Mythbusters and Their Cannons

[miskaman]

So I took apart the net I made and attached another golf ball in the middle of the net. Also tied in a lot more rope almost 40 foot of 3/16 nylon in the net now. There are a lot more cross ropes in the net than shown, squares around 1 inch square. Total size is about 16 inches square.


I used a sabot to keep the net together until out of the gun. The true net performed only marginally better than the quick job I was able to do last week. I am able to hit and catch the dodge ball when flying away or towards me but the gun and net perform so slowly that a taget moving perpendicular to me is impossible, I can't even get close. The sabot is set up like this. Load the center ball first, then rope and a corner, rope and adjacent corner, rope and opposite corner, rope and last corner. The numbers correspond to pic above.


The increased weight of the net forced me to move up to my tennis ball gun and I dropped some extra golfball barrel down the barrel and duct taped it in. The increased air capacity definitely increased speed. Still under 150 fps (rough guess, net is way to big for a chrono) Range is not too bad. The golf ball in the middle of net actually increased range about 100% when fired out of a bigger gun (100 cu in in sniper to ~550 cu in in tennis ball gun) and I can get around 150 feet if I shoot at an upward angle. However the net didn't close in on itself in 10 shots and I was finally able to hit the stationary dodgeball at around 80 feet (with maybe a 10-15 degree elevation for the lobbing effect).

Birds still horribly out of the question. Tanks or opposing players in scenario games however are excellent targets, though not with golfballs. That would hurt like sum bit@h, tennis balls would make an awesome large net, probably fired out of three inch sabots.

If I can convice the wife that a new digital camera is a must have (mine got soaked )I will try to get some pics up. Unfortunatly vet school is draining our finances quickly this time of year (her tuition just came due, boooooo).

Sounds like it works preety good. But I got one question, whats a sabot?