Signal cannon

[AfterDark]

duplicate

 

[AfterDark]

Thanks for the info Miketsp but I think I'll stick with what I know for this. I want to be able to reuse the cannon and I don't think I want my hand in front of the muzzle when I drop the feather in:shocked2:! Also I like the smoke and smell of the BP! Sounds like intertesting stuff.

 

[DennisS]

As a kid I made any number of black powder cannons from pipe of various dimensions, big fun.

Enjoy

I was about 13-14 when I made my last "cannon" out of a pipe. We lit it and waited for it to shoot the gravel out of the end, next thing we knew there was metal buzzing all around us, somehow we didn't get hit by any of it, the biggest piece was about 20 ft away. That was with a potassium chlorate/sugar propellant, an excellent mixture to lose body parts. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" I gave up on pipe "cannons"

 

[DennisS]

When I was a kid we used to have a great deal of fun with various bits of pipe, firecrackers, BB's, smokeless powder, waterproof fuse, rocket engines, match heads etc. When my backyard neighbor stopped coming to school, I found out he'd had an accident. Months later a new kid showed up at school. I had to ask around to find out it was him, because he wasn't recognizable. I wasn't exactly scared straight, but I gained a healthy respect for what explosions can do, and a great desire to understand what I was doing before I did it.

The former president of PGI (Pyrotechnics Guild Int'l) was a plastic surgeon. His advice, "keep your back to it, it's easier to make the back look like it used to, than the front"

 

[DIWdiver]

He was looking down the barrel. Hard to do that with your back to it. I guess that deserves another quote "never get in front of anything that's loaded unless you intend to kill they guy behind it". That was someone on a military range many years ago.

By the way, it was dry pool chlorine and gasoline in a coffee can. It self-ignites. Eventually.

 

[Tom Winters]

In my last year of prep school, there was a kid who was a real genius with chemistry. He also liked blowing stuff up. Towards the end of the school year, there was an unholy explosion down by the gym - pretty far from the academic buildings that rocked the whole campus.
The kid wound up going to MIT to study chemical engineering, but his right hand, right eye, right ear, and a lot the right side of his face stayed in Connecticut.
Screwing around with explosives in a steel scuba tank is sheer brilliance. You're talking about a 7+' diameter - the destroyers that I was on only had 5" bores. Have fun.