Homemade Potato Howitzer

hi and welcome back to the invading small countries I mean the save it for birds Channel hi folks welcome back to the save it for parts Channel long time viewers will know that I have a thing for potato cannons and I have a number of these kicking around from past projects and you can check out some of them in my previous videos now recently thanks to my work I was able to pick up some pretty large chunks of plastic and I thought to myself maybe it's time to move up from the handheld versions of these potato guns and go with a towable potato howitzer fortunately that same junk pile at work had a set of wheels and whatever this is and a few other odds and ends and pieces of junk that I think I can throw together and make into some sort of mobile field artillery piece well you seem like some things to start with for my carriage [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so it seems that my potato gun obsession has gotten a little out of hand because we've somehow wound up with the save it for parts light artillery battalion and this is a potato cannon this is still a PVC barrel and most of these parts are things that I scavenged from a pile of junk that it was at work and all that stuff was getting thrown out so I kind of looked at the pile of junk and I thought well there's some wheels there's some pipes there's some plexiglass there's some weird machinery there's some stuff there's these things I bet I could make a cannon out of all that and then I did I'll do a quick little tour of what this has as I said it's a PVC barrel and this is just a decorative shroud this is a plastic shield or guard back here we've got our regular chamber and we've got a propane feed into the side of the chamber rigged up to the tank up here and then there's a pair of electrodes inside and those electrodes go to this barbecue lighter and this is a different kind I've not used this type of barbecue lighter before so I'm gonna see if that works better than the old clicky ones I've got my telescopic sight which is honestly just for show because I can't really see through it I forgot to mask off one side of this one I painted I masked off the one side but then I forgot to mask off the inside and also I don't have the right lens in this sight tube then over here we've got our elevation crank and I made this out of a variety of parts found this little gear made this little handle I had some other stuff kicking around and I was able to make this working elevation crank that makes the barrel go up and down these little stabilizing guys pull in for transport I was considering putting a trailer hitch on here but my wheel bearing isn't very good so I don't really want to tow this around like a trailer now since I still don't own a welder this is a bit of an erector set back here it's all old shelf brackets bolted together and it's kind of this framework and then the barrel is kind of mounted to this platform and I could pull this barrel off and put another potato good on here I consider doing some kind of a cartridge loading system I have seen that on some other channels but I didn't quite have the materials for that so I went with a little more standard potato gun design with some exceptions so what's going on back here in the chamber my barrel actually comes all the way through into the chamber and you can see that the rear part of the barrel has these ports drilled in it and that leaves it open to the chamber surrounding it so the theory is that the propane gets blasted in through this nozzle my electrodes fire off it allows me to load from the breech here so I can put a potato in ram it in there with a rod and not have to run around to the front and load it like a muzzle loader it acts a little more like a real can in this way or at least that's the theory so I'm still getting the hang of how this likes it's propane mix it seems like it wants just a minimal amount of propane in there and that mixes the best with the air so I'm gonna go ahead and shoot some lime peels out of it I wrapped in a paper towel to make it fit the barrel a little better all right lime cannon test fire so you know the old saying when life gives you moldy potatoes you build a potato howitzer [Music] her [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right so I'm pretty happy with how this thing came out I've got a couple improvements that I could do to it there were some things that I meant to do that didn't quite make my budget and time requirements I think I have spent about forty to fifty dollars in torch parts and igniters on this but most of the rest of it was all junk and free I did want to make a recoil system and I had those shock absorbers but they turned out to be way too powerful so it really didn't bounce back on the shock absorbers as much as I wanted so if I want a recoil system for the barrel I'll need to use some springs instead other improvements that I could make I am thinking of using a Taser for the igniter instead of that barbecue lighter and that would potentially give me a bigger spark and then I was also thinking of adding an oxygen bottle just so I have a little more consistent ignition and a consistent fuel air mixture inside of the chamber right now it's more of a count on that little valve for how much propane goes into it and if I had oxygen going in there as well I think I could dial it in a little closer to have the power of each shot be more consistent so those are a few improvements that I'll probably save for a future video thanks again for watching I hope you enjoyed the video I enjoyed making it quite a bit and I'm sure I'll do some other dumb things with this cannon and I'll probably build some other cannons in the future so go ahead and like it subscribe if you want to see those future shenanigans and check out my past videos for other shenanigans not just cannon related I've got some air boats kayaks other stuff as well and if you want to support my torch parts in PVC habit you can jump on patreon.com slash save it for parts and throw me a dollar or two and we'll see you next time you [Music] [Music]

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 15,845

Rating: 4.9217219 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ocxYe_j6nOw

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

"now this, this is beautiful"

[u/Kazza197]

Video is private