Ming_Lung on Manga Revolution.com

built a pop gun

Posted: Apr/26/2008, 9:38pm
Feeling: dizzy; Listening To: Your Brains

Ever since I was a kid, I liked to played with fire and explosions. Since I wasn't getting any good ideas for an art piece this week, I decided to switch from artist to pyromaniac mode.

I built my first potato gun around five years ago, and the thing worked great. Nothing like smelling burnt Right Guard deodorant fumes in the morning and watching an apple slam into a brick wall at high speed. Even took it out one winter and shot snowballs out from it :).

But soon it appear that this little toy i made from $40 worth of part from Home Depot was a bit too loud and destructive for my upper-middle class sub-urban neighborhood. The thing ruptured on me one day and it left a burn mark on my clothes from where the super hot gas touched. Needless to say the thing was dangerous. I stopped firing the thing after my parents told me the neighbors were getting bad ideas of what sort of individual I was (this was 2 years after 9/11 :/ ). Ole Spuddy has since disappeared from the garage, probably resting in the local dump in all its ABS glory.

This time however, I decided to build something much smaller in scale. Instead of 8 feet of ABS piping, I took three plastic soda bottles and cut/taped them up into a tube. I drilled a hole into the cap lid on one end and stuck in a gun lighter I bought two days ago (Now empty from excessively usage :P).

Three bottles taped together with a lighter stuck up one end; Not very pretty, but does it work?

My pop gun turned out better than I expected from less than $5 worth of parts. A light spray of AXE ignited by a spark from the lighter fired out the tin foil ball at high speed with a loud bang. The coolest thing is that I could see the AXE ignite through the clear bottles. I proceeded to wield my creation like a shotgun and shoot my brother a few times ([pop gun x nonlethal projectiles] + slow little brother = SAFE FUN). Since I'm not completely evil, I let the little guy have a few tries with Mr. Popper.

We stopped after the fumes got too heavy and decided that we didn't want to subject ourselves to suffocating in potentially toxic and brain-damaging gases (AXE is killer on the lungs as well). It was also then that I realized that I was an idiot for choosing a non-ventilated basement as our makeshift gun range.

I'm still a bit dizzy from breathing in the AXE fumes, hopefully my brain cells are still live and well. Gonna be needing them for college in September.