the basic stuff.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

30ft isn't very far. You could get away with some surgical tubing in a slingshot arrangement if you wanted to make it simple.

[Mr Skeptic]

You could just use a piece of cloth. The old style slingshot was a piece of cloth with strings tied to opposite sides. You twirl it and then let go of one string, and the egg will fly at whatever speed you were twirling it at. They are harder to aim though, so be careful not to get egg on someone's face

[SkepticLance]

To MrSkeptic

 

That's the old shepherd's sling. Once when I was stranded on an island by a storm, a bunch of us who had to fill in time made a shepherd's sling. We used a small pouch of leather, and two strings. We had a beach full of rounded pebbles to throw.

 

Man that thing was powerful! When you hear about it, it sounds too simple. But those stones would have broken someone's skull if connected. The only real problem was accuracy. We sent those stones out with an error factor of plus or minus 30 degrees! Everyone else stood well behind the slinger.

 

You wanna throw an egg a mere 30 ft? We could have sent an egg hundreds of metres.

[CaptainPanic]

The trick with an egg launcher is not to get the distance. The real trick is how not to break the egg while launching it... and sometimes also how not to break it when landing.

 

The egg is strong along one axis (top-bottom), and rather weak along all others.

 

Anyway... nobody seems to be prepared to answer the initial question... what should it cost?

 

Whatever design you have, you'll need (for example) some cloth, some rubber elastics or old inner tubes of a bike, perhaps some pieces of wooden planks and a few nails or tape to put it all together. How about 10 euro for the whole thing? (It's a wild guess, but the lack of info really doesn't allow me to do anything more accurate... I am however not scared to estimate numbers... it's because I'm an engineer, not a scientist ).

 

Oh, wait. Forgot about the nucular reactor to power the machine. Costs just went up to 500 billion euro. Sorry.

[SkepticLance]

How not to break an egg?

Hard boil it!

[CaptainPanic]

How not to break an egg?

Hard boil it!

 

That's cheating!

 

Why take a hard boiled egg if you could also make a tennisball launcher?

[Jon13]

we can't use hard boiled eggs that's cheating like sceptilance said. thanks for the ideas guys. wish me luck.

[iNow]

Good luck!