Potato Guns

455 Bravo Uniform

455 Bravo Uniform

Final Approach
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455 Bravo Uniform
My 17 year old son said he wanted to build a potato gun and gave me a parts list last week. I brought home the parts after running out to get some plumbing supplies for a furnace vent project today.

The hardest thing will be waiting for him to build it and not pester him to get started or help him improve it. Kinda like the discipline it took to not be THAT dad in Pinewood Derby.

Your pics and/or stories of shenanigans follow below - please begin:
 
I know a potato gun ain't exactly the same thing, but one of my students, when he was in 10th grade, blew off the majority of his right hand constructing a small pipe bomb just for fun with some friends on a camping trip. He was a nice, normal kid... wasn't a cult member, white supremacist, violent, nasty, bigoted, hateful, or anything.. just a regular boy doing stupid stuff with his friends. It went horribly wrong. Sorry to be a wet blanket. Maybe find a fine line between being "THAT" dad, and one that'll be close enough to keep your boy safe.
 
I think it sounds fun, certainly a safety discussion is appropriate and i dont think the OP was intending to say he would just let the kid run wild with it. Sometimes a safe release of our desires (and explosions interest kids) is better than none at all...we take risks flying an airplane most often for mere enjoyment than true necessity...

I never have fired one but would like to check em out!
 
Though potato gun are way cool, they can cause damage and hurt people. Sometimes being "that Dad" isn't altogether a bad thing, especially if he hasn't had any previous supervised experience with things that go boom.

Now, if you want to make noise, graduate from the potato gun to the carbide cannon...basically an acetylene noisemaker.
 
Maybe use a tennis ball instead of potatoes? Will minimize damage if aim is a little faulty.
 
By "That Dad" I assume he means build it for the son and make sure it's the best one rather than let the son build it. Not ignore the safety of one.

I never built a spud gun. I skipped straight to explosives and fire. Thankfully, I survived with all my factory equipment intact. My mom is still alive so I'm not sure the statue of limitations has run out so I'll just quietly leave the thread now...
 
Years ago a neighbor built a spud gun but he used it to launch tennis balls. In our neighborhood, that was preferable to something heavy like a tater.
 
I feel like a pneumatically powered spud gun would be safer than a gas (propane) one, but in reality they’re probably equally as dangerous.

I agree that a tennis ball might be a better alternative, at least until the design proves itself and your son gets some experience with it.
 
Maybe I have wrong end of stick -


d93ed5ef4d19748d37ab8316b053807dda426a77.jpg


:):):)
 
The guns are nothing but pvc pipe bombs, do your self a big favor and do not let your kid make one or have one,
 
I’m amazed at the number of people worried about these things. Built right with the heavy duty PVC, it takes a LOT of fuel to break one.

The PVC end screw cap in some designs or a glued joint usually fails first, but if the PVC goes, it splits. It doesn’t explode.

Ask me how I know. :)

Y’all a bunch of sissies.

Just build the thing right.

And don’t let the kid point any weapon at anything they don’t intend to destroy, and always know your target and backstop, like any firearm.

I suppose also: Don’t use inappropriate propellants. But that seems to fall into “duh” territory. White Rain hairspray produces good results.

Oh yeah. Wasn’t mine but a buddy put a piezo electric lighter from a BBQ grill in his. Works well, but remember to seal it from the inside with silicone. He forgot and got a little circular burn ring on his thumb. LOL. He dropped that thing so fast...
 
Yeah, by “that dad”, I meant taking over the project. I’ll be there when he builds it, just out of curiousity.

Pinewood Derby I had to make a dad’s car, just so I would keep my hands off of his car making hot rodding improvements, paint perfection, etc. Year 1 I helped a lot, by Year 5, he did all of the work himself.

Safety-wise, he’s “one of those kids” who I trusted with a.410 at age 9 without supervision (after a lot of training and supervision years prior). Still a teen though...and in some ways needs MORE guidance now than when he was 9; He’s more creative with dangerous ways, lol (or not-lol).
 
I think I described all my homemade cannon adventures here before, but here is a recap:

I found a four foot long piece of aircraft aluminum thick wall tubing, just the right inside diameter to launch coke cans. By threading on an end cap and tapping a hole for a spark plug, I attached a 6-volt ignition coil from a Volkswagen engine I had laying around...

I experimented with various explosive fuels to launch soda cans, potatoes, wads of tape with various dead animals attached and anything else that would fit in the pipe. A tablespoon of gasoline works great on a warm day. Dust from the top of the refrigerator works OK. Coffee creamer is dangerously explosive!

From there, I graduated to fitting rimfire cartridges into lengths of TV antenna tubes. Yep, .22 Long Rifle fits perfectly...

That led to the homemade gunpowder and various forms of fireworks, bombs and rockets... At one point, my brother had no eyebrows. Wonder how that happened?

Eventually, I settled down and limited my arsenal to Hydrogen bombs, made with balloons filled with hydrogen gas from a mixture of lye and aluminum.

Some of the non-exploding toys were UFOs made from weather balloons and dry cleaning bags. Those were a cool sight at night and scared the local kiddos...

Oh yeah, no parental involvement or supervision was involved. Was my father "that Dad?" Who cares, it was fun!
 
IK04 said:
I think I described all my homemade cannon adventures here before, but here is a recap:

I found a four foot long piece of aircraft aluminum thick wall tubing, just the right inside diameter to launch coke cans. By threading on an end cap and tapping a hole for a spark plug, I attached a 6-volt ignition coil from a Volkswagen engine I had laying around...

I experimented with various explosive fuels to launch soda cans, potatoes, wads of tape with various dead animals attached and anything else that would fit in the pipe. A tablespoon of gasoline works great on a warm day. Dust from the top of the refrigerator works OK. Coffee creamer is dangerously explosive!

From there, I graduated to fitting rimfire cartridges into lengths of TV antenna tubes. Yep, .22 Long Rifle fits perfectly...

That led to the homemade gunpowder and various forms of fireworks, bombs and rockets... At one point, my brother had no eyebrows. Wonder how that happened?

Eventually, I settled down and limited my arsenal to Hydrogen bombs, made with balloons filled with hydrogen gas from a mixture of lye and aluminum.

Some of the non-exploding toys were UFOs made from weather balloons and dry cleaning bags. Those were a cool sight at night and scared the local kiddos...

Oh yeah, no parental involvement or supervision was involved. Was my father "that Dad?" Who cares, it was fun!
Click to expand...

Sounds like the way I grew up. I had a .22 at 10 years old, yet my mom would not let me have a BB gun....

At 13 I discovered black powder. 48 years later I still have thin, scraggly eye brows.....
 
strangebird said:
The guns are nothing but pvc pipe bombs, do your self a big favor and do not let your kid make one or have one,
Click to expand...

I'm guessing you'd also probably oppose the construction of those old spring clothes pin / country match head shooters that we made to shoot fire at each other when we were kids......... Sheesh! Or, those special little darts we made out of a country match, some copper wire, and a straight pen. Man those things really sting when they get stuck in your back or your legs.
 
Anytime you store up a bunch of energy in a small space it's dangerous. As they continue to discover with lithium ion batteries. Compressed gas, chemical energy (White Rain hairspray, gasoline, ether, lighter fluid, propane, gunpowder, hydrogen), even electrons. So be careful. And as @denverpilot pointed out, PVC will usually fail at the joints or split. It's not like a pipe bomb made of steel. Or a pressure cooker.

Sounds like you're on the right track with the level of supervision...
 
When I was a kid we made tennis ball cannons. Same idea as the potato gun, but instead of PVC we used empty tennis ball cans. Three cans, cut off both ends on two of them, join them together by wrapping with duct tape. Tennis balls fit the bore perfectly, of course, and they worked pretty well.
 
Art Rose said:
I'm guessing you'd also probably oppose the construction of those old spring clothes pin / country match head shooters that we made to shoot fire at each other when we were kids......... Sheesh! Or, those special little darts we made out of a country match, some copper wire, and a straight pen. Man those things really sting when they get stuck in your back or your legs.
Click to expand...


Probably also never launched bottle rockets out of a BB gun! (Don't know how I survived childhood.)
 
Half Fast said:
Probably also never launched bottle rockets out of a BB gun! (Don't know how I survived childhood.)
Click to expand...
I strapped two bottle rockets to the underside of a paper airplane (see? Aviation related!). It made quite the shower of burning paper when the first one "reported".

We shot each other with BB guns, though I never liked that much.
 
jsstevens said:
I strapped two bottle rockets to the underside of a paper airplane (see? Aviation related!). It made quite the shower of burning paper when the first one "reported".
Click to expand...


Cool! Never thought of that.

Ever shoot cherry bombs with a slingshot?
 
Half Fast said:
Cool! Never thought of that.

Ever shoot cherry bombs with a slingshot?
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Nope. Never had cherry bombs. I guess my dad had to draw the line somewhere. Did you know you can light the fuse of a firework with a magnifying glass? But you'd better be paying attention to know when it lights...
 
Ours were made with 4 Canadian beer cans taped together after the ends were removed.
This was almost 50 years ago.
The last can did not have the bottom removed.
In this can, very close to the bottom, a 1/4" hole was made in the side of the can.
We poured a small amount of lighter fluid into the hole, loaded a tennis ball, then a brave person would reach down with a match.
We eventually graduated to shooting propane from a plumber's torch into the hole.
Occasionally the tape would split and the cannon would come apart but no one ever got hurt.
We were delighted when a tennis ball would go clear across the road and over the neighbor's house!
 
My sister went to Cal-Tech. A house (kind of a cross between dorm and fraternity) mate built a tennis ball cannon with some unique form of chambering that would use ether to fire a tennis ball at 650fps muzzle velocity.
 
jsstevens said:
Nope. Never had cherry bombs. I guess my dad had to draw the line somewhere. Did you know you can light the fuse of a firework with a magnifying glass? But you'd better be paying attention to know when it lights...
Click to expand...


And you'd better be careful to light the end and not the middle.
 
Half Fast said:
Ever shoot cherry bombs with a slingshot?
Click to expand...

My dad came home with a bag full of M-80 artillery simulators one time. The date on them was 1954, and this was 1968.

We (my friends, not my dad) did one in the slingshot. It went up.... and over into old lady crabby's yard and about 10 feet agl it went off.

While it wasn't planned, we had not learned about wind correction angles yet, old lady crabby never complained about us riding our bikes in front of her house again...
 
Zeldman said:
Sounds like the way I grew up. I had a .22 at 10 years old, yet my mom would not let me have a BB gun....

At 13 I discovered black powder. 48 years later I still have thin, scraggly eye brows.....
Click to expand...

Black powder is highly addictive. Just remember (as I'm sure you do) that anything under .50 caliber is "small bore". :p

jsstevens said:
I strapped two bottle rockets to the underside of a paper airplane (see? Aviation related!). It made quite the shower of burning paper when the first one "reported".
Click to expand...

I remember a roommate in college doing that out our dorm window. Once it failed to launch and all we could do was wait in the room until it went off.

If you wanted a firecracker to go off outside a room the floor below you it was easy. Tie a string around the firecracker and lower it to the proper height. Bring it back up, light the fuse, drop it and wait for it to go BANG!. Then pull the string back up so it couldn't be traced.

College was fun.
 
Kid and I built one that used compressed air. Shoot it off a couple of times and our neighbor the retired cop, even though he was cool with it, told us it was not kosher.
 
Ventucky Red said:
Kid and I built one that used compressed air. Shoot it off a couple of times and our neighbor the retired cop, even though he was cool with it, told us it was not kosher.
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Shorten the barrel.
 
When they graduate to shooting model rockets with warheads through the “enemy’s” dorm window, let me know. I can provide input. ;)

and for the record, I was NOT present for, nor did I participate in, the making of napalm in the kitchen sink.
 
MauleSkinner said:
When they graduate to shooting model rockets with warheads through the “enemy’s” dorm window, let me know. I can provide input. ;)

and for the record, I was NOT present for, nor did I participate in, the making of napalm in the kitchen sink.
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Got a cup of Joe in hand and feet up on the desk, care to regal us with you tales of yesteryear? :D
 
Engineering problem, you say? Bestest undergrad course ever was T.C. Scott's lab for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineers. One week was practical applications of theory: wire an outlet, change a tire, etc. (I got to pay back a lot of help from the smart kids that week). Another week was predict the performance of a funnelator: T.C. stood in a random spot in the field adjoining the building as a target, you had to figure out how to hit him. Then the ever popular "build a bumper out of beer cans" where your team of four had to ride in a cart down the loading dock ramp, hoping to minimize your score on the accelerometer (we wore the Keystone Light twelve pack containers on our head as a helmet). Good times, totally impossible today.

For the OP, when the gun does not fire, do not unscrew the end of the combustion chamber and then look in while firing the ignition switch to see if it is working. Residual fuel is a beyotch, story from a friend (call sign: Scorch). :rolleyes:
 
catmandu said:
For the OP, when the gun does not fire, do not unscrew the end of the combustion chamber and then look in while firing the ignition switch to see if it is working. Residual fuel is a beyotch, story from a friend (call sign: Scorch). :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

ROFL!
 
Ryanb said:
I feel like a pneumatically powered spud gun would be safer than a gas (propane) one, but in reality they’re probably equally as dangerous.

I agree that a tennis ball might be a better alternative, at least until the design proves itself and your son gets some experience with it.
Click to expand...
They’re hairspray/deodorant powered, not propane
 
denverpilot said:
I’m amazed at the number of people worried about these things. Built right with the heavy duty PVC, it takes a LOT of fuel to break one.

The PVC end screw cap in some designs or a glued joint usually fails first, but if the PVC goes, it splits. It doesn’t explode.

Ask me how I know. :)

Y’all a bunch of sissies.
Click to expand...
I always suspected you to be dangerous. :D
 
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