Senior Design Project for a group of mechanical engineering students.
This video has gotten a lot of negative criticism from people that think they know what they're talking about and I have some things to say about that.
Guess what: everyone in the group got an A for the project work.
Here's why: No matter what you think you know about paintball, you probably don't know anything about actually building a paintball gun, let alone a GATLING paintball gun. Furthermore we were building one under the following conditions:
A.)Limited time: We had a little less than four months (the semester began in January and ended at the beginning of May) to design, manufacture, build, and troubleshoot a rather complex device. Most companies don't even do that in a 1.5 years, let alone less than four months.
B.)Limited funds: This point isn't as important as the other conditions, but it isn't like we had the backing of a multi-million dollar company. In fact, we had less money than most people spend on their guns.
C.)Custom parts: Nearly everything on that gun was custom made. We couldn't just go out and buy the parts we needed.
D.)Experience: this and point A. probably had the most influence on our project. Just imagine designing, building, and troubleshooting something like this AND it's your first time doing any such thing. We were college students with more or less no experience doing anything of this sort.
Furthermore, to add to point D., of six people on the team, only one had ever played paintball (me) or handled a paintball gun.
If you think about all these things for a minute, you'll probably realize that we did well (we got A's after all). I could certainly be wrong but I think someone familiar with the design of paintball guns (who actually works for a company like AGD) would probably be reasonably impressed given the conditions we were working in.
Tags: paintball TTU gatling gun engineering senior design
