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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.
That doesn't make them any less fun, though. For Xmas I got Backyard Ballistics which documents how to create a potato gun as well as many other loud and violent ballistic weaponry for children of all ages. Highly recommended.
For anyone interested in doing this too, building instructions can be found here
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
Not like no one else has done this on the net. Here are detailed instructions (at least enough to build) if you are so inclined... http://blizzard.rwic.und.edu/~nordlie/cannon/
Old, but very sweet!
GotSpud?
Tony's page
Spudweizer
Simple Spudgun
My mom would never let me build one when I lived at home, so now's my chance. AND, I'll be prosecuted as an adult, and possibly an 'American Terrorist'
I find it's easier to simply get a matching diamater chunk of potato and put it in the freezer for a day :)
frozen oranges are good too if you've got the right diamater pvc
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
the story calling it "craze" is somewhat overrated. At every time in the last 50 years, kids have built something that goes boom. I think that is the same in every other country.
I live here and i haven't seen or heard of a single "Kartoffelkanone" prior to the article and the photos of the SPIEGEL magazine.
At least it's an interesting method of delivering mashed potatoes.
Yours, Martin
It just so happens I had this same hobby a few years back. Except we used propane as the fuel and golf balls as the projectiles. Tiger Woods beware! It was truly amazing to see a golf ball launched several hundred yards, almost out of sight. For those interested, www.spudtech.com has a load of information on these fun toys.
Scott
Other good ammo is taking a bunch of D batteries and duct taping them together. They are excellent for taking out street lights.
Hairspray is for wimps...real men use compressed air. Compressed air is much more powerful, you don't have the legal ramifications of using an explosive, and it's cheaper than hairspray. It takes a little more work to get it air-tight, and you have to buy a thicker PVC pipe, but the results are worth the extra effort.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
No, german kids have always been building things that go boom, as did kids all over the world. It is the german magazine DER SPIEGEL which discovered the topic and decided to make it an issue just now. Seems to fit with the overall mood, US going to war in Irak and weapons inspections and all.
Kristian
Check out this story we ran over on Sci-Fi Today which included some relevant links. You can get Sci-Fi Today daily headlines on your Slashdot home page by clicking here and putting a checkmark in the Sci-Fi Today box. Or heck, just join us as a member and help us build a science-oriented discussion community!
even better, acetylene. any hobby store sells calcium carbide (the stuff in old miner's helmets to make the light). just put a little calcium carbide in water and you have instant acetylene (used for welding). ignite that with a gas grill ignitor and you can easily have potatoes going 150mph. when i was little my brother and i experimented with many different style guns. the best we came up with was using acetylene as the propellant and using a 1 inch pvc barrel (rahter than the traditional 2 inch). you couldn't shoot a whole potato with it, but the part you did shoot went about 150mph. (we figured that out by timing how long the potato stayed in the air when shot vertically).
www.kartoffelkanone-forum.de
Here's a letter from the ATF regarding the legality of the "spud gun". Note the date - September 12, 1995.
Definitely old news...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
It sounds like these have gone from "geek hobby" to "mainstream danger"
Good thing most of these kids are probably too stupid to make a pneumatic spudgun. Far safer for the operator, but FAR more dangerous for people at the wrong end of the cannon. (Pneumatic spudguns use a constant pressure for most of the firing cycle, rather than the quick spike of pressure from combustion. As a result, pneumatics can pack a LOT more power into a gun while stressing the components less.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Down in Dunedin FL, there is a local museum dedicated to Police and the Military. http://www.naslemm.com On display is a spud gun manufactured by the engineering department of Smith & Wesson over 20 years ago. Big, Blue and with the S&W Logo, a bit more impressive then the tennis ball cannons, I used to build back in the 70's.
We played with these a lot as kids. Aqua-Net + potato + sober people, no problem. Firing them with ether is bad [weakens the PVC cement after a few firings and gun explodes], other non-squishy projectiles are bad [jam in the barrel and gun explodes], and impaired people of course don't mix well with firearms.
Get with the times PVC pipe connected with pvc cement removes the chances of flying metal shards Also: Deisel engine starter contains 90% ether which will over double the range of a hairspray fueled gun Lastly: a Grill ignitor works far better than a battery Silly Germans
Since, to my knowledge (IANAL), in the state of Texas these things are banned because they can be considered a firearm (some lame excuse of combustible material). So my brother built one using a sealed chamber with a ball valve. He uses a bike's tire pump to pressurize it, and even has a gauge built into it. The cool thing about this on, you can load anything including water. At about 70 psi, it could shoot a ping pong ball (filled with water) about 100-125 yards.
The guy who got one in the eye was hit by an apple. So that was shot from an apfelkanone, right?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If they get their hands on this then we may have a problem.
Isn't this how the great Irish potato famine started?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
I'll second the warning to be very careful with potato guns. A kid in my old neighborhood was badly injured when messing with a gun made from a chain-link fence post. Don't know exactly what he was doing with it, but he came very close to blowing half his arm off. I never heard what happened to him afterwards...hopefully the doctors were able to reattach it.
Moral: Be very careful when you're messing with stuff that explodes...
DennyK
My semi-literate, tv-watching Playstation-playing lazy step-brother (who is no releation to me) has had one of these for years.
He liked to fire it around the neighbourhood. He used PVC pipes. Bright kid.
I wouldn't be overly concerned, unless they get into an SS uniform and say they are Panzerfaust.
Inflammable means flammable. Nitrogen is inert, as is CO2.