Bowling Ball Gun

[Bullshop Junior]

I want one!!

[STP22]

This is from a few years ago...the narrative is priceless!

http://www.docsmachine.com/nonPB/mortar.html

[Bullshop Junior]

This is from a few years ago...the narrative is priceless!

http://www.docsmachine.com/nonPB/mortar.html

OK! THAT DOES IT!!
I'VE GOTTA HAVE ONE!!
I am going to start looking for parts.
Time to go to the dump!

[Mrs.Geargnasher]

NO!!! Stop giving my husband ideas!! -runs off to go hide all the potential materials-

[geargnasher]

NO!!! Stop giving my husband ideas!! -runs off to go hide all the potential materials-

DRAT! Foiled again! And I was just given a decomissioned 244 O2 tank by a friend and was wondering what to do with it....

Gear

[Multigunner]

When I was a kid the old style cherry bombs still had enough powder in them to take all your fingers off in one whack, at least one fellow I knew lost three fingers to one.
I figured that was plenty enough to fire off a tennis ball, so I went to work building a fair representation of a French 75 using a discarded boat trailer , some plywood and a large bore piece of threaded pipe with a cap.
The pipe turned out to be too small to take a tennis ball, which was a shame since the high school tennis court was near my aunts house and I'd collected dozens of lost or discarded balls.
But luckily we had several walnut trees and they filled the yard with the walnuts still in the husk. I had to rake these up in piles to mow the lawn.
I found that a cherry bomb would send a walnut still in the husk sailing right over the rooftops and out of sight.
Now days the neighborhood down range of my experiments is thick with half century old Walnut trees.

[madsenshooter]

OMG, you guys got to stop this! I live across the road from a golf course, I get lots of little white roundball projectiles that pop up in my yard in the warmer months, I've been giving them away to avoid temptation. Could be worse, I could live behind a bowling alley.

[Lee]

pssst....geargnasher......
just do it.
it's easier to find another wife than a decommissioned O2 cylinder........

[smokemjoe]

madsenshooter: They have a bowlingball shoot at Richman Ind. There is a viedo of it on gbo web site on page 92. its really something to watch.

[giorgio]

And do you know anybody who is shooting a spud gun?
A very mad friend of mine is stdying one........

[RayinNH]

....and invovles a large amount of beer, .

I'll bet this is a recurring theme ...Ray

[Multigunner]

And do you know anybody who is shooting a spud gun?
A very mad friend of mine is stdying one........

Funny story but true.
A friend of mine had built a nice spud gun and painted it in camo pattern. It looked very realistic and military.
He was driving past an airfield one day and was stopped by a highway patrolman.

The patrolman while checking his license saw the camo'ed spud gun partly covered by a blanket in the back seat.
Next thing my friend knew he'd been yanked through the window by the neck and was face down on the asphalt with a gun to his head.

My nephew built a nice spudgun, he got at least a three hundred yard range with it.

[Linstrum]

Back when some of us who now haunt this board were at the now defunct alloutdoors.com, there was a similar thread about an event that took place in Grants Pass, Oregon. There is a mountain there that has many bowling balls atop it summit, all mysteriously appearing one afternoon about a decade ago.

I had a rather wild-acting buddy, now deceased (from natural causes), who used to launch tennis balls and baseballs with an air cannon he built from schedule 80 PVC water pipe and 12-volt electric solenoid actuated water sprinkler valves. He had several switch barrels of different bore sizes to accommodate cantaloupe, oranges, and all other manner of spherical objects. He never did bowling balls, though, he didn't have any PVC pipe that big. There was a public housing project across the creek from his place, and he used to launch rotten fruit at the cars parked across the way on Saturday afternoons, which was when the inhabitants washed their cars. Without much acoustic signature, the direction the fruit came from was not easily determined and the creek was a further barrier to discovery.

When I was in college far too many moons ago, a friend and I built a giant sling shot using a natural rubber bicycle inner tube stretched across a window frame after removing the glass panes. Natural rubber has much more rebound to it than synthetic butadiene rubber and we could launch our balloons 100 yards, clearing the roof of the middle dorm, and hit the front door of the farthest dorm. Because we couldn't see our target, we had a forward observer who relayed data back to us so we could correct the trajectory to make direct hits on the large front door. From the third floor of our dorm nothing on the block was safe from our water balloons if we or our forward observer could see it. Condoms made fairly good balloons, but we generally used those for filling with hydrogen generated by reacting aluminum foil with lye drain opener dissolved in a little bit of water, using a big quart Coke bottle as the reaction chamber. I got all my supplies from the local supermarket and drug store. That was way before plastic pop bottles were invented. Floating a condom inflated up to the size of a watermelon with hydrogen gas was a bit tame, so what was more fun was igniting one! One of my crazier buddies was our "trigger man", he used a match jammed through the grommet on the end of a yard stick held at arm's length to keep from getting scorched by the resulting "WHOOOOOMMMM!!!!" when the hydrogen lit off. No, they did NOT explode, they just burned fast enough to constitute a good solid thump. We did this deviltry on Saturday nights after about 10PM when a good many of our fellow dorm residents were in general pretty well plastered or stoned, or both (this was back when such was quite common and the laws against teen alcohol use were still generally ignored if we stayed out of public places). Some of the dorm administrators sometimes joined us, they were pretty laid-back themselves! The dorm had just been turned into a co-ed facility the year before and that added latitude made things even more enjoyable! Oh, in case you couldn't tell, I was a chemistry major and I was just putting to use my newly acquired education. And I never stopped!


rl722

[trooperdan]

Linstrum, try filling some balloons with a correct mix of actylene and oxygen.. I truly believe that in do detonate with ignited! Actually pretty dangerous as they are so easy to set off, even static charge might do it.

[Linstrum]

Since my dad is deceased, I can relate what he did with some acetylene and oxygen when he worked at the Hanford, Washington, nuclear reactor in 1942 during World War Two. My dad was a chemistry student at the time and during summer break from college he got a wartime strategic job working on the crew that was wiring up the reactor building. One time at noon he was sitting on a cast iron sewer pipe reading a newspaper before heading off to eat lunch, and a big rat ran into the pipe he was sitting on, so he wadded up two sheets of newspaper to plug the ends of the pipe and then ran the pipe full of a neutral mixture from the oxygen and acetylene welding tanks that were nearby. He lit the newspaper on one end and walked off. In about three minutes a big explosion was heard that broke windows all around and scared hell out of my father since the explosion was a lot bigger than he anticipated! It killed the rat, all right, plus the reactor site was put under lock-down while the FBI came in to investigate the act of "war-time sabotage"! My dad had the highest security clearance given to blue collar civilian workers in The Manhattan Project and fortunately it was never discovered he was responsible for that little bit of pest control since he was not even close to being a security risk, he kept his mouth shut about what he did, unlike Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who deliberately blabbed all they knew to the Russians.

Boy! I wouldn't want to be anywhere within 100 feet of even a small balloon filled with a stoichiometric mixture of acetylene and oxygen, much less attempt to fill one! Acetylene by itself is unstable, that is why the tanks are filled with acetone and asbestos to dissolve the gas into the acetone to stabilize it. Above about 15 psi at room temperature, acetylene will detonate all by itself, no oxygen needed, and 7 psi is the absolute maximum pressure that the acetylene regulator should be set at. Five psi is the norm but I have run it up to 10 psi on occasion when running my big cutting torch to cut through a 6-inch thick slab of steel (sure beats a hack saw!), but it isn't a good idea! I used to teach welding in high school night class and the maximum pressure that acetylene could be used at was one of the things on the test I gave to my students.

Messing around with oxygen and acetylene is just too dangerous. I used to bubble up a small pile of soap suds with a neutral mixture of acetylene and oxygen and then touch it off with the striker, and maybe 1/4 cup of that hurts your ears at arm's length. The reason why my hydrogen balloons weren't terribly dangerous is that there was no air in the condom along with the H2 gas.


rl723

[JeffinNZ]

LINSTRUM: I built a potato cannon from PVC plumbing hardware and ran it on butane. Where I worked at the time, one of the engineers suggested trying with with oxyacetylene to which I responed "sure, just let me go around back of the building when YOU touch it off!"

Not likely brother.

[Johnch]

OMG, you guys got to stop this! I live across the road from a golf course, I get lots of little white roundball projectiles that pop up in my yard in the warmer months, I've been giving them away to avoid temptation. Could be worse, I could live behind a bowling alley.

I have just what you need to return those white toys

Years ago I made a golf ball cannon
200 gr of 2 F will send a golf ball THROUGH 8 straw bales and the barn door behind the bales

I have a old steel barn 40 rods behind the barn
I love to bounce golf balls off of it when I am bored

Best guess , 3/4 mile , but no accurcy with 250 gr
100 gr , I dare you to park you car out at the end of the lane

John

[smokemjoe]

Okey, I have a oxg. tank, Going to put it on a big band saw and cut it half for the bowiling ball gun. Is this safe, valve missing. Thanks

[Lee]

Saw away, brother. A vented, decom O2 tank is no danger. I wouldn't say the same for a propane tank though. Also, pictures, please! Before, during, and after.

[TCLouis]

I remember hearing about a person who would open the shooting competition with a plastic bag full of Oxy/acetlyene.

He said . . . I heard he said, ' I knew I WAS IN TROUBLE when the hair on my arm stood up.'

Something about waking up and being in a bush and luckily the hospital found no major injuries or burns.

Sometimes we survive our experiments.