“Is your boss being mean again?”

Do you often get so much pressure that you have to vent it out somewhere? It’s time for you to change. Your lunch break at work is usually just having lunch, and when you get home, you are either completely exhausted or still answering messages from your boss. It seems there just isn’t any time to release your pressure, which is fine, because you can do it at work, and it’s definitely not the Whack Your Boss flash games, it’s a crossbow made out of office materials.

Materials and tools

You’ll first need 4 pencils, chopsticks will do as well but they can’t be too thin. They don’t need to be equal in length but must be long enough to be made into a cross. You’ll also need a large binder clip, large enough to hold 2 pencils, plenty of rubber bands, adhesive tape, a pen refill and your skills. The 3D printed white stand in the picture below is used as a sight. The barrel of a pen is usually preferred, but the barrels in our office still require some cutting work and we don’t have cutting tools, so I replaced it with a white stand that has the same caliber. You have to figure things out for yourselves.

The steps

Step one is to form a cross with the pencils and keep it in place with adhesive tape or rubber bands. It would be better to use rubber bands for the wings because it makes the bowstring more stable. Try to use as few rubber bands as possible and make sure both sides have similar amount of rubber bands. Small rubber bands with high elasticity are preferred.

Then knit the rubber bands into a bowstring(you can watch the tutorial below), and fix them on both ends of the wings. Remember to check the elasticity of the bowstring while fixing its position, to make sure that the bowstring works to its full potential.

Next, fix the binder clip at the bottom of the crossbow with adhesive tape. Remember to open the clip and adjust it one more time because it might move out of position while you play.

Lastly, fix the sight at the center of the crossbow. If the rubber bands are not balanced on the wings, you might have a hard time keeping the sight in position. Remember to align the groove of the sight to the arrow track, then put the arrow(pen refill) into the arrow track.

Please take note that there is a ring on the front of a pen refill, you have to keep the caliber of the sight just small enough to get the ring stuck outside. Different sights also result in different trajectories, so be extremely careful when you shoot, and don’t accidentally hurt your boss for real.