I just made my spud gun but i can't get it to fire

[armand1694]

Ok, I made my spud gun and i used a BBQ ignitor to fire it so i connected it with all it's wires, i put in a apple (it's all i could find in my house) and rammed it down the barrel, i first sprayed a flamable hair spray in the chamber and screw the cap on tight, i clicked the buttom six times and it didn't go off, so then i took off the cap and looked in the chamber to see it there was a spark and there was, so then i tried WD40 and nothing happened.

[LGM]

You felt the need to start a thread about this?

Just look around at all the other "help me" posts, there are plenty.

[elitesniper]

so then i took off the cap and looked in the chamber to see it there was a spark and there was, so then i tried WD40 and nothing happened.

thats the worst possible thing you can do with a spray and pray

[rp181]

Im guessing your putting to much fuel in and not leaving enough air in. Also completley vent out the chamber after every failed attempt, to make sure your not putting to much fuel.

You also might wanna search

[bigbob12345]

Your problem will dissapear if you build a propane meter

[TurboSuper]

The newer bottles of WD 40 are CO2 powered I believe, and won't be of much use. Best way to check is to read if it says "WARNING: EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE, KEEP AWAY FROM FLAME OR SPARK" on the can. Hairspray is also a terrible fuel- it gums up your chamber and electrodes.

Use starter fluid, or my personal favourite- lock de-icer.

If you are using a highly flammable fuel, and it still isn't firing, then you probably have too much fuel. The ratio of fuel/air has to be in a specific "butter zone" in order for it to combust.

[FordGtMan]

so then i took off the cap and looked in the chamber to see it there was a spark and there was

Unless you don't take pride in every bit of facial hair you may have acquired through these years, this may not be the smartest idea in the world. Believe me, the first time i ever shaved was with a spray and pray.

You should just start out with a simple squirt of fuel and go up on fuel from there and keep trying to see if it will ignite

[psycix]

Again I will say this:

A rule of thumb for spray'n'pray guns: If the gun doesnt fire because of fuel problems, then you've got too much fuel.

[jimmy101]

Wasn't there a combustion spudgun troubleshooting page stickied or in the Wiki? I looked and couldn't find it.

Wouldn't it be great if the form could be setup so that when someone posts the same question for the umpteenth time the forum would automatically direct the poster to the proper stickie or Wiki page?

[iisthemuffin]

I agree, jimmy, that would be very cool. But it would be difficult to do. And would be very faulty. Someone should give it a try though.

[Davidvaini]

just text parsing with a redirect, wouldnt be hard to do with php at all.

[jimmy101]

just text parsing with a redirect, wouldnt be hard to do with php at all.

Sort of. The problem with simply keying on a few words is that you'll get a lot of false positives. Throw in a few spelling/typo errors and you get a lot of false negatives. A big challenge in any natural language processing is the lack of a decent thesaurus; "won't fire" "doesn't work" "no ignition" and a couple dozen other ways of saying the gun doesn't work make it hard to identify the concept in a chunk of natural language text.

It is certainly doable, but to get it to work half-way decent would take some work. You could use word frequencies. Parse all the initial posts on the forum then compare new posts to the old ones. Similar word occurances suggests similar post topics. Throw out common words (at the I we a), weight the words by the Z-score ... If the new post has a strong similarity to an old post then send the poster to the old post.

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I knew there was a trouble shooting guide somewhere... it's in the spudtech archive and was written by plasticex009
http://www.spudfiles.com/spudtech_archi ... &sk=t&sd=a

Unfortunately all the links with the actual info are dead.

Perhaps plasticex009 has the original files around somewhere? It would be great to have it stickied here and to have it included in the Spud Wiki.

[frankrede]

Hmm what if before anytime you post a topic a screen is brought up listing threads that might help