When I smoked and had a machine shop, every once in a while I'd toy with the idea of making a small entertainment wheelock out of the BIC cigarette lighter I always had in my pocket.
Twenty-five, maybe thirty bore, maybe 10-12" barrel seemed like the right scaling to the size of the BIC spark wheel. The thing would have been to design / build the lockwork, then assemble a gun around it.
Never a burning desire, just one of those things that popped into my head every once in a while. I did go so far as to take a BIC apart, but I found the spark wheel turned freely on an axis (driven by one's thumb), and I couldn't figure out how to rig a simple and durable spring-driving arrangement to aggressively spin it.
I'm sure I could have jinned up a way to do it or figured out an alternate scheme if I were assigned the task by a greedy whip-wielding profit-driven uncaring corporate overlord, but the personal desire kept approaching zero but never reached it as time went by.
So now there's this thread, and I don't have a machine shop any more, nor do I smoke.
Terry
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