So, Who influenced you to start spudding?

[RDX,]

When I made my first spudgun I didn't know even that there are lots of other people that makes those cannons ..I didn't know that spudguns exist but...
I have always liked guns and tried to make things that shoot and one day I saw pvc pipe at my dads house and I started to think how can I make it shoot something and then I did get the idea to use compressed air, and cannon was ready 8) now I have made spudguns for 4 years and I still love them

[CpTn_lAw]

I was like 14, with my best friend in my room, we were bored, it was the summer, and we wanted to have fun, I had the idea to build a launcher out of a 2L soda bottle and a vaccum cleaner telescopic tube.
Results were amazing...
Later I searched on the internet and found people in france who made one using a 6L fire extinguisher, at 100 psi...i was amazed! I decided to use copper instead of the bottles, and there was my first really powerful experience. I later discovered tha a man named Joel Suprise (
) had a store, and that a website called http://www.spudfiles.com had a whole bunch of people doing like me, inventing stuff which main purpose is to have fun with.(involving of course high energy blasts of potato )

[MrCrowley]

Jeremy Clarkson on the History of Guns. He fired a Spray 'n Pray.

"And yet, if you carry one you win every argument, you always get your own way, and that gives you an immense sense of power - and power is an aphrodisiac.

This may well be an instrument of satan, but it is unbelievably sexy"

Excellent program

Hahaha great clip, "I'm gonna go hold up a bank"

[potatoflinger]

I also became entangled in this wonderful hobby by the book Backyard Ballistics. My parent's wouldn't let me build the hairspray powered gun in the book, but they let me build the pneumatic gun from the book. (they said that since it was air powered it was much safer)

Now I build a cannon every month or so

[SPG]

This man

[Brian the brain]

Back in about 1983...my brother made a cannon ( by accident) out of a bike inner tube and a pump.He put the tube over the pump and taped it so it sealed onto the body of the pump.He then struggled a pingpong-ball into the other end of the , 1 meter long, piece of biketire and held it in place as the tube was inflated.
After the whole thing looked like a giant saucage, he let go and BOOOMM
The ball spiraled through the livingroom.Lot's of fun!
THat was my first experience with a pneumatic!

Later, after I had worn out several airguns, some of wich I sawed off.( age 11, I mind you) I kept an interest in building homemade "weapons".

At 13 I made a katana out of a steel strip.
At 14 ( I think) I made a very powerfull crossbow with a frictionless trigger system.Shot through 1/2 ply.
At 16 I made a very good katana out of a better steel strip, I later felled a tree with it, so I guess it was good.
At 19 I walked the streets armed with a colapsable gardeners saw ( 45 cm when whipped open)and it got me out of a potential stick-up, among other things
Again, later, at age 20, I built a marble gun that used 40 rubber bands to power a string that, with the help of a pulley system propelled marbles fast enough to embed them halfway into a solid wood door.

THEN I read about the Girandoni rifle, wich in the 1700's was used by the Austrian military.An airgun wich could fire multiple 13mm shots and was lethal at over a 100 meters.In the age of blackpowder.

That inspired me to build my own airgun.Browsing the internet looking for a suitable valve, I stumbled apon a site called Airpower.net.
From there I learned about spudguns, Spudfiles and Spudtech.
Today I run a small business selling parts...
I no longer carry weapons.

[Hubb]

What inspired me to start spudding? You guys did.

I came here on a Google about alternative paintball devices. I saw how much fun you guys had shootin' starch and figured I would give it a try. I built my first pneumatic a while back (paintball), but built my first combustion from reading this site (and the wiki, and the search...)

[goathunter]

My uncle,

I guess I had to be about 7 or 8 at the time. My uncle, dad, and myself were all surf fishing up at the Jersey Shore. That being Jersey the boaters were being a real pain, running our lines over, and getting up on plane in a "no wake" zone. My uncle was rather "angry" to say the least and was yelling about how he'd like to get a potato gun and punch holes in boats. Well nothing came of it at the time. But, it did get me thinking what was this magical device that could propel potatoes at boat destroying velocities? A couple of years later(7th. grade) I had a chance to blend a science project with fun. My spray n' pray versus my friends arm. Who could get the water balloon the farthest.
HeHeHe...I won and the rest is history.




Edit: Ha! this is funny. Jeremy Clarkson and I have the same Birthday! Bummer for such an anti-American Brit. Oh well the hillbillies breeding with vegetables joke was funny

[dongfang]

Hi,

A friend showed me a Danish website, http://www.appelsin-kanon.dk. There was a description of how to build a really primitive combustion orange launcher. IT wasn´t even glued together; it was supposed to pop apart at every shot.

I decided to build one, but heck, I´d glue it together. With PVC gutter cement. No primer. It didn´t work; later I found out that the pipe I had gotten was PP, not PVC...
Then I used expanding foam instead, that worked (and it got mý hands black for a whole week...). Got a piezo igniter (my own reinvention), fitted that, tried with a carefully computed squirt of rubbing alcohol... no ignition. The only thing that really happened was that my sister´s kid grabbed the squirt bottle with alcohol, and hit himself in the eyes with it.

Threw the project aside for a while, then took it to an old friend´s place. We tried with different amounts of propane, and BOOM suddenly it worked. We shot over the tree we aimed at, and hit somebody´s roof at the other side of the road. We laughed our asses off....
... and that was while I was doing my Master´s in computer science, and he ran his own business!!

Later I came across Spudfiles, and I spent the first month or so just reading and reading... one of the first things I published was my supersonic combustion, which I made just after graduating

Like so many others here, I have learned a bunch about materials, tools and construction techniques. It´s a rather relaxing hobby, although the entertainment value of home made destruction devices is not really that much appreciated here in Switzerland. In fact, I have only heard abt. one single other spudder here ... but hey, there is still Spudfiles.

Regards
Soren

[SpudFarm]

after i started to talk to Galfisk i got hooked..

[drex]

one day me and my friend got some dry ice and me in my infinite wisdom decided to put it in a soda bottle.... boom . sence then i have been trying to (safely) harness the massive amounts of energy that can be created by the stuff you can get at the hardware store.

[mark.f]

Well... I have been surrounded by spudguns for a while, but only started building my own at the end of my sophomore year.

When I was in the 5th or 6th grade, I went to one of my friend's parties at his house. His dad, a retired geologist, got out the spray-n'-pray combustion at started sending Excedrine bottles across the yard.

Well, of course, I told my parents I wanted to build one, and the answer was of course, NO. Fast forward to August 2005.

Hurricane Katrina blew through and we went to Illinois. When we came back, I had nearly an entire month ahead of me with no friends or school, so...

I started off small. Hunting in the mornings for squirrels and such. By the second week or so, I was actually reloading 0.38 Special cartridges with 0.32 caliber buckshot "bullets" with a little wadding. After this, I was starting to get really bored.

So, one day, I grabbed my backpack, some random crap, and walked the few miles to my friend's house. He showed me the DPC-400.

Truly amazing in my eyes at the time, even though he couldn't get it to fire at the time. 1-1/2" chamber and 3/4" barrel with a powerline 3-9x32 scope mounted as well. He had fired it quite frequently before I got there, but it just wouldn't work for us.

So, fast forward yet again to later in that school year, he built another model with a larger 3" chamber for easier fueling. We went for a couple of Friday nights firing CO₂ cartridges, lightsticks, and paintballs without incident. We finally discovered our favorite ammunition: Dum-Dum lollipops. These fly amazingly straight and could actually put a hole in tin when shot with the right mixture. Of course, I was truly intrigued by then, until it blew apart one night. So, I decided to make my own, using air pressure. A pneumatic had to be safer than a combustion, right?

And the rest, they say, is history. I got some 3" SCH-40 from an arrow case a guy from the local archery shop sold us arrows in, went and bought some DWV fittings and a sprinkler valve, and I was set. For a month or so afterwards, I was shooting all the standard ammunition better than the old DPC. Of course, then I realized the components weren't pressure rated, so I scrapped the cannon and turned it into my first combustion. Everything went downhill after that and the rest some of you know. The summer after Sophomore year was full of much boredom. Before I eventually got a job and really started the building, one of our best friends and my friend's girlfriend moved to Texas, creating a little boredom. But, I wouldn't trade it all for anything.

And of course, I wouldn't be close to where I am at now without the SGTC forums and later, Spudfiles. What can I say... *sniff*... I love you guys...

[brogdenlaxmiddie]

Those are some really awsome stories... I remember my best bud and I were looking at the Backyard Ballistics book and seeing the cannon that they had in there... Note this was after building our first other guns. It seems sooo primitive now.

[Ragnarok]

There's no real "who" involved with me.
Although I did see Jeremy Clarkson's gun program, that was pretty unrelated to how I started.

Over my life, my brain has always been wired for physics and engineering, because I always look for the inner workings of things; cause and effect; the reasons for something happening.

I can't see anything without wondering how it works or why it happened - and I mean anything.
The human brain, coffee machines, printing presses, why each bird in a garden acts as it does, quantum physics, song lyrics, what the flow of time actually is, anything.

My brain looks at simply everything, analyses it, then catalogues it for later reference. In some ways, it's extremely annoying - I just can't switch off, no matter what. In others, it's quite useful - I find that I can learn huge amounts without much effort.
Eventually, all this stuff will collect together into another idea.

Anyway, what do you imagine I think of after I've seen/operated enough pneumatic confetti cannons at school concerts?
...well, other than "Does that kid have to sing a Guy Ritchie song every sodding year? Can't I accidentally reposition one of the cannons to hit him?"

[Maniac]

Whoa JSR xinventions and that exact same cannon got me into spudding too, sorta. I also [am growing] up in a "gun" free household.

I built my first cannon when i was 8-9 (dont remember which)
It all stated back in my Sk8tr days. (oh my gosh i cant belive i just said Sk8tr) I was watching Bam margera, yes bam margera, and the were launching spuds at Vito out of these cannons, and i thought i want one of those.
Did some researching. I couldnt exactly research when i was 8 though. Found Backyard ballistics and built the combustion one it was actually a nice cannon for a eight year old and my dad if i saw so my self.(Piezo ignition nice paint job constructed with primer and cement too.)
I got a little older and started to understand some of the concepts and stuff found Xinventions which eventually led to Spudfiles which i have been lurking on since the old FIBlack3dBlue style.