[Rip tide]

Burt Reynolds played the lead role in a movie in the mid-'80's called Sharky's Machine. In that movie he once used a weapon that was half crossbow (it used a bolt/arrow) and half rubber band gun (it used a huge, thick rubber band, stretched long-wise just like on a toy that shoots rubber bands).

Burt/Sharky had some trouble pulling the huge rubber band into firing position, because he had no lever mechanism. While a lever mechanism would certainly make such a gun much easier to use, my thought was that the single thick rubber band could be replaced with many thinner ones, stretched into place one at a time.

Then, if this gun were made to allow a much thicker rubber band than had the one in the movie, you could load so many more thin rubber bands onto it, resulting in a much greater firing power than has perhaps even a top-powered commercial crossbow.

(If you find your office's supply of rubber bands mysteriously depleted, you now have one possible explanation. :D )

[White Horseradish]

Rubber band gun? It wasn't a speargun (http://www.divebooty.com/equipment_details.asp?pid=2395), was it?

[Rip tide]

Speargun? No, it was a short gun with a short bolt/arrow. It looked nothing like a speargun in length, and it used fletched bolts just like on a crossbow (for shooting through air).

But, in your mention of the speargun, the scene in which Burt/Sharky used this 'rubber-band' gun was on a boat (docked). If I recall, part of the reason he had trouble pulling the rubber band into place was that he had the upper joints of a few fingers missing on one hand (from having had them cut off in a prior scene in which he was being interrogated by some bad guys).

Does a speargun use a rubber band?

[Charles S]

Does a speargun use a rubber band?

Yes, some do use rubber bands.

Charles

[Rip tide]

One microscopic speck of gun powder is not worth much by itself---nor, I hear, is even a small pile of it without a barrel. A bullet by itself is relatively harmless. What makes it dangerous is in the directional containment of the expanding/exploding gas through to a very narrow diameter, resulting in a high velocity/pressure. So the firearm acts as a synergistic whole.

But, a gun that uses a small pile of rubber bands to generate fire power does not involve an omni-directional exposive force, rather it's force is a simple linear one to begin with. So it is less economical, energy-wise, than a firearm. Still, the common rubber band is seen as a harmless little thing, like how the ancient Chinese saw their fancy little explosive toys...

If you shoot a charging moose with a few bags of common rubber bands one at a time (assuming you could slow time down long enough to shoot them all), then you will have a small scattered pile of rubber bands amongst your own scattered carcass. But to harness/release all that power at once...

A few wraps of duck tape around the pin-hole-size leak of a compressed-air hose does not stop the leak, but a few dozen wraps does (it's the cummulative pressure, just like what you feel when wrapping your finger many times with a string).

By the same principle, I was curious how much fire power could be generated from so many bags of common rubber bands. :D

I think it could stop a moose.

[Gifted]

I think that the idea was that the rubber band was the power source, not the actual projectile. Which means that all the rubber bands are released at once, shooting a projectile of some sort. In which case this works.

[Rip tide]

Yep, that's it. Two boxes of rb's, one dead moose.

BTW, I really like your sig! LOL!