PRINGLES PISTON

Provided By FoxxLord - http://www.geocities.com/cain333_2000/

Here's my version of the poor mans piston. Look familiar? It should, it's a (was a) Pringles snack can! Just a few modifications and it was ready for air cannon action. The only reason I don't use this piston is because it's so light weight it doesn't seal 100% of the time. Rather than add more weight I ended up just building a proper piston. When it sealed it worked like a charm though!



Here's an overall view of the finished piston. It's a dry fire piston since the cloth tape slides effortlessly inside a 3" pipe.



A shot of the piston face, just a rubber disk glued to the metal bottom of the can. I think I used contact cement.



The back of the piston. Not so pretty eh? I gave it a few coats of Bondo just to make sure the cardboard didn't crush under heavy impacts. It worked at 50psi but I haven't went any higher since I switched pistons.



Finally here's a side view of the Pringles piston. The metal edge of the can is a great fit in a 3" pipe so I also built up the back edge with some extra layers of cloth tape to make it stable inside the chamber. You could probably use anything similar around the outside like felt or something, I had some tape laying around from my amateur street hockey days (that's the stuff they use to wrap hockey sticks).

That's about it for the piston. Like I said, you might want to add some more weight so it seals right away, and you could also stick something in the back to take up some of the empty space inside. Less space means less work pulling the piston back! Good luck.

Provided By FoxxLord - http://www.geocities.com/cain333_2000/