Hairspay and potatoes are much cheaper and potatoes come in 100 pound burlap bags that made a nice mat for my dog after I was finished. Potatoes also are kind of oval shaped so they seemed to fly in a straighter line than other produce we tried.
We used to build these things when I was younger and it was indeed a lot of fun. I should warn you though, if you you build one too exteme then it will blow the chamber open. A friend of mine got his arm broken by this. We were only using hairspray and a grill lighter but I guess it got stress cracks or something because we had probably shot around 250 pounds of potatoes through it.
We found a barrel of 4 feet was about the limit. Anything past that caused so much drag that slowed the "projectile" down. For most of ours we used a 6" PVC pipe that was about 1.5'-2' long as the chamber. Anything bigger than that was just awkward and consumed a lot of fuel without gaining much in range. You can either drill a hole in the side to spray the propellant in, or have a screw cap for a better seal. The screw cap yielded the best range of course but was a pain after a while. If you do use the hole method you can use a fireplace lighter for ignition if you can't find a clicky grill lighter.
At the time of creation, pink Aquanet was the cheapest and best propellant:-)
And if you want to get your PVC cheap, ask for the scrap pieces. I don't think any of our "guns" cost more than $10 to make.
You must also realize that not everyone is on a college network. Most of the world is still on dialup. And a good percentage of those people don't even get 56K.
Wow, isn't it fun to swap 1 song every 3 hours?
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Hairspay and potatoes are much cheaper and potatoes come in 100 pound burlap bags that made a nice mat for my dog after I was finished. Potatoes also are kind of oval shaped so they seemed to fly in a straighter line than other produce we tried.
We used to build these things when I was younger and it was indeed a lot of fun. I should warn you though, if you you build one too exteme then it will blow the chamber open. A friend of mine got his arm broken by this. We were only using hairspray and a grill lighter but I guess it got stress cracks or something because we had probably shot around 250 pounds of potatoes through it. We found a barrel of 4 feet was about the limit. Anything past that caused so much drag that slowed the "projectile" down. For most of ours we used a 6" PVC pipe that was about 1.5'-2' long as the chamber. Anything bigger than that was just awkward and consumed a lot of fuel without gaining much in range. You can either drill a hole in the side to spray the propellant in, or have a screw cap for a better seal. The screw cap yielded the best range of course but was a pain after a while. If you do use the hole method you can use a fireplace lighter for ignition if you can't find a clicky grill lighter. At the time of creation, pink Aquanet was the cheapest and best propellant :-)
And if you want to get your PVC cheap, ask for the scrap pieces. I don't think any of our "guns" cost more than $10 to make.
You must also realize that not everyone is on a college network. Most of the world is still on dialup. And a good percentage of those people don't even get 56K. Wow, isn't it fun to swap 1 song every 3 hours?