SpudFiles

well i am bored again So i was sitting in class today thinking of stuff i could build, and i came up with this idea of making a marble mini gun. this is going to be one of the hardest things i have tried to build so i need some advice. here are my sketches of what i want to build


the top picture is the whole gun , and the bottom one is the barrels assembly, it has 5. the air will be stored in a Large air chamber (shown in blue) and the air will be held by a ball valve. When i am ready to fire it, i am going to use something like an air drill to spin the barrels around and around at an approximate speed of 700 RPM. Once at full speed, i will open the ball valve and release the marbles stored in the tube (shown in green) the marbles will then fall into the barrels and get shot out by the air coming from the tank. My only concerns right now are

#1 how to seal the ball valve to the barrel assembly
#2 how to get the marbles to actually go into the barrels, rather than bouncing off when its spinning

anything else you can see wrong with it?

#2 how to get the marbles to actually go into the barrels, rather than bouncing off when its spinning

Well, I hate to say it, but this is a pretty half-assed idea if you don't even have a loading mech in mind. You generally should come with a revolutionary idea and ask us if it will work, not come to us and ask for revolutionary ideas.

Come up with a loading mech for this thing, and it could be quite impressive.

well i have a few loading ideas in mind.
#1 is to pressurize the tube that the marbles get put in, but i don't think it will work that great
#2 was to spring load the marbles, this would work for sure, but would limit the amount of marbles i can keep in the tube.

i was just hoping someone would have a better idea

I designed a minigun loader with only one moving part per barrel, and it should have been almost completely immune to jams and double feeds.

The trick was using the rotation of the barrels to load themselves (through the side with a breech) by dragging it with the spin. The single moving part was a bolt which sealed the breech.

The only two problem's are:

1) It was designed for 6mm airsoft pellets, and scaling it up for marbles would be very tricky because the system needed a special powered feed for which they don't make components in the right size.
2) It was pretty complex, probably a lot more so than you want to build.

ok... i drew up a loading mechanism... it works like this. there is a tube that hold a few hundred marbles, it is vertical. There is a tube that goes horazontal that has a piston of sorts inside it, when you open the one ball valve, it slides to the back (left) of the tube, and marbles run in... close it and open the other one and it forces the marbles into the barrels. Only problem i see is the marbles getting halfe in and stopping the barrels from spinning