Potato Cannon
Warning: This is dangerous. Do not go and try this at home without propper security and knowledge. You will likely hurt yourself or others very badly.
A few days ago I told a friend of mine about these fun things I saw on the internet, potato cannons. The day after he showed up at my place with a bunch of pipes and other PVC pieces. We went buy one of those long lighters with a piezo crystal and the material checklist was complete. We used an old (10+ years) can of hairspray an fuel.
We didn’t follow any particular instructions, we simply built the cannon the way we thought would be efficient. And it worked perfectly, after struggling a bit with the wiring of the ignition sparkle the canon was firing every single time without ever failing.
We didn’t make so many tests because the wires got ripped off with the recoil of a shot and it was raining, so we didn’t bother repairing it. Also this was just a prototype… next one will be more robust and therefore safer.
Here are some pictures:
At the first sight the combustion chamber looks too long, but that turned out to be very effective. In 95% of the videos I saw out there on the internet, the operator puts way to much fuel on the chamber which ends up powering down the explosion due to lack of oxygen. In order to have a efficient combustion one need a very little volume of hairspray and a rather big volume of air. Thus, a long combustion chamber is good because it keeps a lot of air inside it. I should say that half a second of spray in this cannon results in a damn loud BOOM and a rather powerful shot.
I will make a post covering only security aspects of these things as they are quite dangerous.
Tags: potato cannon, potato gun, spudgun
