Wrist rocket: worlds fastest disc launcher

i've casually played disc golf for a few years and what i've learned from all that experience is that i suck but aren't sports 90 mental so i decided to use my brain although you might think there's something wrong with my brain because i made this my goal has been to throw faster than any human so we're going to see if we can break some records and before everyone accuses me of cheating i want to point out that this disc is regulation it does have this minor issue of so much kick that it'll break your arm and a 100 mile per hour frisbee going past your face so naturally we have to see how bad it would be if you got hit this ended up being my most labor-intensive project ever everything that could break broke i mean heck it broke twice one of the main systems took me 10 generations to get working right i even had to make my own valves like a lot of my projects the journey is the destination so buckle up disc golf is just like normal golf played with discs you play a series of holes where you try to get the discs into a basket with the minimum number of throws you typically start with a long distance drive you get close to the basket and then you put it in i enjoy making things go really really fast so i'm going to focus on the drive and my goal is to make the disc go as fast as humanly possible actually faster than humanly possible and according to the internet the fastest disc ever thrown was 89.5 miles per hour by simon lizotti so our target is 90 miles per hour i've been wanting to make something like this for quite a while and i have a vision of how i think it would work imagine a thing that you could hold that gave your arm an extra joint and it was powered and could spin super fast on command and then it had the ability to hold a frisbee on the end as you swung this thing it would fire and give you a ton of extra speed and then a computer monitoring the swing would release at just the right point the biggest problem with this design is the reaction forces it is going to kick like a mule when it accelerates the frisbee there's an equal and opposite force that pushes into your arm this could mess up your aiming or even injury you thanks a lot isaac newton but wait if i launch two frisbees in opposite directions they'll push on each other and it'll cancel out so we just need an extra arm on our launcher and we'll use a weight instead of a frisbee i need some kind of power source that i can use to accelerate this arm and launch the frisbee in the past i've used explosive blanks to launch stuff really fast but i don't think they're suitable in this case and that's because they're just too fast they release all their energy almost instantaneously if i accelerated this disc as fast as the explosive blanks would want to it would basically just break everything so my plan is to use really high pressure air i can shoot this air into a piston which will make a really strong pull and then i can attach a chain to it to spin the arm but that's only half the problem we also have to stop the arm you can't just have a hard stop because this will destroy everything but there's a really cool trick if we attach the chain to the sprocket it will unwind as it launches the arm and then it will wind the other way which pulls the piston back out acting like a break i really like this design there's no extra parts for me to make break and then remake which is what usually happens with these systems holding and releasing the disc is really hard humans are crazy and we're not going to be making a hand so i'm going to have the disc sit on a flat plane held down by fingers around the rim the fingers will have a trigger mechanism that will let me drop them all in sync that's the basic design two counter rotating arms one holding a frisbee with little claws powered by a high pressure air system all right let's get this thing made [Music] oh crap this hole is supposed to be over here this part is too big to fail if anyone asks you didn't see anything everything is super beefy because the forces and torques are ridiculous this thing has a lot of round parts which means a lot of lathe work you know what don't even ask cutting square edged holes is sometimes a real challenge this is the arm brace and will be formed into the shape of my arm hey wife yeah could you see if we have a rod kind of similar size to my bicep yeah sure [Music] very cool if you want to understand what the heck some of these tools are check out my shop tour i 3d printed as many parts as i could but the forces are so high that pretty much everything had to be metal once the parts are finally made the assembly is pretty easy [Music] so cool this is completely ridiculous but also really cool so you hold it with this handle and strap it to your arm this is the air cylinder that powers it and this is the chainring that it drives and this gearbox rotates the arms in opposite directions the frisbee sits here and is held in place by these fingers the little air piston that releases the fingers is in here and it pulls on these rods for a fast synchronized release this whole thing is powered by a power pack which you wear like a utility belt so it's designed to be worn in the small of your back like this although if you're feeling chic you could wear it on your side and if you're feeling adventurous you can wear it like a 90s fanny pack but it just doesn't seem like a great place for a 3000 psi air system the power pack is simple there's the high pressure air tank a valve to control the air flow to the launcher and a low pressure side to drive the frisbee release my first instinct is to strap this to my arm and give it a shot but that is a really bad idea for one i'm running this air cylinder at six times it's rated pressure i did analyze its strength and it should be totally fine but my bigger fear is actually the stuff that's spinning around something became partially detached it could fling around and whip the snot out of me we're gonna test this really thoroughly before i strap it to my body whenever you test something like this for the first time it's always really nerve-wracking anything can happen and so i'm in the safest spot in my shop so here we go three two one that was about 30 times slower than it should have been which is kind of funny but also really annoying although i think i might know what the culprit is i'm really suspicious of this gearbox everything feels really good in low friction right now but if you put a lot of torque through these gears they try to push each other apart i think this is shoving them into the side of the gearbox and generating a ton of friction so we're going to modify the gearbox to put these bearings between the gears and the wall all right hopefully it works this time three two one why all right so i've been doing a lot of testing and i think that this valve is part of the resistance trying to undermine my disk launcher from within the reason i use this valve is that someone on amazon said it worked for their potato cannon and i thought sounds great i'm basically launching a potato too uh yeah cool story mr potato head if that even is your real name i just did the math which i should have done before on the air flow that i can get through this valve and there's not a chance that it'll work this valve is between the tank of high pressure air and the pneumatic cylinder and the problem is that it has a tiny little hole which only lets a little bit of air through so the piston moves really slow unfortunately i can't get a suitable valve quickly and i want it right now so we're gonna make our own valve we'll start with a giant hole that all the air can go through then we'll add a piston that can open and close the hole pressurizing this side will push the piston down and open the valve we can even use our high pressure air to do this we just need a small valve to turn this piston on and off which is a perfect use for this valve that i thought was useless and you know the drill we just got to make it now this is the valve piston it goes in like a glove it really is pretty simple i did integrate a safety stick which prevents the valve from opening until i'm definitely ready let me show you the difference between these valves here's the old one three two one now i'm going to show you what a real valve does two one [Music] [Applause] it's just too much stress for the balloon to handle the balloon is gone in five thousandths of a second balloons are cool but it'll be really cool if it actually works three two one and so slow this is starting to get pretty annoying actually come on all right i think i found another problem i'm very hesitant to say the problem because i've said that three times already basically we have a bottleneck and our bottleneck let me show you oh come on hold on i don't have the right tool [Music] okay let me show you and this is the regulator the tank actually has a super duper high pressure inside of it and the regulator allows it to output a constant lower pressure even as that pressure inside the tank changes here's what's inside it's a lot of interesting stuff but the main takeaway is there's another tiny hole tiny holes are bad all right it's starting to get a little bit complicated but we're gonna add a second tank that has no regulator the main tank pressurizes the secondary tank before we fire the second tank has a big hole which can deliver all the air when we fire all right let's try again [Music] ignore the fact that it didn't release that's a software bug the speed is way better but what is with this kick oh my goodness i know what is happening i think of stupid and smart as a continuum you have stupid over here smart over here and everything in between but what you might not realize is it's actually a circle and it's possible to do something that you think is really smart you actually wrapped all the way back around the stupid which is exactly what i did right here with this torque problem looking at it from above things are great all the forces cancel out but from this view the top arm is pushing this way and the bottom arm is pushing that way which wants to twist the launcher like a lot so i calculated how much torque this would put on your arm and it's about the torque output of a honda civic so i'm going to remove this lower arm this will cut the torque in half although it does mean we're going to get the kick that i was trying to cancel out so to try to make that better i'm going to make all the mass moving up here as light as possible the downside is i have to redesign and remake everything that moves yeah that's not great cnc is the best i call it the finger flinger the idea is that the disc sits on a little finger at the end of the arm as the arm rotates the disc will swing out and when it's at the right point you can drop the finger to let the disc fly the real finger looks like this and is held in place with a metal wire the wire is held and released by a mechanical trigger at the base of the arm including the counterweight this way is 20 times less than what we had before we should really reduce the kick and the torque one little tricky thing is that before it starts swinging the disc can just flop and fall anywhere so there's a little plastic clip that holds it in place before it starts moving and then it can just swing away freely it's cool and all but does it work three two one hopefully that was a fluke [Music] it can throw alright sometimes but if there's any wobble it just pops out slight redesign hopefully this holder will keep it stable alright let's try it i think i somehow managed to make it worse this is the super duper holder which super duper supports the disc three two one oh i got it wrong it's the super duper waste of time i just don't see any way of making the disc stand here without making this too heavy i'm gonna go back to the original holder and try to make it really light any mass that can't tell me what it would say it does here is gone everything is skeletonized lighter fasteners and i modified it to use the finger trigger because it's a lot lighter so before i sink any more time into this i want to actually test it with me holding it i'm going to do it at an extremely low power this will let me test the whole system it'll also let me test the throwing modes so up until now i've been using bench mode which if i hold this button for two seconds it'll trigger it but it also has throwing mode there's an accelerometer and gyroscope on the launcher that monitors the tilt and rotation of it when it reaches a certain point in the throwing motion it will trigger it to fire the frisbee time just go for it wow [Music] three two one [Music] it seems like the disc isn't releasing at the right point you know i think that assessment might have some merit something somewhere is broken and i don't know what it is so i'm going to stop before i hurt myself and try to figure out what the heck is going on [Music] you solve one problem you create another the discs are jamming oh my gosh now that we're going really fast i think the extreme acceleration forces are jamming the triggers so they don't open which means that we get to redesign and remake the triggers i think you know the drill at this point okay this should be practically unjammable [Music] all right 10 power here we go all right that looks great 25 what so it kind of looks like the disc is catching air under it and getting forced out i love how we now have the opposite problem of jamming i'm making a quick and dirty air shield to see if i can improve the situation this should block air from flowing under the front of the disc all right 25 promising how about 50. nice i think this actually works 75 we're going for it two one [Music] the disc popped out immediately a lot of stuff just happened we broke the carbon fiber tube which i don't think is that big of a mystery the disc popping out early is just really really bad normally most of the energy goes into the disc and when it's released it takes it away but when the disc pops out early all that energy goes into the arm which makes go super fast and then slam into the stop system with gusto you could say it turns the brake system into the brake system we're gonna replace the tube with titanium which doesn't shatter now the real mystery is why the disc is popping out almost immediately i don't think this is aerodynamics this time because it's happening almost immediately before it starts going fast i think this is actually g-forces the disc is going from zero to sixty in a few thousandths of a second this pushes the disc into the arm with over a hundred pounds of force i think it's pushing it just so hard that it bends like this which lets it pop out of the fingers the acceleration begins immediately which is why the disc would fly out when it's not even going fast so my thought is if there's no gap to squeeze through then it can't squeeze through let's put that shower thought to a test this fully supports the back edge of the frisbee which will hopefully keep from popping out i'm using one of the trigger fingers to keep the disc in then when we're ready to fire we can open the trigger finger and the disc should roll out of this holder i'm so tired of making grippers please work three two one yeah that's definitely gonna be a no for me dog i'm really tempted to make a custom solid metal disc which can't bend but that would be deadly and also not regulation i think the answer is to pull on the disc from the front this will want to stretch the disc out rather than compressing it and it shouldn't bend so that means we get to redesign and remake the disc holder for i don't even know the 100 000 millionth time before i sink a ton of time into making a nice gripper i want to confirm that pulling on the disc actually works this simple prototype holds under the rim but it doesn't release all right 75 power here we go i think this concept works also i was wrong about this one not releasing the disc trying to stop the frisbee broke it [Music] i couldn't have hit more things if i tried but as far as i'm concerned that is the sound of victory i think we just have to make it for real and find out it's 95 carbon fiber because i need maximum strength and minimum weight it's basically the same way you make a drone carbon fiber titanium aerospace grade aluminum all to throw a piece of plastic you think we're trying to go to the moon here this is just like the prototype except there's a little trap door holding the disk in place if this doesn't work i give up three two one [Music] finally it works this has been such a slog this is the most time i've put into any project and a lot happened so let me summarize we made the original design which had bearing issues then we had a series of pneumatic bottlenecks and made our own high flow valve we realized the launch would twist your arm off then we wasted time trying to make a finger flinger with three generations of stabilizers we backtracked and made the super light gripper which wouldn't let go so we developed a new trigger finger then as we started to go faster we ran into aerodynamic issues with the holder and had to make a windshield then as we accelerated even harder the three-finger holder couldn't handle the g-forces so we went off on a tangent trying to make a around holder which didn't work so then we made a prototype pulling on the frisbee holder which worked i made another wooden prototype which i didn't show because it was boring and then we made a spaceage certified carbon fiber prosthetic hand and all i want to know now is can it throw faster than a human because if it can't that would be really really disappointing remember the speed to beat 89.5 miles per hour i've got a setup that we're going to use to measure the speed of the high speed camera but before we do that i'm going to throw the disc so that we get a human bass line i already know that i suck so you don't have to tell me that all right it's the robot's turn three two one [Music] 85 miles per hour at 40 percent power that is what i'm talking about all right let's step it up three two one wow that's it could we do 100 miles per hour i bet we could max power in three two one that obviously wasn't supposed to happen that way it looks like the centrifugal force was so high that it pulled the gripper off the titanium rod i have the clamps maxed out so to fix this would take some new parts since we're already exceeding 90 miles per hour let's just call 75 100 i grabbed some dimensions off this still frame before impact and i calculate that the disc is going about 115 miles per hour but it is a weird perspective so take that with a big grain of salt [Music] i think it's a really bad idea to hold this launcher the disc can come off and when it does it's deadly blah blah blah blah blah boring we've demonstrated that it's fine at lower power so let's do it but we are not going over 15 power all right here we go three two one so [Music] yeah it's probably a good time to end it i forgot to aim this thing is amazing i love this it's fast but how far can it go i really don't want to take it to a park this is the kind of thing that generates interest that you don't really want so thankfully we have a family friend with a really long field i bet it's gonna go so far three two one [Music] directly into the manure all right let's try again three two one do a barrel roll do a barrel roll my very shallow understanding is that discs flipping over is a fundamental behavior how much discs want to do this is so important it's actually one of the ratings for the discs i'm using discs that don't want to flip over but they're not designed for the speeds that i'm going and they're still wanting to flip i tested all the discs in all the configurations so i'm all right some are terrible i'm getting about 550 feet which is less than half of the human distance record which really highlights how insane that record is so you'd think if i'm throwing it faster than any human it would go further than any human can throw but it's actually really complicated discs are basically wings and gyroscopes how much the disc wants to flip and how efficiently it flies is extremely dependent on the design i think if i want to come anywhere near the distance record i'm probably gonna have to design my own disc for the speeds that i'm throwing at and i also think i'm gonna need a lot more spin when the disc spins it stabilizes itself from tipping just like a gyroscope and i think i'll also need a really strong tailwind you know what hold on [Music] oh that's really close but i'm not a woman so i brought the wife out to press the button in which case i think it counts because she's a woman who could argue with that who could argue with that all right here we go three two one [Music] point [Music] okay not the strongest start let's try again three two one [Music] whoa [Music] that was a good one you can see how far it went 167 meters approximately what was the record again [Music] you know i think that might be for the best i can't put my finger on it but something about this just doesn't really feel quite legit i do think it would help if i was holding it do you want to hold it no so this thing will let you throw a frisbee faster than a human but a sacrifice must be made it'll either break your arm or possibly kill you not exactly the most useful thing ever but i think it's a good proof of concept i learned a ton and i have a lot of ideas on how i can make it safe and how i could launch the frisbee really far which i think is a super interesting problem and i know this thing is powerful but i want to get a better visual so we're going to shoot it at some melons just to see what happens but before we do that i want to talk about getting these videos made so i just spent eight weeks designing and building and testing this thing and i still can't believe that's my life it is so fun and i'm so thankful to be in this position projects like this have zero commercial potential so my ability to make them is totally dependent on your help so if you want to help me make more projects like this there's a few things that you can do the first thing you can do is subscribe to the channel this helps me get sponsors you can support the projects directly on patreon or by picking up a sweet shirt and the final thing you can do is take a minute to check out this video sponsor i get messages every single day from people who want to learn to make stuff like i do and the simple answer is that you learn a specific set of skills which you apply to solve various problems but picking up that set of skills is the hard part and it's why i think the sponsor for this video is really important it's a company that i've wanted to work with for over a year and they're called brilliant i love tools and this is an amazing tool for learning what they do is they take a subject like linear algebra and they present it in an interactive and hands-on way so you're solving real problems you're seeing the results and it's a really effective way to learn and linear algebra may seem esoteric but i use it all the time i've found that if i spend a little bit of time learning every day it's just insane how much progress i end up making in six months it's kind of like working out except for your brain brilliant is really good for this because they take these big meaty topics where you don't even know where to begin and they divide it up into little chunks that you can do one every day and before you know it you know a bunch of new cool stuff right now i'm trying to improve my statistics game i'm working through all the statistics lessons is kind of inspiring me to try to beat the house we'll see so if you want to level up your skills and become more capable as a human check out brilliant all you have to do is go to brilliant.org stuff made here to sign up for free and the first 200 people will get 20 off their annual premium membership learning and applying knowledge is definitely one of life's great joys so i hope you check it out and that's it thank you brilliant for sponsoring this video and thank you for listening time to find out what would happen if you had an exceptionally soft head and got hit by this three two one [Music] and we want some cantaloupe fresh cut [Music] that seemed like a good one i know most people are stronger than a melon but man i would not want to get hit by this that's all i've got until v2 assuming i make it i hope you enjoyed this project and maybe you learned something if you feel the urge to get out there and make something or learn something i would recommend acting on it it's a source of great joy [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 7,761,706

Keywords:

Id: gnwIiw3Rz3I

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/kickert-sd]

I came here to post this, but new in my heart it had already been done.

Great video. Even Italian Simon Lizotte will appreciate it.

[u/Kirrod]

Why didn't he launch the disks on a much more hyzer angle?

[u/Hvutti]

Shane has one of the best channels on Youtube. I highly recommend checking out more of his stuff.
I like his baseball bat videos in particular.

[u/SunkenSwallow]

This is amazing. He needs to set this up in a controlled manner and we can finally see what high speed discs do at consistent levels of throwing.

So we can finally find out, let's say, if the bohrium actually goes faster than other discs when thrown at the same speed at like 75mph perhaps. And why not find out what discs do at 95mph.

How the weight of the disc affects flight etc. So many possibilites

[u/facedodge]

"Simon Lizzotie" LOL

[u/magikian]

I actually went into his discord and gave him this idea.. i have not seen the video yet.. but holy shit im excited!!

https://imgur.com/eI7MaiW

[u/Gnatt]

He's also a Redditor:

u/swighton

[u/shoogshoog]

THE BEAUTIFUL BASTARD ACTUALLY DID IT!

[u/PlannerSean]

Finally I can take my revenge on one very specific tree.