Coilgun

This is a single-stage coilgun I built a few years ago. It is powered by a bank of salvaged power supply filter capacitors totaling about 230 joules of stored energy. It operates at around 200 volts. The power supply is 6 18650 li-ion batteries in series run through a DC-DC boost converter. It uses a 200 amp silicon controlled rectifier to discharge the stored energy into the coil. It fires 1" long, 0.25" diameter projectiles at about 25m/s and has an effective range of about 50 ft.