Tire Slasher

[owenmp]

Does anyone know how the Tire Slasher from Mad Max 2 was manufactured? The description of the weapon in d20 Apocalypse states it would use CO2 paintball-style cartridges. How was it built in the early 1980s?

[Karol]

Sounds like you're talking about the airguns that were in the back of the Cobra Truck and the Valiant. The tanks looks much more like butane cartridges than anything I was able to find on Google. Paintball was still so young at the time that the first game was being played while The Road Warrior was being filmed.
One of the Gayboy Berserkers ("Bad Cops") also had his own personal dart gun. He had his propellant in tanks on his back (perhaps a welding set-up?).
Of course I highly doubt any of the guns actually worked. And can you really shoot a crossbow bolt out of a metal pipe using compressed gas? Wouldn't most of the gas pressure escape through the huge gaps between the bolt and the pipe? Sounds like a job for Myth Busters.

[Deaths Head]

I made a set up similar to the backpack gun of the Landau guys, and the Berseker on the Cab of the Mack. It ran on compressed air, and was made from an old fire extinguisher. You needed to open a valve to fire it, and stuff a toilet paper wad behind the arrow to seal it. The valve was an electrically activated water valvle from Home Depot used to turn springlers on and off. I couldn't get the battery powered part to work from a switch/trigger, so I just clicked the manual on/off on the valvle it self. A bit more work and design and it would have been like the movie one appeared to be. It would shoot a bolt through a radiator from 10 feet away. Probably for under $50 you could make one a working one like in the film.

[MFP1]

Now that the Red XA is nearing completion I am turning my eye towards my 68 F-100 cobra truck project, and was just pondering the same issue. I am working out how to power the "Prop" with compressed air from an onboard tank, similar to how Deaths Head describes. Hoping to design it as "Non Lethal" to start with. Probably will toy with functional "Target Practice" once i get the darts out of the tubes under their own power. The quality of the "Back Pressure" seal (ie like the toilet paper wad described above) is the diffrence between no action at all , safe launch only, and deadly.