For the gun enthusiast who has $400 and 144 rubber bands

Josey1

March 12, 2002For the gun enthusiast who has $400 and 144 rubber bandsAdrian HumphreysNational Post Rubber band-firing gatling gun is every boy's dream, but not every boy could afford it, so it is popular with executives. The Incredible Rubberband Machine Gun After 10 years of work, an aerospace engineer has invented an all-wood, tripod-mounted firearm that unleashes 144 rubber bands as fast as it is cranked.At US$395 the inventor admits the guns have wide appeal, but few buyers.The Incredible Rubberband Machine Gun attracts the attention, but it is the much cheaper 24-shot double-barrel rubber band shotgun and Texas 12-shooter rubber band pistol that people buy."Well, to be honest, I've sold three of them," said Ron Toms, 41, who three months ago unveiled the machine gun on his Web site, www.BackyardArtillery.com, adding it to his product line of unusual projectile machines."One was to a Hollywood cinematographer; another was to a businessman who works in the retail liquidation business.""[The businessman] bought one because he deals with a lot of people going bankrupt and likes to have it as an office prop for people trying to chintz him out of money," Mr. Toms said."It is expensive and kind of goofy, but it looks and works great. It is a great conversation piece."Intricately constructed from sanded, wooden parts and looking like a 19th century Gatling gun, The Incredible Rubberband Machine Gun seems the perfect executive toy for the wealthy and exuberant.The key is the patented star-shaped wheel that holds the stretched rubber bands.The star wheel is the rubber-band equivalent of splitting the atom. It is a technological advance allowing it to tower over quaint childhood rubber-band inventions such as the nailing of a clothes peg at the back of a sawed-off hockey stick.The 12-pointed star allows each gun barrel to hold 12 rubber bands. A dozen of these 12-shot barrels, rotating around a circular frame, give it immense firepower. The gun is accurate to within seven metres.The down side, of course, is all of those rubber bands have to be loaded by hand."The first time I loaded one, there was two of us working on it and it took us 20 minutes," said Mr. Toms, who lost his job a year ago as an executive in a Los Angeles-based dot-com firm."I applied everything I knew about running a dot-com business and merged it with my passion for fun artillery. I'm making a fraction of what I used to make as an executive, but I'm having a hell of a lot more fun."The guns' inventor, Don Mims, 54, of Fort Worth, Texas, graduated with an aerospace engineering degree, but turned to his woodworking hobby as a career.He was turning out cabinets, doors and furniture and added simple rubberband pistols and rifles to his product line."I eventually realized that the only thing that was really paying for the whole thing was rubber-band guns. So one by one we cut off things that weren't profitable and finally we were down to just the rubber-band guns, so we stuck with that."He has been working on the machine gun design for a decade, finally getting a smoothly operating 144-shot device, up from the 72 shots of his previous model."I keep one in my office," said Mr. Mims in his long, Texas drawl."When a boy comes in wanting a raise, I just turn it around in his direction. It keeps off pesky kids and angry ex-wives," he said."I got four of them," he adds. Kids? "Nope, ex-wives."Officials at Canada Customs and Revenue Agency say the rubber-band machine guns seem to meet Canada's tight laws on gun importation."This should be OK to bring into the country. It shouldn't be a problem. We all agree it is not a firearm," said Colette Gentes-Hawn, spokeswoman for Canada Customs. http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020312/310851.html