Supersonic baseball cannon on 'Smarter Every Day'

Show us your pneumatic spud gun! Discuss pneumatic (compressed gas) powered potato guns and related accessories. Valve types, actuation, pipe, materials, fittings, compressors, safety, gas choices, and more.
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Skywalker
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Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:11 am

They built a balanced piston valve. Very heavy-duty steel, they've run it as high as 500psi. The barrel is evacuated before the shot. There's a nice shadowgraph image of the shock wave from the supersonic baseball.

Discussion of the concept:


The shock waves start here:
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Moonbogg
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Tue Sep 22, 2020 9:41 pm

I saw that video. It's completely awesome! It's the ultimate pneumatic cannon and pushes the performance to the extreme by doing a variety of special things to get there. I loved it. I wonder how a hybrid cannon would do. I'm thinking a simpler and cheaper hybrid could be made that would out perform the pneumatic. I wonder why they don't explore that route. They have focused on pneumatic cannons with evacuated barrels. Maybe for legal reasons? If that were the case, they wouldn't have made a combustion spudgun video, which they did. I say they up their game and build a simple, beautiful, sexy looking piston hyrbid cannon out of heat treated 4140 at around 200kpsi yield and bust loose at around 20X.
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jackssmirkingrevenge
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Wed Oct 07, 2020 3:59 pm

Moonbogg wrote:
Tue Sep 22, 2020 9:41 pm
It's the ultimate pneumatic cannon and pushes the performance to the extreme by doing a variety of special things to get there.


I wonder why they didn't go with a burst disk. Much simpler to engineer and arguably has an edge in performance.
I wonder how a hybrid cannon would do. I'm thinking a simpler and cheaper hybrid could be made that would out perform the pneumatic. I wonder why they don't explore that route. They have focused on pneumatic cannons with evacuated barrels. Maybe for legal reasons?
There's a certain joy in achieving certain milestones purely with compressed air I suppose. Hybrids are almost "cheating" if the goal is to go supersonic.
hectmarr wrote:You have to make many weapons, because this field is long and short life
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