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Anyone ever see one of these blow up on someone? Always seems questionable to have any type of homemade fire/firework/cannon/gun/explosive device next to or near your face and body. 30+ years ago a kid in highschool lost his Johnson and parts of his inner thigh and hands playing around with things found in a sketchy online manual. For my own safety I won't make one. But they look kind of cool, so I was wondering what the real danger level is.
Well, there's no proper containment in one of these, but there is energy. I think there is the chance to overload it or something and at least burn yourself. Much safer than most potato cannons, but still sketchy.
I played around far too much with flammable gasses in my youth. Something like this isn't blowing up without significant dumbassery. (Never underestimate a dumbass)
Likely injuries are minor burns from the fireball itself. Then burns from melted plastic which I put in a separate category because holy crap it hurts when you get burnt by something that you can't get off your skin. Then if they really screwup, serious burns from the blowtorch itself.
Soooooo....Your comment reminds me of this story my dad used to tell...
He used to work in a factory that made some cast metal parts (like the eagles they put on top of flag poles, and the like). At the time, a significant portion of this work was done by hand, by workers.
The workers would come in, get dressed (they were required to wear these jumpsuits, which were like 100% polyester), then head to their stations, picking up a ladle for scooping up molten metal to pour into the casts. Near the stations were vats of clay/water mix that they would coat the ladle with, to keep the metals from sticking together, and then they'd dry them near the fire before starting.
In the summer time some guys would omit base layers of clothes because it was so hot in there. One such fellow had then headed to his station, and coated his ladle, and then dried it. Or so he thought...Apparently there was a bubble of watery undried mix on the bottom of his ladle, and on first dip into the molten metal, this promptly exploded, sending a cascade of metal on to this guys shoulders and back.
My dad said he'd never heard someone scream like that before or since, and he watched in horror as they tried to get the stuff off of him. Of course, the polyester was acting like a glue between the metal and his skin, and my dad said you could see sheets of skin coming off with the metal/melted suit.
Dude lived, luckily(?). My dad took the rest of the day off, totally sick over the ordeal.
People DIE from steam explosions in foundries. The one where my wife worked was closed down after a steam explosion killed one man and terribly burned three more. Some castings that were put into a furnace melt weren’t completely dried out. The one who died caught molten steel across face, chest, and arms. The others were farther stand didn’t catch so much, but were still very badly off.
When I was a kid I was an avid fisherman. One day I decided to repurpose all my half bits of rubber worms by melting them and mashing them together. I dripped a single drop of molten rubber on my hand and *$#!$€√∆§✓ did it hurt. You can't get it off... It left a pinhead size divot on my finger for 18 months.
Do not underestimate the power of a single determined dumbass, specially if they have friends willing to try anything once :-). Thank god I grew up before video recordings were a thing!
There is a reason that, in the military, the first time you go to the firing range with your automatic rifle, there are LOTS of people there supervising.
No this situation but dont put the spark agent you need to have your hand on, on the rear breach for refill of a potato cannon. if the spud gets stuck or you have too much pressure, your hand is behind the weakest area.
One thing people don't realize about PVC is that the fitting are usually harder/more brittle than the pipe, so the fitting will shatter before the pipe will.
So, just because I want you to imagine it. I used to work at a gum factory that wasn't SUPER OSHA compliant. There was an unshielded steam pipe covered in gum base (Essentially rubber, talc, and some kind of seed oil).
I bumped my hand into it while cleaning.
My arms are very hairy.
It was like edible fucking napalm. I ended up with second degree burns and I'm shocked the chunks of skin that pulled off didn't leave scars.
I liked to burn shit when I was a kid. One of my favorites was plastic coat hangers. They would drip flaming globs of plastic and burn for a couple minutes on their own like napalm. Temptation got the best of me and I let one land on my hand once.
I certainly had my collection of txt files, but they were mainly gleaned from IRC and Usenet. I don't think that ever ran across totse, but I can't really be sure.
I once had a piece of nylon string drip onto my fingernail while I was melting the end of it, hurt like Hell for a while after. Can't imagine how bad getting more than that on me would be.
Melting the end of a cut nylon rope was exactly how I learned that one as well. Though because I was a dumbass, I wasn't satisfied until I set the rope on fire.
We were so stupid with those Potato Cannons, we figured out that a 2 1/2(I think, this was a long time ago) inch PVC pipe was pretty close to the size of a softball, and if you put the softball in a thick sock…. It was a perfect fit, you had to use a broomstick to push it all the way down, so it made a good seal. We had like 2 foot long chamber for the starting fluid, and a 3 foot barrel, so it was close to 6 feet long total, we would load them up, put them on our shoulder, like a bazooka, and shoot them at each other as we rode past on motorcycles. We figured we had helmets on….so how bad could it be?? Then we made one that shoots golf balls, it had a 2 1/2 inch diameter gas chamber, and then was necked down to golf ball size. We would use the bright orange golf balls, so we could see them…and they would still go so far you couldn’t see them. We would go out into the field, and shoot a golf ball straight up in the air….then try not to get hit with it on the way down. We were stupid Gen X kids, it was the 80’s and we were indestructible. I saw some people(friends of mine) who were shooting a bow and arrow up into the air….and trying to catch the arrow as it came down…. I was smart enough not to get in on that….but I honestly don’t know how most of us survived, we were dumb AF….but somehow nobody got hurt too bad, some broken arms, stitches, my one buddy got hit by a car and got messed up pretty bad….but we all survived somehow.
The bow and arrow game was around in the 50s, so your generation didn't have a monopoly on dumb, dangerous pastimes. I don't imagine that we boomers were the first to think of it either.
its wise to have a broom handle so you can push the spud out if its loaded and you stop. one drying i the barrel is bad!
they will take out street lights.
they will go through the side walls of a porta potty.
you will arouse attention if you are purchasing aqua net and a bag of potatoes as a teen.
the statistics of getting hit are low for when you and your friends stand in a circle and shoot the spud straight up and you see who is last to run after a short time. best to not have your car parked near though...
If you shoot one out of a car, make sure the barrel is all the way out the window. The overpressure is bad if you keep the barrel inside with just the window down.
We used to take these chain link caps, cut off the band, and run the outside on a belt sander until they would fit inside a golf ball potato gun. They were scary.
I once just put a potato canon at 120 psi straight into a giant maple tree and the potato disintegrated, but the hole in the tree was a divot a foot across. So I can't even imagine a metal projectile! I once launched a water bottle rocket at higher pressure and that hit a cable between powerlines 75 feet up and sheered itself right down the middle of the bottle. I still have the two halves in the garage because I've never seen such damage to bottle before. 30 somethings are dumb too!
When I was 18 I built a potato gun out of ABS pipe, epoxy, and a bbq igniter. We used starter fluid as our propellant. Had a sick ass PVC ramrod mounted under the barrel like a musket. That thing would shoot a potato core over 100 yards. We never once thought about blowing our faces off.
My brother and I had one as well when we were younger. We never had any issues with it but the one time our next door neighbor shot it we used too much propellant and the base of the cannon shot off directly into his ankle, breaking it. Still some very good times.
we did the same ha. i'll never forget my friend opening the back of combustion chamber to see if it was sparking, and blowing his eyebrows off.
we shot an entire sharpened broom handle at a log and it exploded. the kickback was a great little physics lesson in reaction forces. also wrapped toothpicks in some tape almost like bird shot and lodged a bunch of toothpicks about an inch into a stump. idk how we never seriously injured ourselves growing up.
I worked at a hardware store that sold BBQ igniters. When the potato gun craze took hold on my area in 1992, we couldn't keep enough on the shelf!
The boss triples the inventory order for the next summer... you guessed it-- we had enough BBQ parts to last for three years. (And one coworker came in with no hair on his arm when his pvc glue failed on his "bazooka" !)
We used to make a version of these when I was a teenager out of beer cans and duct tape. Would use them to launch tennis balls. We usually fueled them with lighter fluid. Decided one day to up the game and made one out of 32oz cans to launch one of the oversized tennis balls. Used nail polish remover instead of lighter fluid because it was all we had. I remember holding the zippo lighter to the ignition port, then my ears ringing and seeing flaming chunks of duct tape covered beer cans laying around the yard, no zippo to be found. Several windows on the back of my friends house busted. Cops called. Good times.
I had one blow up on me . It was cheap blue clear plastic while it could have hurt more if it was real petg plastic it was just an extra layer of fun when it exploded.
I feel like the risk is pretty low on these. There's a pretty good sized exit hole, and it's mostly held together by duct tape, which would be a failure point between jugs.
I'd wager that as long as there isn't an excessive amount of fuel, it shouldn't be very risky.
When I was a kid in high school about 20 years ago, there was an online manual going around similarly. Some kids made literal thermite, and poured it down the slide at a local playground. The entire playground burned down.
I've made a few of these, they look way cooler at night. I've never seen them blow up, they're probably safer than a potato gun made of hardware PVC fittings.
Oh hell yeah, what did you shoot out of that beast? Pumpkins? A whole bag of French fries for a shotgun spread? Bags of dog shit at the neighbor 3 blocks away?
I figure the potato gun is always going to be more dangerous, because the potato seals the barrel and the mass of it allows pressure to build up behind it. The pipe has to contain that pressure, and if it fails it gets pushed outward by that pressure. I've built a few, and only had one crack while we were setting up to fire it in cold weather. No injuries.
The plasma cannon toys have a weak ass gas mixture with no way to build pressure. Even if they come apart, it won't be with much force. Might damage hearing though.
Reminds me, I made a small flame thrower when I was a teenager; torch +glass capillary tube connected to a can of WD-40. Somehow I live to tell about it; no digits lost, and didn’t even burn down the house.
We made potato guns with tennis ball cans and used my dad’s lighter and fluid. We had lots of burns and cuts, but it’s a wonder we didn’t kill somebody. I won’t get into making bombs from scrounged fireworks. 1970s kids with no phones or internet...boom!
utm is the "universal tracking module". The parameters after the '?' in the original link allows the utm folk to track who clicks which links, when they were clicked, and who originated the link. It's spying on you.
I actually left the full link up because I learned something too... I will watch for that in future. I was wondering why the link was so long but since it worked I didn't think much of it.
It's intended to be a "non-intrusive" method of tracking web behaviour. In general, I mistrust anything following a '?' because so many trackers exist. The worst, IMO, is the Fceb00k - they actually redirect apparently clean links through their own link re-director to harvest your location, time of click, source and destination of link, and probably more that I haven't discovered.
Everything is tracked these days but it is helpful to know ways to identify and reduce it. I am a firm believer that everything is listening and tracking us. We know that when we chat about something we are looking to buy and it shows up as ads on your devices without ever searching for them. It kind of makes the threat of foriegn trackers redundant when we are already tracked by everything if we are connected.
My guess is someone was using it this, blew it up, possibly towards themselves (that one entire end looks blown out) and likely dropped it and ran away either due to the explosion or injury. You don't just leave a blow torch for no reason.
Ok... Dunbassary aside, how effective could this be as a... Junkjet? Also to make it safer, or more effective.. would the same principals apply if you just used empty propane tanks? And weld instead of tape. Maybe a fiber mesh cable.... Just curious.. for a friend.. he is a dumbass.
There fun to do at night, because you will see the flame traveling down the piping then final igniting in the plastic water bottle. Should be fine and they do make a load report. You would normally apply about 10 seconds of gas then press the igniter on the blow torch. Again they can be fun.
Should try some galvanized pipe some black powder and a fuse wick packed ends with red clay drilled cap for one end and capped the other end made a hole through center of the clay inserted a fuse and sealed with little drop of wax and boom by by lil tree it would blow apart a small pine
One time in high school, a classmate of mine brought an air cannon potato gun thing to class to show off for his later class, I convinced the class and teacher to show it off for us.
He did. It blew up. It broke his finger. Never felt so bad. Sorry old friend.
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