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In 1999, Mouser and some friends began thinking about railguns
and doing some math on how a theoretical one would
operate. Soon, Mouser and I were introduced by our friend
Helen. I had been thinking about railguns since junior high
school, when I saved up my whole summer's lawn cutting
proceeds to buy a giant capacitor from C and H Sales, which
was delivered on a truck and promptly caused my stepmom to
flip out and confiscate it. Some later attempts with
electrolytic caps and BBs didn't do too well, and the ambition
had since been cooling off in the back of my mind. However
when I found a fellow enthusiast of building a railgun I was
happy to throw in with him and give it a go. Soon after that I
moved into the 324 garage, which was an ideal place to work on
the project. For the next 2+ years we worked on the sucker on
and off, the progress of which you can see at railgun.org. We only got to
attempt a firing twice, and it didn't work. But we have some
great ideas for rev 2 of the gun, and we can reuse much of the
controls and electronics we built up for the project. But the
project is basically on the shelf until later since Mouser
moved to New Mexico to finish his degree and I had to move out
of 324 and won't have a shop setup for a while in my new
place. Here are a few pictures of the railgun:
The full setup
Closeup of the breech area
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Design partially original and partially ripped off from other websites
by Holly Gates
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