Building a Chestnut Launcher

I built a simple crossbow-style chestnut launcher made from scrap wood, latex tubing and an archery release that can send a chestnut about 220 feet.

The park near my house has lots of chestnuts and my kids have been collecting them like crazy (it’s their favorite post-school activity). We have accumulated quite a lot of them over the past month.

With all these chestnuts, we obviously needed a way to launch them so I decided on a very simple crossbow-style design using latex tubing and a leather pouch (D2 item version). The frame is a 42 inch 2x2 and I used a spare IKEA bed slat for the crossbeam, glued and screwed together. A 3/8 inch eye bolt goes through each end of the crossbeam, and the latex tubing is tied to those and to the pouch from a leather shepherd’s sling. Tying the tubing was the fiddliest part. It has to be stretched while you wrap it with butcher’s twine, so I clamped a couple of scrap blocks to my workbench to hold it. The tubing can be wrapped around the eye bolts to easily add more tension and power.

The Trigger

My favorite part of the design was that I decided to use an archery release like this one for the trigger. It provides a safe and reliable way to hold the tubing back, and it’s made to let go cleanly. I designed and 3D printed a little housing that mounts the release securely to the back of the stock, and the release clips onto a loop of archery D-loop cord on the back of the pouch. Then I added a dowel for a rear grip and an old handle I had previously removed from my shop vac.

How Well Does It Work?

We tried it at the park and it works surprisingly well. Aimed at about 35 to 40 degrees, it sends our chestnuts (on the small side, about 10 to 15 grams) about 220 feet. Thanks to the archery release, we haven’t had a single misfire.

I got curious and did some rough math. To go that far with air drag, the chestnuts are leaving at somewhere around 85 to 100 mph, which works out to about the same energy as a paintball. So safety glasses are important and it should never be pointed at anyone.

You can find the 3D print on Printables and a full build guide on Instructables.