SpudFiles

Furthest shooting a whole potato out of a combustion= about 165m.
It was funny cause it went straight past the target and 4 houses down it splattered all over a real estate sign.

MrCrowley wrote:Is that a ball valve? You should build a piston valve or even a 2" sprinkler valve would be better then a ball valve.

Yes...it is a ball valve. We never really got to experimenting with any other kind of valves cause we didn't know about them. Where could I get a 2" sprinkler valve? Would it noticably improve performance?

Would it noticably improve performance?

Oh you have NO idea!

Yours for less than 60 bucks but I'm sure you can find it for cheaper.

Thanks! Are they hard to install? Do you just glue it on and you're ready to go?

dont worry its very simple but you have to mod it to get the most performance out of it just thread in a blowgun,screw it on to the male adapters on the barrel and chamber and your ready to go! the power increase makes a ball valve look like a nerf gun and oh yeah use lots and lots and lots of teflon tape!

I used to build a lot of smaller ball valve pneumatic potato guns and we could always clear both goal posts on a football (american for you soccer nations) field at relatively low pressure 85ish psi. I have since moved into tennis balls.

My largest cannon will chuck a weighted tennis ball (I added sand to get the thing to 226 grams or half a pound) around 300 meters. I never accuratly measured but used the old 1 stride = 1 meter guestimate.

Yeah I'm scared to go above 80 psi on the schedule 40 6" pvc so that's as high as we're going.

Cicada, thanks for your help! I'll pm you if i need more help!

With a chamber that big, you should extend the barrel to at least 20' to get some real performance.

DYI wrote:With a chamber that big, you should extend the barrel to at least 20' to get some real performance.

Really? 1:4 ratio works well? Never thought about making it longer...I'll have to try that.

What is the volume of your chamber? I usually aim for .25:1, because I build barrels around a specific chamber, and aim more for power than practicality.

20' was a pretty arbitrary number, but you can't get pieces of PVC much longer than that. Also, C:B ratios are always expressed as _:1, to avoid confusion. As you probably know, the 1 is the barrel.

With a potato, map landmark measured, the Taternator II will go just over 1000' with 2X MAPP, 8' long 1.5" barrel. Beyond that much power, I can't use potatoes because they liquefy. With other projectiles at 3X MAPP or oxy/acetylene, I can go well over 2000' but have not had a chance to do this at the measuring site - I'm hoping to be happily surprised.