Golf ball mortar

eugene13 said:
When I was a little kid I watched some older kids fire CO2 cartridges off through a piece of pipe, using a hammer and nail to pierce the seal, they went pretty far, I've always dreamed of ramping it up with a bigger pipe and a compressed gas cylinder, I figured you could shoot the valve off with a rifle. Mythbusters did a similar experiment to see how thick of a wall they could penetrate, I think they used a Gullotine type device to bust of the valves.
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I did that with those small CO2 cartridges and a pipe with a nail at the bottom. Felt exactly like firing a mortar, drop one in and boom! They didn't fly very straight but you probably got 100' or more out of them.

I also got into fireworks and very amateur rocketry. Would make big bottle rockets in rolled paper tubes made specifically for the fireworks industry. I figured out after some time that it was easy to cap both ends and make a big M80. Refined the design with some carefully cut open Christmas light bulbs stuffed with black powder as electronic igniters. Put some sizable craters in my parents yard this way.
 
eugene13 said:
When I was a little kid I watched some older kids fire CO2 cartridges off through a piece of pipe, using a hammer and nail to pierce the seal, they went pretty far, I've always dreamed of ramping it up with a bigger pipe and a compressed gas cylinder, I figured you could shoot the valve off with a rifle. Mythbusters did a similar experiment to see how thick of a wall they could penetrate, I think they used a Gullotine type device to bust of the valves.
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I lost 2 and a half fingers to a CO2 bomb. Emptied out we put match heads inside and compressed them = boom.
Knocked me out cold. When I woke up my head was ringing, I couldn't hear a thing and I had blood shooting out from two formerly positioned fingers.
It was not a great day.
I still love black powder and the 4th of July :)
 
Yeah, be careful. This kind of stuff can get you dead in a hurry.

Two related stories (yeah just two but I could probably come up with more).

First the fun one, when I was young before Burning Man days we used to do some shows with Survival Research Laboratories. Founder Mark Pauline also is down a few fingers but that's a different story. Anyway we were doing a show in Seattle I think and one of my jobs was filling balloons with oxy/acetylene mixture. They made a great boom when hit by one of the flamethrowers but what we hadn't anticipated was some of them didn't go off. At the end of the show we were running around like mad men and women stomping on them because kids wanted to take them home:oops:

Second story, not fun. I worked for a while at a company that made airbag initiators, think ammunition plant. One day two of the load room techs were transporting explosive at our sister facility in SoCal and the batch went off. As IT I had to be part of reviewing the video footage from the incident, two fatalities:cry:

Be safe out there.

John
 
So a number of years ago i built a compressed air cannon out of PVC pipe and used a lawn sprinkling system electric valve to trigger it. It was amazingly powerful, and had fun shooting green lemons at a target. Then, thought I should see how high it would shoot, reviewed the physics, and saw if I timed its fall, I could compute height. I went out to the driveway, armed an associate with a stopwatch and fired it. Man that green lemon went high, later we computed it at 600’. But, just as it started down, I realized that we had 4 cars in the driveway and a rock hard lemon starting down. I prayed that if it missed the cars I would never shoot it again...it hit 3’ from a new Lexus. Wow. I hung it up for good.
 
Yes it can be dangerous but by using loose black powder poured into the muzzle it is not a firearm. Even a black powder muzzle loading rifle or a cap & ball black powder pistol is not a firearm.
 
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epanzella said:
Yes it can be dangerous but by using loose black powder poured into the muzzle it is not a firearm. Even a black powder muzzle loading powder rifle or a cap & ball black powder pistol is not a firearm.
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Whats makes a device a firearm?
 
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