Project: Flamethrower

[Jolley]

the flamethrower is a genocidal war machine that has a great history being used widely since world war one til the Vietnam war and even rumored to have been used in ancient wars before then. it brings fear to the enemy of the wielder burning them alive.

so my project is can i make an airsoft version of a flame thrower and will it be as feared and genocidal on an airsoft scale?

i first got the idea after watching this video on you tube

then i thought i should try and make it into a realistic looking flamethrower like this painted in OD green

so i want to know if anyone has any ideas?

should i make it out of metal or plastic?

metal giving it a realistic feel and weight - plastic being much less costly and easier to work with.

and lastly should i go with the wwII style M2 shown above or try to make one with a more modern look to it?

 

[two_zero]

My first though when I reed the title was "a flour thrower", something to consider. If you can find a handle from an old pressure washer it could make a nice base for it.

 

[Jolley]

not a bad idea i should be to hard to replace airsoft pellets with flour kinda like one of those mines that shoot pellets flour or water

 

[two_zero]

not a bad idea i should be to hard to replace airsoft pellets with flour kinda like one of those mines that shoot pellets flour or water

exactly! or filling 40mm shells with it

...extra deadly in wet weather I might add!

 

[Finius]

Can't see this idea being allowed on sites for insurance purposes, that, and people punching you when you wreck their fancy new gun for the whole day by filling it with flour.

Water might work better...

I've seen smoke throwers before that puff big clouds of smoke, you could set one up with orange smoke to mimic flame, anyone within the field is instantly dead, but I don't know if they come in handheld sizes...

Nor do I know if that would even be legal...

 

[two_zero]

Can't see this idea being allowed on sites for insurance purposes, that, and people punching you when you wreck their fancy new gun for the whole day by filling it with flour.

Water might work better...

I've seen smoke throwers before that puff big clouds of smoke, you could set one up with orange smoke to mimic flame, anyone within the field is instantly dead, but I don't know if they come in handheld sizes...

Nor do I know if that would even be legal...

why would it not be allowed/legal?

we have flour mines, water mines, 40mm showers, 40mm 'rubber battons' (which I disagree with, since one bb is all you need for a kill), smoke grenades, bangs... how is this any worse, and what makes it illegal? preferably I'd be more pissed of if I got soaked with water.

if its about asthma, well people who has it are always asked to identify them self at the beginning at games. so that they can be helped out from smoked areas etc. I assume if someone had asthma you would just have to leave your thrower at the safe zone.

 

[bigshep]

fps problems: how do you measure the fps, how do you regulate the fps

ROF: the amount of shots per second on the video would cause personal injury at the close ranges you are firing at.

Personally I would try to make a flamethrower using a normal AEG and use it as a support style weapon with a belt/pipe fed system from the pack. That way all you have to do is make the externals from the material of your choice and use the internals from an AEG.

 

[Finius]

With regards to insuring a flour-thrower, I just can't see it going down well with insurers, you're aiming a spray of flour at someone, use it wrong and you've potentially got a choking related fatality on your hands. I'm not saying it's likely, just that it's possible and that is enough to freak insurers out. That and, would you want to be covered in flour all day after some gay hosed you with the stuff in the first twenty minutes of play? I really don't see anyone being up for it.

As for the legality issue, that was about the smoke-thrower, that being because it'd probably class as a pyrotechnic and thus, illegal for home-manufacture and an even bigger insurance issue.

 

[adam bussey]

how about a larger diameter tube with airflow going through it an the bb's are fed into the tube when the trigger is pulled and the air comes on to give a flame-thrower type spray?

 

[Ian_Gere]

not a bad idea i should be to hard to replace airsoft pellets with flour kinda like one of those mines that shoot pellets flour or water

exactly! or filling 40mm shells with it

...extra deadly in wet weather I might add!

I've got some ideas, but 1st I've got to address this. Flour mines are 1 thing, but spraying flour all over people is entirely another. I go to airsoft, not a food fight.

 

[Airsoft-Ed]

Also, if it's literally baking flour we're talking about here, what if someone happened to lob a lit pyro through the centre of the flour cloud?

A fuck off fire ball would happen.

 

[Ian_Gere]

They way that bloke has made his has several drawbacks, but the most important, because we can get to safety once we have a plan for a skirmishable weapon, is that, because he has used easily available and easy to work with parts, the pressure in his tank is pretty limited. You could get more BB's downrange in the same amount of time with a high ROF AEG with a big mag and that could put another massive burst in seconds later, whereas his tank would need to be pumped up again.

So what a skirmishable BB-thrower needs is either a number of paintball style tanks or a 12V compressor built into the backpack.

The next thing is that the pop bottle looks more naff than a 2/3rds size 2-tone M4 and that's saying something! Plus it obviously needs to stay filled with enough BB's that there will always be plenty around the tube opening for simple air pressure to make them feed. Which means that, assuming we solve the air pressure issue, it would have to be dismantled after every good spry to put more BB's in.

How about put the BB hopper in the backpack too? Something like a 10cm tube with a funnel shaped bottom attached vertically, but with no hole in the bottom. The 'out tube' would be fixed so that its opening was in the bottom 1.5cm-ish so gravity would keep the BB's flowing into position to be blown up the tube by air pressure right until the last few. If the 'out tube' was also 'upside down J-shaped', so it poked out of the side of the BB hopper, and the pressure inlet was in the side also, a screw cap with a gasket, of the type used as inspection covers on soil pipes in plumbing would be a lot easier to reload through.

The BB's would need to travel down a tube into the 'gun portion', so simple water hose might not be stiff enough to prevent deformation causing a blockage. Hydraulic hose from some kind of scrapped forklift, or anything with a ram, should do the trick, plus it will come with solid fittings which can withstand way more pressure than we're on about and over-engineering is a tried and tested method of ensuring safety, ie "I dunno how good it needs to be exactly but this is way better, Mr. Insurancegeezer."

This could also help with 1 of the safety issues, that of a lot of BB's following 1 behind the other into the target, because it may well be possible to feed enough BB's through a hydraulic hose at such pressure that they would need nothing else to make them feed into 3, or more, separate internal barrels.

That's the scope of my brainwaves for the moment and I need to get some gear ready for a skirmish 2moz, but it'll be simmering away in the back of my mind...

 

[TPI]

Sorry Ian i've not quite read the entirety of #12 (literally the first line)

I will say this Why has nobody looked at Paintball yet?

I'm gonna lay a Simple word map out because i need some sleep

Left tank is your Air Pressure Rig a Pip from the Bottom of the left into the Bottom of the right (You can have your safety in between on the Pipe and Make a Cone or some other funnel in the Top or of your Right side Tank (I'd actually go for Almost a Third of the way up and then start making yourself a Barrel...

I'd have thing's here and their like extra Safety's and stuff but I'll Speak on them when i have the time.

 

[remus]

post number 12 is probably the most suitable way to do it, one tank compressed gas, the other the hop up chamber etc, feeding the gas and pellets down the pipe an dout the nozzle. having your controls in your nozle will hard to get right (long cables running up along side the pellet feed) and having your feed so that it dosent kink/bend to much and block/ pressure build up too much. if going for proper flame thrower sort of action might be worth trying to get your fps quite low as well as range whilst trying to get rps as high as you legally can (no point being able to out range a rifle) could also do multiple tubes like the tri shot shotgun.

only other option is to get it like grenade launchers, have the hop up somehow designed to take say 10 pellets at a time and pressurise them and each pump releases a wave of rounds when you fire it. how to go about this though i have not the foggiest how to go about making this possible...

 

[Ian_Gere]

TBH, unless there's a tri-shot shotgun with hop already, to use as a base for the project, I'd forget all about hop up.

I've been pondering this on and off since Friday. I'm not so sure about using hydraulic hose now - the problem is that the fittings are usually 90° elbow type, and that could easily cause a blockage - like when you're trying to load a pistol mag, push to hard or try to go too quickly and 1 BB gets jammed in the corner and the rest can't get past it.

Something that would work, but may be a bit stiff in use, is black/blue alkathene water pipe and that has loads of different fittings available for it, but it may not be so easy to convince people that it is capable of withstanding pressurised gas/air (even though it definitely is). I don't know how stiff MDPE gas pipe is, but that, and its fittings, would probably be an easier sell insurance-wise.

For a trigger I'd go with a bike brake system. Just attach the cable to a valve between your air/gas tank and the BB hopper and add a fat return spring (to make sure it closes as quickly as possible saving pressure, but also for safety, because it will make pulling the trigger hard enough that it couldn't happen by accident).

 

[Ditch]

Am I missing something simple, or could you just use a small fan to blow smoke from a smoke pyro down the nozel, anyone hit by the 'flame' (smoke) is out. No marking, simple to use, won't harm people, not expensive, and looks the part. Flamethrowers that are BB hoses just seem a bit naff to me.

 

[remus]

by the time a smalll fan blows smoke at someone they will walk upwind of ya and shoot.

ya could always take this as inspiration

just have your flame thrower tanks providing gas to a self made gun designed to not look like a typical airsoft gun( bike brake trigger etc) only problem is what way to disguise the ammo hopper(whatever way you do it, possibly p90 style so its kinda hidden?)

 

[Ditch]

That is true but a flamethrower would provide no tactical advantage outdoors to a normal air soft gun, so I'm assuming it for indoor use in cqb, where very few sites allow full auto thus eliminating any use of a BB hose

Also as an edit, some small fans are extremely powerful and run off a very low power

 

[Ian_Gere]

I don't think it's about tactical advantage really, although tbh, if I made it, I wouldn't be happy until it could shred the foliage of plants/bushes etc so I could see my target better!

Why bother with a GBB pistol? The blowback doesn't add any advantage and may serve to throw your aim off; a NBB pistol has less moving parts to break as well... In fact, why bother with a pistol at all? A semi-auto gas shotgun would be a better 2nd for woodland or primary for CQB.

The look of the thing. A flamethrower that is as good as a support weapon AEG would be epic!

You can't mess with pyros. Insurance.

Maybe you could do something with a smoke machine, but I'm sceptical that a small fan could produce enough force to carry the smoke much more than 3-4m.

 

[remus]

if your thinking smoke machine then why not just go with a simulation flamethrower, smokemachine as Ian_Gere suggests but from what ive seen of smoke machines at partys' discos is the cheap ones are crap, the expensive ones are expensive, and eitherway you still have insurance problems and its hard for anyone to know if they are hit(you cant see them they might have their back to you. maby you could build the thrower to both pump out smoke and fire semi auto?a combi weapon as some nerds will know of it...

another more clear potentially answer i thought of whilst looking at pics of another hobby of mine, warhammer 40k. take a look at this flamer armed grunt...(not mine btw)

as you can see its a brute of a flamer size wise(compared to the wielder however with that size you gain options. firstly the tank wouldn't be impossible to have whatever form of compressor and smoke making device in the back pack tanks(which is your main luxury with the flamer template weapon for airsoft, back space, lots of it) also its possible, (by my reckoning, if you know any engineers they could go over the idea with you) you could have the smoke feeding through the tank into ad through the gun to the main lighter thing below the nozzle and you could inessential jus t have smoke coming from there, wither a small amount for effect, or the occasional cloud for room clearance smoke screen(which in airsoft might be a bigger boon) but dependant on the smoke machine thing you may not get much or very often???

mean while the main 'gun' can inessential be a aeg, disguised as a flame-thrower this way you aren't hampered by the hoping your smoke getes to someone before they notice and blast you, you haven't the weakness of being stuck flaming but can play as close as you possibly can to flamer style, and no one gets riddled too much. how does that work for yas? hmm if i had the ability and money to spare id be tempted to give that a try, mayby some day. also note that such a build should be able to comply to sites standards, as you can simple turn the smoke off separately to the gun and still be dammed cool...