How to Make a Pop Pop Boat From a Pop Can!

today we're gonna be looking at pop pop boats now I've explored these in previous videos but today's videos gonna be a little different we're gonna be looking at making a pop pop boat out of a pop can but for now I'm just gonna give everybody a quick intro to what a pop pop boat is because I'm sure a lot of you have never heard of these before what I have here is a little tin boat with a boiler and two tubes that lead from the boiler out to the back of the boat and how this works is you fill the tubes and the boiler completely up with water you put a little heat source like a candle underneath the boiler this candle heats the water up in the boiler until the water gets hot enough to flash into a vapor state and vapor takes up much more room than water so when some of the water flashes into vapor it creates a lot of pressure in this boiler which forces some of the water out of the boiler and out of these tubes propelling the boat forwards and then what happens is the momentum of the water flowing through these tubes wants to keep on going even when the pressure in the boiler has been relieved so it actually pulls a bit of a negative pressure into the boiler in other words it creates like a bit of a vacuum in the boiler I guess and then this vacuum eventually slows the water down and pulls fresh water back into the boiler this fresh water contacts a hot boiler surface and the whole process repeats itself and this rapid change in pressure in the boiler creates that pop noise that you hear when the boat operates if you look at this a boat in water here let's zoom out a bit I can give you a little demonstration if I remove the front of this boat you'll see the boiler I won't take it complete I will take it completely off and I've got my little candle right there I've already primed the boiler so it's all full of water I'll light the candle there we go just tuck that under the boiler I'm gonna put the lid back on just to prevent the wind from affecting the whole process and I can already feel it starting there it is so that might actually pretty loud because I find microphones really pick up this noise with a lot of effectiveness but that's basically what a pop pop Oh tis and of course as soon as you extinguish the flame the boat stops with that intro out of the way it's time to start making our pop pop boat boiler out of our pop can now I've been playing around with these designs on and off over the past three or four years I've tried different manufacturing methods I've tried soldering I've tried gluing I've tried different types of glue I've tried different boilers shapes and I finally settled upon something that I'm pretty proud of so I hope you guys enjoy this video first thing you're gonna do take a can of pop or beer open it up and drink it this aluminum can along with some small copper tubing and five-minute epoxy will become the boiler of our boat we're gonna start by cutting off the bottom of the can and then also cutting out a small square from the side of the can using some tin snips I'm going to cut out the little concave Bowl from the bottom of the can leaving that 8 inch lip along the edge next we can trace out that bowl on top of our aluminum sheet and cut it out about 1/8 inch inside the mark we just made this should give us a bowl with a cover that fits down inside that lip now we're going to make three evenly spaced creases in that cover and then flip it over and make three evenly spaced creases inside the creases you just made so you should have six alternating creases all together this pulls the circumference of the cover together and lets it pop back and forth like a bottle cap it just makes the boat sound really good now we're gonna drill two eighth inch holes in our bowl positioned about 3/8 of an inch off the perimeter as shown here I forgot to charge the drill for this clip so I ended up chewing through these holes by hand which actually worked alright using some coarse grit sandpaper we're gonna scuff up all the areas that are about to be epoxy this just helps the epoxy sort of bite into the surface a little better the last thing we're gonna do to this piece is make about 30 evenly spaced cuts along that outer lip and you'll see how these are used in just a minute the copper tubing I'm using for the legs of my boiler has an eighth inch inner diameter and an outer diameter of 0.16 ish you should be able to bend this tubing into an l-shape by hand I'll throw a template in the description so you can copy what I've done if you want and I'm gonna use some sandpaper to clean up the end of this tube as well as scuff up the air that's about to be glued there is a completed L section now I'm gonna take a couple decks of cards and some tape and tape those tubes on top the cards to form a little gluing jig I'm also going to take some paper and roll it up to form some little plugs that I can stuff in the ends of the tubes this'll just help me align the boiler legs with the boiler bowl we made earlier now we're going to mix up some five-minute epoxy and apply a liberal amount to the intersection between the legs and the bowl make sure you remove the plugs before they become permanently glued in place after a couple hours we should be ready to glue the boiler lid in place so mix up some more 5 minute epoxy and then quickly apply it to the perimeter of the joint and then one by one we're gonna fold in those tabs we cut out earlier once the epoxy cures you're gonna have a nearly indestructible boiler I found that on other boiler designs once the epoxy ages it starts to crack and fail but in this boiler even when the epoxy starts to crack these tabs ensure that the boiler remains airtight this boiler here is still fully functional even though it looks like the glue has completely failed using a hole saw a jig saw a file okay chop saw and a palm sander I'm gonna fabricate a quick little boat body that I can glue my boiler to and something that will hold a tea candle underneath the boiler again I'll throw a quick little template in the description of this video if you want to replicate what I've done here or you can shoot for something a little more elegant the first thing you're gonna want to do to test out your boat is Prime the boiler which means you're gonna fill it up with water as much as you can using a sink or a sprayer attachment and then place it in a bowl of water and see how well it floats mine did not float too well I'm gonna solve this quickly by gluing some closed cell foam to the bottom of this boat and we should be back on our way it sort of works come on here we go so although this boat is working it's a little bit rough and doesn't cut along as well as I hoped it would one similarity between both of these boats that I purchased off eBay is that the boilers seem to be angled a little bit so that the part of the boiler right above the candle is higher than the rest of the boiler I'm thinking the reason for this might be so that when the steam forms up here gravity pushes the light steam to the top of the boiler which in turn allows us team to push the water out of the boiler and through the tubes if the boiler is completely flat and steam formed right there gravity doesn't care where the steam goes for all we know the steam might be making its way to the legs of the boiler and out the tubes before it actually pushes the water out of the boiler I'm gonna take my boiler out of my boat modify it to match these boilers angles and put it back in the water and see how it works even though this change was super subtle it did seem to give me a pop pop boat that covered along much more consistently looks like this works pretty well so I've moved out to a larger pond so that we get a better feel for this boat I found the most challenging thing to be the wind the slightest breeze blows the candle away from the boiler and prevents the boat from working of course as soon as the wind starts to blow the flame out it stops working but I did manage to get it to work in a few instances when the wind settled down so I'm pretty happy with how this little boat worked my only complaint would be the candle and the fact that there's nothing shielding the candle from any kind of breeze and as I found out during my little testing montage there whenever this boat leaves like a covered area the slightest breeze is enough to just blow the candle away from the boiler and prevent it from working so I think in the next revision I want to put some kind of a windscreen on top of this thing - like shield the candle from the wind speak of the wind is you can hear it's like very windy out here I've got my little fuzzy hat on my microphone so hopefully that's doing something but that kind of brings me to the next part of this video which is what do I have planned for the future well I plan to sort of forget about this guy and let's see if this works there it is this is the radio-controlled twin-engine pop-pop book as the name suggests it is fully radio-controlled I don't have the transmitter right now but there's a little receiver battery pack voltage regulator and a servo motor that just control this rudder in a simple back forth motion and that's all that is radio-controlled this boat is powered by two separate top pop boat engines very similar to the one we made in this video now I'm gonna be interested to see if I have any issues getting them to run at the same time because they can be a little bit finicky I bent up some screen door mesh to form a little Hut and that just covers up our candle and boiler and my hope is that this will sort of eliminate any sort of effects that a bit of a breeze might have on the candle flame so we'll see how it works speaking of that I hope to test it out this weekend so you might see another video within a couple weeks but then again I hadn't posted a video for four years before this current video so you never but hopefully I can get something out relatively soon [Music]

Channel: Forrest Trenaman

Views: 1,805,642

Rating: 4.8322701 out of 5

Keywords: diy, instructional, putt putt, put put, steam boat, repair, maker, project, speedboat, fast, rc, 25cc, beer can, coke can

Id: PKk3w1M4J-4

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/aanr]

I have NEVER heard of this but I'm pretty sure my nephew and I are going to be building one very soon! Awesome share!

[u/[deleted]]

The mere fact that you call it pop pop tells me that you’re not ready.