SpudFiles

thats one cool cannon, and i agree with bluetooth, you should post the vid

Legal stuff? Can't you just sell it as a kit? I've seem em sold on e-Bay.

Noice!

Please excuse the hoard of 1-2 liner half-assed replies.

Its no wonder that the cannon goes flying after ignition. With that arc of shot, and the power of the shot wouldn't expect it to do much less!
:-p

Nice machining! I've got a mini lathe of my own. A 8x12 Central Machinery made lathe that I got from Harbor Freight [All 280lbs of it]. So far I've only machined plastic with it. The surface finish you got on the lathed components is very nice, as to get something like that on plastic you have to use the auto carriage feed, and some lube for the tooling. The lower density may have something to do with it though. I'm quite scared to start doing metal, because I believe I'm going to damage my tooling at a fairly fast rate.

A Jig-Saw? Maybe a band saw? Again Ive never had a chance to cut metal via anything other then a chop saw, but either way, nice job. I was figuring you had a mill or something you cut that out with...

As to the barrel, it appears that there was in fact 4 pieces... I'm just going off the seams I think I see, doesn't matter either. Again did the lathing of those welds mess up your tooling? If I recall welds are 60G-80G PSI.

I'm going to be interupting the rules here, but from what I understand, PCGUY is trying to avoid injuries via information gained from his site. This for obvious reasons. Although here you have presented a very clean, professional, and what appears to be a safe solid-propellant launcher. Either way Ill allow such discussion, and if PC decides otherwise, well Ill take the heat.

Sure I missed out on something that I wanted to comment on. Nice launcher!

Hey, thanks pimpmann!

I'm sorry for breaking any forum guidelines... I should've read "ALL" the rules

yup, I've been through many cutting bits, but I got down to a science now so I'm not breaking many more. I always try to bite of more then the machine is capable of. The welds came out surprisingly smooth and deep. I only had to turn it down hardly a 1/32" to clean it up (gotta love mig) then I polished it up with some cutting oil and emery.

The side plates I indeed cut with an electric hand held jig saw... Then I cleaned up the edges with a grinder & fine file.
I wanted to use steel for the wheels but I was really having a hard time with the hole saw making a nice round cut in the stock, so I used aluminum... which kinda sucked because that soft alloy likes to clog teeth even with oil. So I had to keep pulling the hole saw up and cleaning the teeth with a steel wire brush. Then I put the wheels on the lathe and cleaned them up.

Oh, and yes... good eyes man! The barrel was 4 separate pieces before being welded. Actually, It was welded, then I cut the barrel again back into 4 pieces to drill out the threads on the inside of the barrel. When I originally built it, the bore was much thicker (cannon walls) and threaded for a 3/4" bolt. I originally pressed a piece of 3/4" copper pipe down the bore as a sleeve... But I was worried that the sleeve would come out and hurt someone so I drilled out the threads and made the bore to 1". Before, with the 3/4" bore, the cannon sounded like a shotgun and only moved about 3 or 4 feet when lit. Now with the 1" bore, I stand 20' away cause it throws! You'll see in the vid...

I'll grab a video this morning and post it... It's nice living in the middle of the forest

ok guys... as promised. Here's a short vid of the cannon. it's about 15 seconds, file size is about 8meg.

I wanted to take another vid from behind but the flipping batteries went dead in the camera

The sound from the camera is horrible, the sound/shock wave leaves you breathless... and I was a Marine Corps Demolitions Specialist (Combat Engineer) for 4 years and this thing still sounds unbelievable to me! . The cannon flew back about 15 feet and buried the front of the barrel in the frozen ground! I'll take some more video in an hour or two when the batteries are charged...

enjoy!


EDIT:
i TRIED TO POST THE VID BUT i GOT A MESSAGE "No post mode specified"

Try uploading the videos at a place like photobucket or putfile first. Then just post the url here.

You could have just edited. I'm not trying to be mean but just so you remember for next time .

lets try this...Hey, it worked! Thank you to my wife who reluctantly "volunteered" to light the cannon while I get the video

WOW!! If you freeze it while its flying through the air it looks like a rabbit.

Holy $hit!!!

thats a big boom! you should make a heavy duty stand that is cemented into the ground and will strap the gun down so you will get better range and accuracy from the projectile.

And rip it to shreds .

Holy Sh*t,maybe you should of made those wheels out of lead to keep it down jk

That cannon just earned its way into my favorites You should PM PCGUY and ask if you can post it on http://www.spudtech.com/forums because alot of the guys on there would love to see it. PCGUY admins the forums over there so make sure to PM him first to make sure its allright.

Thanks guys!
I was at first going to secure it to a base but then after some thinking... If I secured it, then I would've probably broke something by now. It needs to be able to blow back to alleviate some of the pressure exiting the barrel. The right way I suppose would be to make some sort of 5' or 6' runner where the wheels would fit into, then connect the chassis to some sort of pulley or bungee to gently "catch" it.

I actually have a friend who said he'd hold it and light it up, but I wouldn't let him. His belief was that it cant be any worse then a black powder rifle...well, I ain't never seen no 1" bore rifle!
Except for in the military, but then it's usually a two man operation or it's mechanically secured to something very strong.

I won't load the cannon with any projectile, cause that's when something will go wrong and I'll end up hurt. It's a blast (no pun intended ) just lighting this thing up and feeling the BOOM in your chest... and hearing the echo for about 10 seconds barrowing through the forest. I'll post more vids in the next day or two... you need to see how far back she goes, and I'll get video from in front of the barrel.... (uh hon? how'bout I light it this time and you hold the camera )

Lol, the runner idea would be awesome like a camera on those dolly tracks they use when fliming a movie or if they are using robotically controlled camera's like the ones they film the news with.

Even if you had say 6' of dolly track and attatch the cannon to the front of the dolly track with bungee cords, but you will need some way of keeping the cannon down and not flipping out of control in the air.

I was thinking I could add two small "L" shaped brackets to the bottom and fit them into a dado (sp?) groove that runs down the length of the runner. I could then mount a couple of springs in the grooves on either side connecting the front of the chassis to the front of the runner. Then I could also hide the springs / bungee to keep it clean looking. What da'ya think?