ballistics

3D Printed C02-Powered Rockets

Building a C02-powered PVC launcher for firing off 3D printed rockets.

Continue Reading
Cannon-Sized Slingshot Fires 80mm Steel Shot

Cannon-Sized Slingshot Fires 80mm Steel Shot

For those of you without metric intuition, 80mm is about pi inches. For those of you without metric intuition who flunked geometry, it’s about 3.14 inches. Which am big. Like, cannonball-sized.

Continue Reading
Marble-Shooting Wooden Crossbow Punches Through Plywood

Marble-Shooting Wooden Crossbow Punches Through Plywood

Just another little bit of sweetness from Matthias Wandel, whose fantastic “woodworking for engineers” site, woodgears.ca, we have, to date, linked to more than a dozen times. See below.

Continue Reading
Rifled PVC Pipe For More Accurate Spud Guns

Rifled PVC Pipe For More Accurate Spud Guns

Thanks to a commenter on last week’s Now That’s A Knife post for pointing out that Jeremy Hanson’s Spudgun Technology Center has a custom machine for rifling PVC pipe to make more accurate barrels for potato cannon. They sell several varieties of rifled PVC (including clear) in assorted lengths. The way I hear it, the rifling machine was first designed and build by STC founder Ed Goldmann. [Thanks, Bryce Bell!]

Continue Reading
Now That’s A Knife!

Now That’s A Knife!

Thanks to our commenters for pointing out that, contrary to my implication in Monday’s bolt-action spud gun post, Jeremy Cook—cool though his project certainly is—is not the first person to build a breech-loading potato cannon. Not by a long shot. (Heh, sorry.)

Continue Reading
Bolt-Action Spud Gun

Bolt-Action Spud Gun

Jeremy Cook advances the potato cannon arms race from muzzle- to breech-loading eras with this .602 caliber pneumatic spud gun prototype that fires from a high-pressure gas reservoir instead of via the familiar fuel-ignition system.

Continue Reading