Jamie Kelly

A Block

It's a bird, it's a brown plane, no wait it's a potato? Our last project was the potato cannon. The idea was simple, build a cannon and shoot the potato. First thing to know about the project are the pieces involved. The igniter for the cannon would be a "Flint Igniter" (lantern lighter). Before the cannon would shoot off you would spray some local store bought hair spray that would be attracted by the igniter and shoot off the potato. To keep the blast from burning whoever was behind the cannon the combustion chamber, consisted the following pieces 4" PVC cleanout pliug, 4" PVC fitting cleanout adapter, 4" PVC coupling, and lastly 4" x 24" PVC pipe. The combustion chamber of the cannon was much like the combustion chamber of a car. There is a compressed volume of gas and air and the fuel is ignited with a spark pushing the potato out of the cannon. The area of which the potato would shoot out would be through a 2" x 4" PVS increaser reducer and a 2" x 48" PVC pipe. We never got to build our designs but we did draw them on google sketch up (which was a pain). You can see my design from the pictures above. I can not say if my project succeed or failed because we didn't have a enough time to build it, however I did learn a lot. First I learned how to use sketch up which most all engineers use to make their ideas come to life on computer first. This application was fun but at times very frustrating, never the less it was a fun to mess around with. One complain about the project is that next time have time to build the cannon. Hopefully one day when I am bored I can build my own potato cannon.