Portal gun that can levitate a companion cube, made from parts from a toy store

Cory Doctorow 10:30 am Thu Oct 11, 2012

Caleb sez, "I tore apart components you can find at your local toy store to make a portal gun that actually levitates a companion cube."

I really wanted to make my own portal gun for this. My schedule and my ego fought hard on this subject and ultimately my schedule won. While I feel like I could have built a fantastic portal gun, there’s no way I could have done it in a reasonable amount of time and gotten as nice of results as just buying the portal gun props available at toy stores.

When initially mounted the coil on the gun, I found that the “arms” were far too flexible. I had to reinforce the arm somehow. The option I chose was simply to bend a piece of steel to the correct shape and strap it to the underside of the “arm”.

I made a cardboard model to test weight and size of the companion cube and got the system working on the portal gun.

Hackaday’s portal gun actually levitates a companion cube

(Thanks, Caleb)

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