Never ends with you does it? LOL. Please read through all the posts before posting. R&D has been done with the exception of the end of the tube.....that's still up in the air. That's all I asked for help with. Go build a better mouse trap if that's what you want to do. I just asked for some help with the cap for the tube. It has a specific weight after many many hours of testing by the designers and testing facilities. This is where it needs to be. It works VERY efficiently in it's current state. Dave
Quote Originally Posted by Fishy Jim View Post
At the risk of helping this guy, it would be a poor decision to add excess mass so far away from the working end of the ram. Since straight thrusting (traditional battering) isn't the tools primary objective (as indicated by the swiss army knife-esque video), the addition of mass so far away from the working end, will not benefit the tools function, but will increase the fatigue on the troop carrying it.

There's a reason maul hammers don't have heavy handles - the added mass is in the wrong spot.

Were it just a traditional battering ram, the mass wouldn't matter where it was located.

Something else to consider with this things design is that the actual force changes with acceleration, just as much as it does with mass. Look at ballistics of bullets. You can get the same ft-lbs out of a smaller bullet at a higher speed. It's easier for a man to accelerate a lighter object than a heavy one (baseball bats would be a prime example). Maybe your research should be focused on the practical effects of being able to swing a lighter boot - oops, you already made 100 heavy ones.