Introduction: Range Day: Comparing Flat Shooting Distances of 4 Knex Guns

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About: I have Knex stuff on my page. Don't follow me, because I'm not really going to post much, if at all. Feel free to use anything I've made, just make sure to give credit if needed. My old account is TheChemik…

So it has bothered me since I first started building Knex guns when people would just spout out ranges.  There are so many variables that come in to play that you can't definitively say for one gun how far it shoots.  

Lets look at all the basic ones that can affect how far the gun shoots:

- number of rubber bands
- how far the bands are stretched on the gun itself
- what type of rubber bands
- how worn out the bands are
- grey or black ramrod
- wind
- ammo type
- angle of the gun when firing(this is a big one)
- how tall the person is
- measuring first point of ground contact vs. where you end up finding the shot
- how well you constructed the gun itself.  Not every version of a gun will behave the same.  Case in point:  I built one MeZak, worked great.  I could not for the life of me get a second one to work nearly as well as my first one.  Same parts, same instructions, same person, same banding.  It just wouldn't work for me.

Now with that out of the way, I wanted to even the odds with the 4 guns I have constructed and test their ranges.  The conditions I set were:

- Each gun would fire flat.  I tried to make them as level as possible
- Each gun would fire from my shoulder height.  I'm 6' tall.
- the butt of the gun would be touching the fence at the 0' mark
- Each gun had only 2 #64 bands on it, and I stretched them as equal of a distance as possible.
- I and another person would look for the first place the shot hits the ground, and see the closest point on the measuring tape
-5 shots per gun, average of those shots would be the final range

Now lets get to the actual numbers.

The Racker Rifle - 32' 11"

My Modded ZKAR - 40' 10"

My Older design TR12 - 37' 2" (without 45' outlier that I got, 35' 1"f)

Knex Gun - 35' 5"

These are just the ranges I got with my guns with the previous stated conditions.  Does this make all of them look really weak compared to most guns?  Yes it does.  That's because I only used 2 bands and shot them FLAT and actually measured how far the shots go.  

Things to keep in mind:  

The Racker Rifle was crippled because its body does not allow for the bands to be stretched nearly as far as the other guns.
The TR12 is an older design, and I didn't build the front end entirely as KILLERK would have liked me to.  This means the ram hardly strikes the turret rod, and it doesn't shoot as well as the most recent version would.
The Knex Gun shoots inconsistently because blue rods are really terrible for shooting.  They are just too lightweight and fly around everywhere in the air.
All of these guns hit 50' or further easily with just a small amount of angle on them.  
You can always put on more rubber bands, and on some guns stretch the bands farther.

I hope this post is informative and helpful to anyone and everyone, and makes people reconsider guns when judging the range posted by people.