Build a Lethal Vegetable Gun in Your Very Own Backyard!
Ever since the first caveman pushed a boulder off a cliff and watched with delight as it crashed hundreds of feet below, Man (gender-specific) has found pleasure in throwing, breaking, exploding, and otherwise destroying stuff.
Christmas vacation can be boring. Luckily, my comrade David "Puffy" Benjamin is in town. Puffy is the resident physics guru--much like Stephen Hawking, except calculatingly evil. Several of our Thanksgiving/Winter/Spring breaks have been spent constructing various weapons out of items commonly found in your local hardware store.
I can't recall what first possessed us to build a gun that would launch an uncooked potato at lethal speed. It probably had to do with the fact that we're dudes.
Anyway, last year, we made one. It was a combustion-based design made of PVC piping. Essentially, the front of the cannon was a three-foot barrel made of 2-inch pipe. Behind the barrel, a wider piece of PVC piping composed the combustion chamber. The end of the cannon was an end-cap that could be screwed on or off the combustion chamber. We installed a barbeque sparker in the end-cap.
To fire the gun, we stuffed a potato down the barrel until the spud was at the entrance of the combustion chamber. Next, we sprayed AquaNet, a flammable hairspray, into the open combustion chamber. We screwed on the end-cap, thus sealing the cannon. When we clicked the sparker button, the hairspray ignited. The expanded gas forced the potato out of the barrel at approximately 300 feet per second with a heart-shaking report. It looked like a gun. It sounded like a gun. It kicked back like a gun. Hell, it *was* a gun.
When we initially went to Strosnider's Hardware in Potomac to pick up the supplies for that first launcher (with Hank and others), we nervously approached an employee to ask where the PVC piping could be found. He was a hard-bitten man, the kind of guy you expected to see on a combine or in a cigarette billboard rather than in a suburban hardware store. He showed us to the piping aisle. We were silently praying the old man wouldn't realize our intentions and report us to the police, or worse, our parents. While we all stood around trying to look innocent, Puffy examined the piping options, mentally calculating what diameter barrel and combustion chamber would give us the greatest power. Puffy settled on two pipes: a piece of 3-inch Schedule-40 PVC for the chamber and a longer 2-inch diameter segment for the barrel.
"You're gonna want a 4-inch pipe for the combustion chamber if you're building a potato gun," Marlboro Man chimed in. "You'll hardly get any power out of a 3-incher."
As it turned out, the guys who work in hardware stores--being guys--also like to build potato guns. Having found us out, the old man regaled us with tales of firing a potato gun off the bow of his fishing boat in the middle of the Chesapeake, building launchers in his backyard, and other forms of masculine mayhem. He left us with a couple choice words of caution:
"You boys had best be damned careful. You point that thing at somebody, you'll blow a man's liver right out his back."
Wonderful. And as we found out (via the Internet), combustion guns are especially dangerous, as the explosion can cause the PVC piping to burst and kill you and your buddies. Of course, this warning didn't stop us from using the combustion gun on a test range. We just made sure to press the sparker button *really* gingerly and quickly duck away.
Soon we realized it would be safer to switch over to pneumatically-powered spud guns. This variety operates on compressed air (we used a bike pump). You pressurize the compression chamber, which is separated from the barrel by a valve. Once the spud's been stuffed down the barrel and the compression chamber has been pressurized to 100 PSI, you turn the valve handle. This gun is even more powerful than the combustion one, but minus the large muzzle flash. Puffy built a beautiful U-shaped one and we had a jolly time firing them at the test range (an open field in east Potomac). Among other experiments, we tried filling the barrel of the pneumatic gun with water, shooting a glorious 40-foot fountain of H2O. Also, we tested the range of the two guns--I can't remember which was more powerful, but I believe we managed to hurl those potatoes more than 250 yards. As a final test, we fired a potato at a tree trunk at point-blank range. The spud was instantly vaporized as it hit the tree with a loud "CRACK!" After the impact, we sat in bemused silence for about thirty seconds as the remnants of the potato softly fell back to earth with a rainy pitter-patter.
Anyway, today our goal was to create a potato rifle that could accurately hit a target at 50 yards. For this, we wanted a solenoid valve--a pressure-relief valve that can be engaged electronically. This way, we'd avoid shaking the cannon, a common problem with clunky manual valves. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the type of valve we needed at Home Depot, so we surrendered and decided to hold off till next break.
What's the point of launching a potato hundreds of yards, you might ask? Well...we get to satisfy that primordial masculine urge to destroy shit. It's damned fun.
-Scoots
Christmas vacation can be boring. Luckily, my comrade David "Puffy" Benjamin is in town. Puffy is the resident physics guru--much like Stephen Hawking, except calculatingly evil. Several of our Thanksgiving/Winter/Spring breaks have been spent constructing various weapons out of items commonly found in your local hardware store.
I can't recall what first possessed us to build a gun that would launch an uncooked potato at lethal speed. It probably had to do with the fact that we're dudes.
Anyway, last year, we made one. It was a combustion-based design made of PVC piping. Essentially, the front of the cannon was a three-foot barrel made of 2-inch pipe. Behind the barrel, a wider piece of PVC piping composed the combustion chamber. The end of the cannon was an end-cap that could be screwed on or off the combustion chamber. We installed a barbeque sparker in the end-cap.
To fire the gun, we stuffed a potato down the barrel until the spud was at the entrance of the combustion chamber. Next, we sprayed AquaNet, a flammable hairspray, into the open combustion chamber. We screwed on the end-cap, thus sealing the cannon. When we clicked the sparker button, the hairspray ignited. The expanded gas forced the potato out of the barrel at approximately 300 feet per second with a heart-shaking report. It looked like a gun. It sounded like a gun. It kicked back like a gun. Hell, it *was* a gun.
When we initially went to Strosnider's Hardware in Potomac to pick up the supplies for that first launcher (with Hank and others), we nervously approached an employee to ask where the PVC piping could be found. He was a hard-bitten man, the kind of guy you expected to see on a combine or in a cigarette billboard rather than in a suburban hardware store. He showed us to the piping aisle. We were silently praying the old man wouldn't realize our intentions and report us to the police, or worse, our parents. While we all stood around trying to look innocent, Puffy examined the piping options, mentally calculating what diameter barrel and combustion chamber would give us the greatest power. Puffy settled on two pipes: a piece of 3-inch Schedule-40 PVC for the chamber and a longer 2-inch diameter segment for the barrel.
"You're gonna want a 4-inch pipe for the combustion chamber if you're building a potato gun," Marlboro Man chimed in. "You'll hardly get any power out of a 3-incher."
As it turned out, the guys who work in hardware stores--being guys--also like to build potato guns. Having found us out, the old man regaled us with tales of firing a potato gun off the bow of his fishing boat in the middle of the Chesapeake, building launchers in his backyard, and other forms of masculine mayhem. He left us with a couple choice words of caution:
"You boys had best be damned careful. You point that thing at somebody, you'll blow a man's liver right out his back."
Wonderful. And as we found out (via the Internet), combustion guns are especially dangerous, as the explosion can cause the PVC piping to burst and kill you and your buddies. Of course, this warning didn't stop us from using the combustion gun on a test range. We just made sure to press the sparker button *really* gingerly and quickly duck away.
Soon we realized it would be safer to switch over to pneumatically-powered spud guns. This variety operates on compressed air (we used a bike pump). You pressurize the compression chamber, which is separated from the barrel by a valve. Once the spud's been stuffed down the barrel and the compression chamber has been pressurized to 100 PSI, you turn the valve handle. This gun is even more powerful than the combustion one, but minus the large muzzle flash. Puffy built a beautiful U-shaped one and we had a jolly time firing them at the test range (an open field in east Potomac). Among other experiments, we tried filling the barrel of the pneumatic gun with water, shooting a glorious 40-foot fountain of H2O. Also, we tested the range of the two guns--I can't remember which was more powerful, but I believe we managed to hurl those potatoes more than 250 yards. As a final test, we fired a potato at a tree trunk at point-blank range. The spud was instantly vaporized as it hit the tree with a loud "CRACK!" After the impact, we sat in bemused silence for about thirty seconds as the remnants of the potato softly fell back to earth with a rainy pitter-patter.
Anyway, today our goal was to create a potato rifle that could accurately hit a target at 50 yards. For this, we wanted a solenoid valve--a pressure-relief valve that can be engaged electronically. This way, we'd avoid shaking the cannon, a common problem with clunky manual valves. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the type of valve we needed at Home Depot, so we surrendered and decided to hold off till next break.
What's the point of launching a potato hundreds of yards, you might ask? Well...we get to satisfy that primordial masculine urge to destroy shit. It's damned fun.
-Scoots
posted by JMR at 1:13 AM
3 Comments:
lovely :)
uh... guys... some things just never change
Wow, I was just messing around and found your page!
Very nice.
If you are interested, go see my pocketbike related site.
It isnt anything fancy but you might still find something of interest.
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