On building yourself a cannon - DIY

You could foul the line too. (Lyle firing is toward the end... wait for it!)

 

A friend and I built a cannon...we were 12 or 13 and it was more pipe-bomb than cannon. Built it out of galvanized pipe, loaded it with fire-cracker powder, aimed it and lit the fuse. We weren't completely foolish, as there was a pile of dirt between us and the cannon. We didn't hit the target and we never did find that cannon. I'm telling y'all this because we were minors, the evidence was destroyed and the statue of limitations has expired. I learned a very important lesson that day that I have never forgotten...how to build a bomb.

 

Me & my friends had a 1/2" thick steel pipe welded to a thick flat steel baseplate we called a mortar. We tried using a fuse thru a hole drilled to fire it but it never worked quite right. Then we developed what we called a shaped charge load. Worked every time. light it, drop it in the pipe, then drop the paint can, or paint can lid as wadding with whatever on top. One those Big high bounce balls would go so far up we never heard it hit. Then it did, a couple minutes later we heard it hit again, minute or so later heard it hit again.............

 

As for Taterguns my friends used gas grill ignightors to fire theirs. I tried to use a stun gun to fire a sparkplug to make a more reliable ignition system but no luck. They mainly used hair spray in their & sumtimes propane. Well, I overbuilt mine, reinforcing the hell out of it. Used a trigger part of a propane blowtorch & an Electric Gas grill ignightor. So that mine was built to use propane all the time. Every time it fired it shot a 3 foot blue flame out of it's 4 foot barrel, and you had to wear gloves or the fire going up the barrel would hurt! Had a long damn range firing taters off the top of the hill my friend lived on.

 

Twenty five years ago a group of grown-ass men were playing with tater guns at lunch. They had started with Final Net hairspray as a propellant, but had experimented with gasoline, brake cleaner and anything else that would ignite. Eventually they tried the Oxygen/Acetylene mix from the cutting torch. The potato went clean out of sight! It was the last time they did this, since the man firing the tater gun lost a big chunk of his buttocks, and will always wear the reverse image of a 4" PVC pipe thread on his backside.

I've shot many many tennis balls from beer can mortars with Coleman fuel as the propellant. This was when beer cans had straight sides and were made of steel. The only fuel I ever used in a PVC tater gun has been hair spray. I've been amazed that even with a coat of black paint, the ignition flash is visible through the entire length of the PVC tater gun. When fired just as a noise maker it never fails to get whoops and Rebel yells from my neighbors. We don't restrict fireworks to Independence Day around here, and mortar, bottle rocket, and Roman candle responses are appreciated.