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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
We made one in our Physics class in high school. I'm due to go to my 10 year high school reunion in a little more than a year.
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."
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'
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
My friends and I built a potato canon and regularly fired it over the skies over Tucson. It was fun to a potato hang in the air for up to 10 seconds at a time, and a bit of basic math estimated it to travel over 1/3 a mile. Beware though that the potato emerges at about 100 miles per hour (but slows down alomost immediately due to air resistance).
We stopped fiting it after we stuck a 1/4 inch thick board of plywood about 3 feet in front of the canon and fired away.
Damned if that potato didn't punch a perfect 4 inch hole through that board. As the potato emerged on the far side though, it almost completely stripped off the last ply layer from the board.
We gained a new respect for tuber-based weaponry that day....
Dr Fish
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)
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
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
The most "impressive" one was a 6ft long black barreled cannon known as "black beauty". It had an ignition switch from a grill, eliminating more clumsy homemade solutions for ignition and could put a potato through a wooden fence from about 20 yards. It could fire them @150 yards on a good day. It was tremendously dangerous, with a 3 foot flame shooting out of the barrel each time you fired it. The heat and pressure on the piping caused it to crack and need replacement, a function often ignored by my more idiotic friends. Here in texas some younger kids at my church got caught firing one in a golf course not too long ago and recieved some fines from the local police. These things are not safe...
My last memory of that cannon involved modification to shoot sprays of water. Ignition, upon filling the barrel with water after placing a "separator" in the piping caused a huge spray of water and steam to eject in every direction. Took the bark right off of trees...
STUPID
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
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.
We have done this for physics often... no explosives or flammables involved. (I know... where's the fun then :} )
:}
:}
All you need is a length of pipe that just barely fits a pingpong (table tennis whatever) ball through it. Fit a connector into one end of it that can hook to a vacuum pump.
Ok.. now here is the operation.
*WARNING do not have anything in line with EITHER end of this device!!! It is VERY unlikely but either end can give way and it fire either direction!*
Place the pingpong ball in the pipe. Place a single piece of plastic packing tape over each end. (Clear or brown... not filament!)
Use your pump and lower the pressure as far as you can. (You will have to expirement to make sure you can get it that low without imploding the tape on the ends)
When ready to fire.. put end with fitting slightly lower. Wait for pingpong ball to settle at that end of the tube. Aim. Using something sharp or pointed pierce the tape on that end of the pipe.
Bye-bye pingpong ball
Basically the inrush of air propels the ball through the tube and straight through the tape on the other end. We have clocked these pingpong balls in excess of 150mph
Please only do this under carefully controlled circumstances... It makes a great science expirement and is relatively safe. But as always be careful, wear protection and DON'T BE STUPID.
BTW You can pick up used vacuum pumps for cheap on Ebay... cheaper than 20 or 30 cans of hairspray so...
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
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).
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.
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!
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?
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.
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
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Building the things was pretty simple -- all you need is a strong tube, a projectile, propellant, and an ignition system. As others in this thread have mentioned, my friends' ignition of choice was the ignitor from old BBG grills. This worked fairly well -- you actually get a trigger to work with -- but they always seemed to break down after a while, so the design had to be built such that you could swap out the ignitition every now and then.
That is how Jeff burned his damn face off :-)
See, like I say, everyone would just sit around in their dorm, building these guns and preparing their next shots. Jeff was about to shoot his when, wouldn't you know it, the ignition jammed. Bummer. So as usual, he unscrewed the back to get at the ignition to check on it. Unwisely, this involved taking a look into the ignition chamber to see -- well, the back end of a potato & some invisible ether.
Did I mention that? I guess not -- their propellant of choice was ether. I have no idea where they got the stuff, but damn it was good for making a nice little controlled explosion. Or in this case, uncontrolled explosion.
So anyway, there Jeff was staring into the back end of the gun, when somehow he bumped the trigger.
And it went off.
And the ether exploded.
Remember how when you were a little kid, and you liked playing with the garden hose in the summer, but your evil older brother (that would be me :-) would hide around the corner pinching off the flow, and you'd get confused and look into the hose trying to find the water -- and just at that very moment that bastard of an older brother would uncrimp the hose and blast you in the face?
This was a lot like that, but with fire instead of water.
So anyway, there Jeff sits, with a ball of fire around his head, and well you get the idea. I wasn't actually there when this happened -- I was back at my dorm, probably cowering under the bed from my psycho buddies (or reading email more likely...). But Jeff was my roommate and, about five minutes after the incident, Jeff comes staggering back to the room. He has no eyebrows -- just white molten lumps where they used to be. He has no eyelashes. Or rather, he does have some remnants of eyelashes, but they are half an inch long each and there is is a six inch line across the front of his hairless brow. And exactly in the middle of his (now apparently sunburned) forehead is a bright red circle -- as if someone had thrown a tennis ball, dripping with paint, really hard at the middle of his forehead.
Jeff took a little nap at that point. He woke up a day or two later, ordered some pizza, ate, and went back to sleep. He slept for most of the next several days, it took a couple of weeks for the tennis ball spot to fade away, and it took a month or more for the hair to grow back. He wore a hat a lot those days, IIRC :-)
So, let this be a lesson to you spud projectionists -- the back end of the gun is just as dangerous as the front!
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
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