Brian Chuk
Pistol crossbows
In my sophomore year of high school, my friend Patrick and I found ourselves with scrap wood left over from building helicopters & other contraptions for Science Olympiad. I saw a piece that vaguely looked like a gun and added scraps of wood to it and a rubber band so it would shoot pieces of paper.
Patrick saw the design and decided to build a wood crossbow that fired pencils and sticks. As months passed, a friend named Brandon Ip joined us and we just kept building more and more crossbows.
We would tape pieces of cardboard with a paper target circle on top onto a shelf and test our crossbows from across the room.
The Big One & the Chuk Crossbow
The strongest crossbow, The Big One, featured a leather grip and was so powerful that it usually shattered its wooden projectiles.
The Force-A-Nature folded & loaded. On the right image in the background is Patrick's crossbow.
They would have thse ridiculous accessories such as scopes, ergonomic leather grips, laser pointers, flashlights, and bipods. There was even a crossbow that fired two projectiles at once and folded in half for portability.
Looking through the scope & Brandon's crossbow
Looking back, a lot of my friends who didn’t build crossbows would look at them in awe as if they were things that were impossible to build to them. But for me, they were things I just made for fun. We tend to tell ourselves we’re not capable of doing a lot of things, like painting our walls or designing our own furniture or asking out that girl or basically doing something we’ve never done before. You’re supposed to need “experience.” Looking back at all the things I’ve demystified, I remember being so happy when these seemingly past-impossible taks are now trivial. In the end, you shouldn’t believe that these things are beyond your grasp, because if you do these things will actually get beyond your grasp. We’re always learning and growing, and the best way to make the most of that is to try things we have no idea how to do.
