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Potato Bazookas
Zog The Undeniable writes "The latest craze in Germany is "Kartoffelkanone" or potato bazookas. These use hairspray ignited by a spark to fire potatoes at colossal speeds. The authorities are not amused." Everyone needs a hobby I guess.
Bet you can't shoot just one!
g
The germans JUST NOW discovered potato guns? Damn, get with the program people!
Just wait until they figure that if you fill a tin can with cement you can put a hole through a car, not just a big dent in the side.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Potato's as weapons. You could supply an army and feed them at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone.
About 20 years ago, as a kid in Denver, we used to shoot tennis balls out of guns made from soda cans and fuled with ligher fluid. At least we did until I had the great idea to soak the ball with lighter fluid before we fired it. The first few times were great, but soon one of our flaming balls set the neighbor's yard on fire.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
Pity the poor Germans. Once they led the world in starch based weapons technology, now they have to play a distant game of catch up.
The Iraqis don't stand a chance against our mighty potato cannon, not to mention our highly intelligent french fry cluster bombs!
Reminds me of the time a couple of Iowa State students got out of trouble for having a spud gun by claiming it was an internal combustion engine. When the officer asked where the piston was, they replied "About 5 blocks that a way.."
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
My favorite part of the article:
German police fear that the youths will turn to more lethal ammunition than potatoes. Tests have shown that such a bazooka firing an empty film canister filled with sand and the cardboard centres of toilet rolls filled with cement could penetrate brickwork.
I can just picture these "experts" in a lab doing "testing".
It probably went something like "Whoa, that was way cool, lets see what else we can use. Hey, if we use something really heavy it'll be just like those cannons on junkyard wars!"
Those guys must have a cool job.
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
I love that... "hey kids, those potato gun things are WAY too dangerous for you! Don't try it, but THESE things are WAY more destructive!"
Ya gotta wonder.
$0.02 (CDN)
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
I went back to my parents house to build one (and test fire, since the apartment complex I was living in presented an environment a little too target-rich). After the PVC cement dried and I completed some test firing with a rag stuffed into the barrel, I managed to put a potato into the air, across the street, over the house across the street and smack into a humongous water tower that has loomed over my childhood memories for 20 years.
Talk about a thrill. It was early evening, and a little dark, so you could see the long tongue of orange flaming Aqua-net.
First a click (of the grill igniter in the trigger)...then a sort of "thomp" sound...then a long silence...then a huge, resounding GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG sound.
It was awesome. A childhood dream come true.
I need to build another.
And after you done with wussy air, you move on to better things like CO2. We had a friend at a welding supply shop that got up 80lb tanks of CO2. Hook that up to a potato cannon, add a 3/4 turn brass valve and you've got a lot better cannon than air.
The initial test of it shot it out the door of the place i was working, over the parking lot (12 cars), across 5 lanes of traffic, over a Kroger's and associated parking lot, and into the field behind it. We deemed it a success.
Now, propane we were a bit leary to try.
kc8apf
He probably figured that if he helped your friends, their parents would come back in and buy some repair stuff too.
Now if only RMS had seen us launching little penguins... he would have made us call it a GNU/Gun.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Nay, it is the fact that they are German boys that makes this a newsworthy story.
In the late 80s, Ronald Reagan issued a challenge to then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. During his famous speech in Berlin, he said:
Shortly therafter, the Berlin wall was no more, paving the way for German unification.
People with no sense of history thought this to be a good thing, but myself, I saw these occurrances for their true nature. A unified Germany can mean only one thing... It's only a matter of time before massive, well equipped, well trained German armies are marching all over Europe.
Others deny this conclusion, and some have actually made statements to the effect of:
Be wary, my Slashdotting friends. It's only a matter of time before the people of Germany grow restless, pretending to be friends with the rest of their European neighbors. Already, German youth have turned their attentions to the design and manufacure of inexpensive, abundant, starch weapons.
Heed my warning... It's only a matter of time...
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Not one eye was put out that summer.
Three, then? Four? Five?
...
THis looks like the perfect gift for my neice. Im trying to be a bad influence on her.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Back in the seventies, the neighborhood pyros would use the top of a kids' swingset as a cannon. They would stuff a racketball in one end, light an M-80, and stick it in the other, followed by a dirt clod to plug it up, and launch the racketball. It flew like a bullet. Part of the game was to launch it horizontally, then have someone try to catch it with a baseball mit. The craziest thing about this story is that the guys doing this were adults, and the people watching were kids! Talk about setting an example. I think they were potheads, though.
How ya like dat?
I guess it's different over in the US.
Don't you guys over there in the States have a constitutional right to keep and bear potatoes?
And I seem to recall Charlton Heston saying that "Potatoes don't kill people, people kill people" (only sometimes with potatoes). And "A society with potatoes is a polite society. Pass the fries, please."
Or something like that, anyway.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Imagine Dirty Harry working in a fast food restaurant...
"You want fries with that?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I spent more than one evening on the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night (Nov 5th) sitting in an attic, crushing match-heads between two 10p pieces (a bit larger than a quarter, I think), nerves stretched by the imminent possibility of a flare-up. Between four of five of us, we collected the crushed heads of about 4,000 matches.
On the big night, we rammed a 6 foot steel pipe about two feet into the ground, rammed paper into it until the paper reached ground level, then poured in the match-heads, jammed a potato in the top of the pipe, and lit a fire around the base.
Then we just got on with the business of lighting a proper bonfire, making punch, roasting potatoes, setting off fireworks, and drinking. Every time anyone walked past the pipe, they would glance nervously at it. A couple of hours later, there was a tremendous thundering BOOM, and the potato went up into the stratosphere.
Yup...and they had waterproof fuses. They used to sell them as normal fireworks. Last box of them I saw was back in HS in about 1980. We got a box of them, took them to our neighborhood pool during the winter, tied them to rocks, lit them and dropped them in...like depth chargers. Found out that summer we had cracked the bottom of the pool. But, the best thing to do with them in school, was to find someone who was sitting on the can in the bathroom on one of the lower floors...run upstairs, light an M-80, and flush it...thing would blow up, and shoot water out of the john's down below...hehehe...talk about a wet suprise..hehehe. Had to quit that when the pipes at Central High suddenly got blow out a few times....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
. . .the Germans out of socialism and restore their war loving pride.
Look out, France.
Some idiots once put the lower part of a mop (the thing you clean your bathroom floor with that looks like your mother in law's hairstyle) into this special gun and fired at someone about 200 meters away. Broke him both legs. (Try to explain that to the ambulance ... "this here mop did it! Really!")
btw: British Airways (or was it the USA? don't remember) caught up to this and copied the idea (not the mop idea though). They loaded the gun with a dead chicken, measured the distance like Lufthansa did, and fired.
The chicken went through the windshield, through the pilot's seat, through the console behind the driver (or whatever was there) and into the wall behind it.
British Airways (or whoever) complained to Germany. Germany sent two engineers there, looked at the setup, and advised them to un-freeze the chicken before firing.
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Somewhere in Idaho, a potato farmer and his family are rejoicing.
Producer: NEXT!!
Ralph Wiggum: Chicken necks