In-car spud cannon

**Bugbyte** · 03-23-2009, 11:43 PM

This is awesome but I'd advise dropping the fuel and using compressed air due to the fact that you don't want a rolling inferno if something goes wrong. Not that I speak from past life experience but if you have a carpet tube duct taped to your car hood and it's designed for the passenger to load a Roman Candle into it and he accidentally loads it backwards and it shoots into the car and ignites the rest of the fireworks in the car, you've got a pretty big issue. Better to go with compressed air instead of fire.

You can drive the compressor from the car's electrical system, trigger the solenoids with a fusion brain and you are golden!

**Aboliton** · 03-24-2009, 02:14 AM

the only issue i can forsee with using compressed air is the space limitation, i only have about a 30x12cm (12"x8" roughly) and i'm not sure where i could fit the compressor.

At the moment I'm considering going to the wreckers tomorrow and grabbing two injectors and trying to find a solenoid valve that can split between two outputs. The plan is then to connect it after my fuel pump and use a capacitor shutoff circuit to control the exact amount i'll need.

This wont be an issue to my normal driving as I run a duel fuel system, not sure if its popular in America and elsewhere but here in Aus it's fairly common to get LPG conversions which is a lot cheaper than petrol,

And yeah a Magna it is, wish I had a verada though

**Crinos** · 03-24-2009, 03:13 AM

Is your spud guns going to be magasine fed, so you can fire multipletimes with the same gun?

If not, you can have CO2 canisters, that you connect to the guns... the canister can be where ever you see fit. And when you have run out of CO2, you can disconnect it, and connect a new one, and refill the first one....

Like you would while playing Paintball

**Aboliton** · 03-24-2009, 03:23 AM

Well, I've reconsidered the petrol idea, i don't want to screw stuff around with my engine, i'm considering the pneumatic idea. The thing with that is, I've never built a pneumatic one, and i'm not sure what the pressure limit on the pvc have is, also, I'm finding it hard to 12v solenoid valve with decent pressure

**stealinfool** · 03-24-2009, 06:27 AM

Generally SCH40 PVC (smaller diameters) has been used for shop compressed air lines...

But here's a cool chart for ya

Considering how difficult it is to make a truly "magazine" type of feeding system, it's likely you'll get one shot at a time. This should allow you to have something like a 5 gallon portable air tank that you'd fill up from time to time... it would in turn pressurize a PVC chamber up to a certain PSI via one valve. The next valve would allow the pressure to escape the barrel, propelling the ammo.

Here's another site full of good stuff

**Aboliton** · 03-24-2009, 07:34 AM

http://www.sorijen.com.au/product_in...ducts_id=15810

This compressor is pretty compact and claims 250psi, so i'm tempted to grab that and use it to power the guns, only thing is it seems pretty high for such a small device.

Now to find a solenoid valve capable of 250psi...

**Fiberoptic** · 04-01-2009, 09:42 PM

Thanks to your comments we are now in the top 10 Google results for "spud cannon". Way to go! What is the latest?

**stealinfool** · 04-01-2009, 10:03 PM

I don't know about him, but after posting the other day I got mine back out.

It was all fun and games until when I hit my ignitor and no boom, only loud, eerie hissing.

I looked down and there were two huge cracks in my combustion chamber, which were now melted b/c of the hot gasses escaping. Sooo glad it didn't send shrapnel into me.

So, safety lesson. Regardless of whether a pipe fits on to another pipe, if it's not pressure rated and compatible with the solvent and other pipes you are using, DO NOT USE IT.

That being said, I'm still curious to see him have it in the car! At least it's remote...

**Aboliton** · 04-02-2009, 12:37 AM

Still working on it, keep running into problem however, the pneumatic route turned out to be a dead end for me. I can't find a decent compressor on 12v, or solenoids for that matter.

The new plan is to use "direct propane injection" but with solenoids on a delay off circuit instead of the hand operated valves.

Unfortunately works been kinda crazy as of late, just gotta find the time >.>

**Injector** · 04-02-2009, 12:50 AM

you're complicating yourself too much, just go to eBay and buy a used dry nitrous kit, it does exactly what you want, it takes gas from the tank through a solenoid into whatever you want at the press of a button, normally on a car you insert the nozzle into the engine intake so that the gas goes into the engine but in your case all you need is a solenoid and some kind of combustible gas, it doesn't have to be nitrous you can use propane too as well, just don't buy a wet kit because that'll inject gasoline as well

something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/NEW-N...Q5fAccessories