Firewheel - the rubber band machinegun

The Firewheel is a rubber band machine gun designed to give children a projectile-firing toy gun that can be used without risk of injury. We took two Firewheels, two healthy boys (aged 11 and 13) and watched what developed. The result was several weeks of continuous use (ongoing at publication date), no physical injuries, universal envy from the childrens' friends and the inescapable feeling that the Firewheel represents extraordinary value at US$22.

Whether boys should be allowed to play with toy "weapons of war" is always problematic. There's lots of conflicting opinion on whether playing with guns should be allowed - lots of opinion, but not much evidence.

Since gunpowder was invented, boys have played with guns. This article is intended as informational for those parents who believe that it's better to offer a safe toy that won't cause physical damage than to leave fertile young minds to create their own devices.

Firewheel inventor Paul Sundstrom says the gun was created to, "distract children from the more dangerous stuff such as sling shots, home-made bows and arrows, and the like, and to achieve this, it was necessary to come up with a pretty mean and business-like looking bit of gear."

We started with one gun, but a week into our evaluation, Firewheel sent a second gun. Eleven-year-old George had been the main user of the gun until that time. Once the second gun arrived, older bother Tim became much more involved, as two guns turned the Firewheel from a single-person toy into a game.

The biggest single problem with rubber band guns is reloading, particularly so for machineguns, as multiple bands need to be loaded and it's a time-consuming and frustrating business with inevitable rubber band breakages.

In the beginning, we found it hard to reload the Firewheel at all, even with the instruction book and after studying the demonstration video.

A few hours later, George had the reloading sussed out entirely, and could reload the entire ten bands within 30 seconds. As time went by, the normal "load" was reduced to five or six bands as the last few are harder to load and most band breakages happen in loading the final few. One of the other major factors in loading only half the bands was that "it's harder to load when you're being shot at."

In terms of potential damage to children, the Firewheel does pack a punch up close - at distances less than half a metre. Graham (father of our testers) reported that the only "discernable welt" occurred when one of the boys crept up behind the other and fired directly into his neck .

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