Range testing indicates about a 50% increase in accuracy for potatoes, and pipe stands up to continuous 300 psi pretty well. This new barrel modification will send potatoes straighter and perhaps most important of all…safer. I say this as I have had experience with a stray potato every now and then, going where you might have not wanted it to go…(through my shop window).
Available in 1 1/2″ and 2″ SCH 40 and 2″ SCH 80 sizes only.
You can buy the pipe – HERE
I never built a potato gun, but plenty of people I knew back in highschool did. I can imagine that the rifling would really dig nicely into the potato and get a sweet spiral going.
Comments
16 responses to “Rifled PVC Pipe For Potato Guns”
Thank you for putting this up man. I’ve been meaning to build me a potato gun for over a year and forgot the website where I got my plans from that I lost. Now I remember :)
Now if they only made one with button rifling….
Here is another potato gun tip. Use apples instead of potato’s, they are softer and will give you a better seal, and therefor better velocity.
When I was in high school I built a potato canon (we still called it a potato canon, despite apples being the primary projectile). It had a 13′ overall length, 10′ barrel & 3′ compression chamber. I devised an electronic detonation system so it could be fired from a remote location, it was a necessary precaution because I was using roughly 700 grains of black powder as propellant.
It could send an apple through 3/4″ of plywood like it was a sheet of paper. I never got a chance to run it over the chronograph because it generated such immense muzzle flash/smoke cloud it would have required placing the chronograph a good distance downrange; combined with it’s relative inaccuracy I was afraid of destroying equipment. If I had a rifled barrel for it I might have been accurate enough to run over the chronograph and finally figure out just how much energy that thing was producing….
Unfortunately it was destroyed when it was hit by a snowplow… I build a second version, with a bottle necked 1.5″ compression chamber ( an effort to achieve higher pressures). I also started building sabot rounds out of 4″ sections of 1/2″ steel bolts with wooden cups. They never worked because of the lack of stabilization, the rifled PVC would have been awesome for the sabots. V2 meet it’s demise when I started developing shot rounds for it (for the shot I cut up reject cast 44mag slugs that were lying around), I over pressured it and the back of the chamber blew out. V3 will happen some day, and it will be epic.
A couple of friends and I built one in college and were also curious how fast it was firing, and with what kind of force. We had no chronograph, but drove out to a farm field, fired it straight up in the air, and timed how long it was between firing and hitting the ground. A little math and physics gave us an approximation, although I’m sure we lost a little due to air resistance. That might not be practical with something of extremely high power, but it worked for our little experiment.
haha man that’s awesome.
I like apple idea
Always be sure of where your potato is going… and what is behind it.
LOL nice one. Rules to live by.
Um, Destructive Device anyone?
I don’t think rifling the barrel would be enough to change the classification of a potato gun to that of “destructive device.”
I still have two air cannons in my garage. I used to use them in paintball scenario games years ago. Using a modified water sprinkler valve for the trigger releasing 40 psi of CO2 from an 18″ pressure chamber running through two 90 degree elbows and a 24 inch barrel I could easily hit 230-250 feet per second (there were some fluctuations depending on the ambient temperature and how soon it was fired after being charged). I looked at (drooled over really) the Spudtech rifled barrel for use with the mini Nerf vortex footballs we used in the games. It’s really cool when you use the ones with the whistles in them.
Golf balls. We spent many nights on golf courses stealing golf balls. They are made to fly…
all the spud gun knowledge you could possibly need: http://www.spudfiles.com/
As to rifled barrels for potatoes, it’s a dead end as far as progress is concerned – spuds are soft and have poor and inconsistent density, and cannot be formed into a decent aerodynamic shape.
You’re far better off sticking to smoothobre barrels and using properly made projectiles like those by USG: http://ultimatespudgun.com/?cPath=50
Not as cheap, but the results speak for themselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-tZn4eyY8Q
Does in have a NATO chamber? What is the twist rate? Will it stabilize 5700 gr potatoes? Can I get it threaded for a suppressor?
I dread the day potatoes get proximity fuzes.
the rifling idea is great my cusin and I have been havin some issues been having a lot of cannons exsloxe on us looking for stonger materails other than s40 thinking about going steel but just wondering what anyone else is using are last 3 catastrophic faliures have been 2 1/2 foot 6 inch necked down to 2 in 4 ft acrylic barrel kronoed at 1200ft per sec and furtherst lunch over 600 yards using starting fluid and oxyen mix using limes is what we found to work the best they work great for about 20 to 30 lauches and than blow to bits ppe has been a must after the first blow up be safe looking forward to hear some other ideas thanks