While web-swinging is a dream of many Spider-Man fans, one YouTuber decided to make it a reality by designing his own web-shooters.
The design comes from the South African-based YouTube channel Built IRL, run by an engineer named JT. He originally experimented with the concept during an internship at Hacksmith Industries. After writing an electro-mechanical engineering thesis paper for his university, JT began construction on the earliest prototypes of his own, real-life web-shooters. As he said at the beginning of the video, “Swinging like Spider-Man has been one of my main goals over the last two years.”
One of the first points JT raised during the breakdown of his invention was the obvious lack of actual webbing. Since the web fluid used by Spider-Man is entirely fictional, JT could not create anything with the same sticking power. He instead chose to create a hookchain using alloy steel and the world’s strongest polymer. This meant it would find purchase by wrapping around an object and hooking onto its own rope. An early design even experimented with a wrist-mounted mechanism, relying on a backpack of compressed air to launch the grapple, in addition to a harness and a microcontroller to electrically fire the rope when performing the signature hand gesture.
The design that JT eventually settled on was more simplistic, but it was still extremely useful due to being multipurpose. He constructed a metal cylinder that could contain the hookchain in one end and the launching mechanism in the other. Additionally, the cylinder also provided a handle to swing from. The launcher functioned through the use of a compressed propane form of combustion, in contrast to the compressed air design used in his Just Cause-inspired grappling hook. This required the use of a new cylinder with each consecutive swing, so JT designed it for multiple cylinders to be carried on the user’s belt.
The exact intricacies of the design were all explored during the video, including how it was made with a 70-year-old lathe machine. It even demonstrated the web-shooters in action, although JT played it safer than Peter Parker by test running them at a trampoline park. He demonstrated that the design theoretically worked given the right spacing, although there was a specific setback that never troubled Spider-Man. After every swing attempt, JT had to retrieve his hookchains from around the ceiling beams, because not only were they precious, but also a form of littering.
Source: YouTube
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