Potato Cannon-ish

During my time in Makerspace I built a potato cannon with Damien, Liam, and Miles. We first started out with designing the cannon in a process in which we oversimplified greatly, turns out we didn’t need any of this valves and tubes that we bought as we just had to spray the hairspray into the chamber directly. After we figured that out, we bought the PVC pipes and glue needed for the barrel and chamber and assembled them the next day, using the saw to cut the pieces to the right size.

The next few days we worked on getting the ignition source to create a spark and light the hairspray, this was a challenge because we genuinely had little clue on how electricity worked and fussed around with different wires and grounding the cannon. In the end we figured out a way that worked quite well.

On our last day we worked on actually testing the cannon, but before that we taught the lower school about our cannon was gonna work, while telling them not to mess with it, Liam set a table on fire. After that unplanned test we stuffed an apple down the barrel and filled it with hairspray and nothing happened. So later in the day we did another test fire when the apple had rotted enough to fall into the combustion chamber, this time it worked (kinda) the cannon made a loud boom and some of the apple flew out, turns out, the apple was creating a vacuum inside the chamber not letting air get in and set on fire. When trying to do a second demonstration at the end of the day it failed to light and the apple fell out and rolled down into the sewer.

In the end we managed to make a semi working potato cannon that could make noise and create fire. If we had more time we would have added some vents for air to get in and allow for an ignition. Along with doing more testing and adding some cosmetic features.