As some of you may have been aware, I've been working on a solution for a high-capacity magazine. I'm posting this to show that I have succeeded, and where my toils have led. I'm dubbing it the Mark-12 (prototype), since it's the 12th blaster I've built or worked on/mostly built (After the Mk-8, it was a JSPB-style blaster, a 3d-printed Durendal, and Caliburn).
Without further delay, here's the janky prototype of possible doom:
This is my development. For those who haven't been following along, it's a 3s lipo powered 12v blower hooked up to some Carlon 3/4" ENT Flexible Conduit (alt link for a shorter section); connected to the PVC via Sch 40 3/4" PVC, a threaded/slip coupler, and a threaded ENT adapter at both ends, hooked up to a firing tube that flows freely* into a flywheel cage (mine is from a Rayven). As-shown, it has a +/- 20' long coil used as a mag and I've successfully fired several shots off it, and fed a total of 61 full-length darts through it.
The distinction is because I found my connection from the end of the conduit to the FWC to be clogging up with darts. If I were able to spend more time building something right now, I could eliminate that issue. I'll get to it if you don't do it first, but I've been touting this thing for a while now and wanted to get a working prototype out there for others to build off of. So far, I have fed it USC's, waffle heads, and stock darts and all fed fine. I suspect I could use the blower I've sourced with a larger coil-mag, but cut my tubing down yesterday thinking it was the issue. These ENT connectors do not like coming off once attached, so I might need to pick up some more prior to continuing coil-mag length testing.
This is absolutely a bench rig. It is meant for testing, and I'll need to make a shell for if/when I actually plan to use it in a war. Or I'll cram all that into an old Longshot, I'm pretty sure it'll fit. Or maybe I'll just tape it all together into some franken-monster. For the electrical guys, yes, I know I'm not supposed to use wire nuts that way but once I'd rigged up the FWC I realized it'd be a perfect fit inside 1/2" Sch 40 PVC so I just cut it and wire-nutted it back together.
This is the bench rig with the coil mag removed to show what is going on a little bit better. On the left, the aformentioned blower. This one appears very capable of clearing the 20' coil-mag I'm using. Leading from that is a section of 3/4" PVC that I've cut slots into such that it nests over the locking nubs on the blower (probably could achieve the same result by filing/sanding down the nubs, but I wanted to keep the blower mostly intact). The 3/4" has a hole cut into it for feeding darts through - in the future I'd like this to be a Y or a loading door, but this works ok for now and I didn't have either of those handy. Then there are the connectors and coil-mag, and a section of 1/2" PVC leading to a 1/2" PVC T (because I didn't have a coupler handy) leading to the FWC. That part was clogging at the coil-mag -> PVC connection, so I may need to create a fitting or nest some pipe and chamfer it or just feed through the 3/4 or something.
Here's the wiring diagram. Negative blower and FWC go to the negative battery, positive blower goes through the trigger switch and to the battery; positive FWC goes through a rocker switch, then to the trigger switch, and then to the battery.
As for draw, this thing probably needs a much larger battery than I have available. The battery voltage has gone from 12.7 to 11.7 in several minutes of testing and loading. With careful attention, I could probably run this as-is in a war, but only for one 30-minute round and at this time I'd want to be checking it even during that.
For the astute among you, you'll have noticed an important omission - this has no trigger. It could, it'd probably be akin to a Zeus trigger or (for full-auto) a simple SNAP trigger. Currently, pull the trigger-switch and everything turns on and that's it. Flip the rocker switch and the flywheels don't turn so you can load more easily. It probably should have a real trigger at some point, since darts resting on the wheels seem to cause the the stock motors this is currently running to jam. Ideally, it'll have a trigger that mechanically forces the last several darts into the wheels so some lag in blower-pressure doesn't cause a firing lag. That's down the line though, I need to get my printer working again before I can really start to figure that stuff out.
Comments, questions, and criticisms accepted.
*In theory, right now it does not.