Engineering real Spider-Man webshooters

sponsored by PCB way hey it's me your friendly neighborhood fake Spider-Man who doesn't have superpowers can't stop crime and is funny but what I can do is shoot webs and swing from them yeah this is the web shooter I made two years ago and it's really cool it's so I amum forgot I was upside down okay so uh guess I'm going to have to build a new one maybe that's not such a bad thing though cuz admittedly there were some design flaw in the original it was too large and it didn't really look anything like the real Spider-Man's web shooters so that's my goal make the web shooters smaller wrist mounted and prettier the only problem is they have to do all these things and still be strong enough to swing from by the way I actually did hang upside down off the side of a building to get that intro so I hope you appreciated that but yeah I'll be pretty much overhauling my old web shooters entirely if you want to see how they worked I have a whole video about them but the important thing to know is just that my old web shooters were kind of like metal cylinders that shot one web each and then you could hold on to like a handle to swing from they launched the webs with an explosive mix of compressed propane and air which is pretty dangerous but more annoyingly the flame front actually melted my webs over time so for the new launcher I'm going to start from scratch and use compressed air but I'm not talking about normal compressed air like 120 PSI or even those CO2 canisters that you see all the YouTube makers use myself included those are a lot better at 800 PSI but they still kind of suck their aperture is too small to dump the gas quickly and liquid CO2 at room temperature just takes a while to vaporize so you're not really getting the full power that that pressure should offer now I'm talking about Air at like 4,000 PSI which is the kind of pressure that puts scuba tanks clean through brick walls I reckon with this kind of pressure I can get the launcher down to like the size of a wine cork but to my knowledge a tiny valve that can hold that kind of pressure and open that quickly and have an aperture that size just straight up doesn't exist and never has so I'm going to have to design it myself and I came up with this a custom valve that can do all those things to save space there's no separate air chamber the valve itself holds all the air that it needs you basically pressurize it through a oneway fill Port here and the air is trapped by these extra hard O-rings on either side of the spool this Spool in the middle can freely slide backwards and forwards and the whole thing activates when you pull the spool far enough backwards at the moment where the front seal leaves its housing all the air can begin rushing out through these slots and in fact the pressure differential now helps to push the valve the rest of the way open which is known as a blow open design now I want to stress I'm not building a pipe bomb it just might be one by accident if my calculations are wrong 4,000 PSI in metric is about 260 bar which you know metric being an actually sensible system just means there's 260 times as much air squashed into there than it would probably prefer and yes if you're feeling pedantic that's only for the isothermal case but come on let's not be thermodynamic snobs here okay other than the fill Port everything is custom made so so I started Machining everything needs to be pretty hefty so it doesn't explode but it also needs to be very precise because if there's a gap at these pressures the opening will basically just liquefy and squeeze itself out of the Gap sadly I don't have a milling machine so after a bunch of high Precision turning I just had to take an angle grinder to the valve core to make the airf flow slots then I drilled through the tail of the core and made a tiny lever that acts as the trigger finally I assembled the whole thing and welded on the fill valve and the end caps so yeah this is the finished valve open closed open closed I did a quick high pressure test to confirm that it was in fact a valve and not an IED but it didn't explode so success before I even attach the barrel though let's first just see how much air comes out of this thing when you [Music] fire goodness graci whoa that's that is a lot more vicious than I expected I was feeling pretty good about this but before I could stick a barrel on it I needed to know what shape and size the new web is going to be so let's put a pause on this and go have a think about the web so to quickly get you up to speed when I was first looking into making real Spider-Man webs I did some polymer Extrusion tests but quickly realized that despite some really cool liquid spiderweb demonstrations on YouTube if you want to safely hold a swinging person on a thin web you just got to use strong rope but rope doesn't stick to things so I invented something called a hook chain it's a bit like a grappling hook but it works by wrapping around something and fastening to itself so it's much more reliable and it's way smaller but for this new chiny web shooter it's still not small enough so I'll need to shrink the whole thing to about a quar of the size like this plastic mockup that I printed on a ender 3s that creality kindly gave me the problem with making the hooks smaller is they will break unfortunately even if they're made of steel supporting the weight of a swinging person is just a lot but I actually think the solution much like burglary is to level up my Steel game because the amount of variation in the strength of metals is so much more than most people expect I want to show you a chart that's probably going to blow your mind all right yield strength of pure aluminium 35 map pascals is not too good but by alloing it with a few materials you can get 6063 structural aluminium notice will be better but by heat treating it you can get it all the way up to 150 megapascal huge Improvement but not as good as regular mild steel which is 280 megap pascals but mild steel is not as strong as steel can get let's jump all the way up to Tool Steels yeah so it is off the charts I've I've pasted some paper to let me show you let me show you so yes it definitely tops the charts and then goes higher into the ceiling even and then keeps going it goes all the way along the ceiling until here 1,900 that is a awful lot more than 280 but it is a little bit Britt compared to normal steel which is where this last material comes in have um you ever heard of maraging Steels they've got all the strength of tool Steels but they're not as brittle they have better impact resistance and in fact they can be stronger than tool Steels they can go all the way across the whole ceiling to the wall and down the wall and keep going 3,450 megap pascals aluminium is 35 that's 100 times stronger 100 I mean these hooks they're going to be tiny as soon as I can get some more aging steel so it turns out two of the most common uses for maraging steel are missile chassis and uh uranium enrichment centrifuges and I also live in South Africa which is a country that has some interesting Foreign Relations so I'm not actually able to get any unless I like move to a really non-threatening country like Canada International authorities love Canadians right so I did do that I moved to Canada the rent prices were pretty horrendous and I had to convince a friend of mine to let me use his very nice Workshop but all in all it was pretty straightforward and that allowed me to contact an American supplier for maraging steel which was very exciting up until they told me it'll be $44,000 and 6 weeks for a single piece which you know I I probably should have checked before moving here in the end I figured I'd just try with tool steel and hope there's no impact issues for a part like this I could see an easy way and hard way of making it the easy way was to get the metal 3D printed but I didn't want to back down from a challenge but I I did so I went online and ordered some hooks out of 3D printed tool steel from pcbway pcbway has kindly sponsored this video and they don't want to waste your time either so let me give you the quick 20 second Spiel on what they offer they do circuit board fabrication obviously hence the name up to 64 layers rigid Flex stencils whatever and assemble them they can 3D print INF fused nylon stainless steel tool steel even titanium they can do CNC Machining including full five access Milling they can do Sheet Metal Fab they can do injection molding all these processes from a single service is pretty neat so if you need some prototyping done give PCB way a look at PCB way.com my hooks have arrived they look great but I'm going to have to set up a t Cil test to see if they actually meet my insane requirements this tiny part needs to hold 300 kilos or in American units approximately one Harley-Davidson I don't have a tensil tester so I just stuck a crane scale on a whopping great ratchet strap and started hoisting the test works pretty well and the 3D printed tool still did way better than a stainless test piece I made but sadly the hook broke before I got to my 300 kg goal tragically that means I'm going have to do it the hard way so I had the Hook's laser cut from some oh wait laser hardens the edges so I had the hooks water jet cut from some 44c tool steel then made some jigs to CNC mill some curved faces so that the Rope wouldn't be cut by the sharp edges of the hook wait this is sharper now okay so I fixed that with some more Milling then used a la and a plastic jar for steel bolts to Tumble them further knocking down in the edges before taking them to another company for heat treating and they're done several frustrating weeks for me but hey only 20 seconds for you a ttile tested them and they survived 300 kg no problem thank goodness but I wasn't sure about their shock resistance I don't have a choie impact tester but there's a much easier way to check shock resistance yeah that is what I thought would happen to be fair most people get quite shocked when you hit them with a hammer so this result isn't too surprising yeah it'll probably be fine to finish up the web I needed to focus on the Rope one of the biggest issues with any rope is that when you not in it you lose like 20 to 50% of its original strength but in super thin high performance dyema like I'm using you lose like 85% of all the knots I tested a triple fisherman's ended up performing the best but it was still pretty appalling so I had to turn to the mystical world of splicing essentially splicing is working a ropes fibers back into itself to make a loop or joining lines by kind of feeding them into each other and a splice can retain up to 100% of the rope's original strength depending on the braid angle you can even splice thin and thick line together seamlessly which is pretty cool so yeah now the webs can be made with thinner line I spliced all the loops and painted the hooks White and the webs were basically done these are just the boring loopover beam webs but I've got some more advanced ones I'm working on that I'm really looking forward to showing you next time now I knew the size of the webs I could make the launches Barrel to fit them so I st welded some attachment post onto the valve made a rubber gasket and welded up a small square Barrel that would fit the web perfectly while I was at it I also had the idea to make this a thin round long barrel that I could just stick a bit of metal in there and use it as a projectile to see what kind of power I had available I set up a little bench test with my mate Jeff but I wasn't really sure what to expect I started at about 20% of Max Pressure so this is the first shooting test at 900 PSI so let's give this a go what the heck at 900 the flipp and board goodness gracious do we try 2,000 GT I'm going to be honest that scared the absolute 2,000 PSI I did some preliminary mats and it came out that it was going to be like a qu the energy of a 9 mm and I was like no that's not right it's I've done the maths wrong it sounded like a gun oh so yeah it's too powerful I can run this thing at 1110th and still worry about breaking my fingers when it's strapped onto my wrist speaking of which I had to figure out how to mount this thing to my wrist and I was seriously considering designing a black leather bracer like Tom Holland Spider-Man uses but in the end I just went with some simple lowprofile velcro straps to make it really easy to put on and take off of course with the plain metal it looks kind of bad so I needed to design a plastic casing for it my mate Santiago agrees with me that the Andrew Garfield web shooters are the best looking and he made this really cool 3D mockup based on those using cardboard aided design then I took it as a Bas and and modeled a similar one with computerated design and added this cool little spider Motif along the whole piece then I 3D printed it in resin hand painted on some detailing and I was done so this is the finished web shooter to operate it you first load a small piece of wding to help the projectile seal and then you load the web after it short webs can fit in the barrel by themselves but for long webs you store the excess length in this cassette underneath the web isn't attached to the launcher because you can't really hang your whole weight off velcro wrist straps and also because I'm currently working on a device to help your hand be able to grab onto the web safely which is more like the real Spider-Man anyway oh yeah and the web does hold my weight no problem to charge the launcher you just plug the hose from a portable HPA tank into the web Shooter's Quick Connect Port fill it and then disconnect this tank will refill the web shooter about 50 times if you're filling to Max Pressure but because the launcher is way too powerful I've typically been running it at like 15% the trigger is just a thin Loop that you pull to fire in some of the movies he uses a button but that would be so annoying it would shoot whenever you try to grab something and would just get in the way putting the trigger Loop over your finger does work but you end up often doing T-Rex hands to try to avoid shooting accidentally so the solution is a fairly loose line on your thumb that permits full motion but can be actuated by grabbing the excess with the classic Spider-Man gesture that pulls the trigger lever and fires the [Music] launcher oh no no no oh dear despite losing one of my webs there at the end I am really pleased with this not only does it look great but finally now I have webs and launcher small enough to consider putting multiple of them on one arm which is like one of the main challenges to be able to swing continuously multi-shot will probably be twoo videos away though because the next one's focusing on having webs that stick to more different kinds of objects and being able to securely grab onto the Rope at any point by hand that one we'll have some more actionpack testing sorry if this was a bit light on that anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Built IRL

Views: 1,443,140

Keywords: IRL, In Real Life, Materials science, Spider-Man, Spider Man, spiderman, spiderverse, webshooter

Id: QlJDHNrEul0

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024