Boing! APH with a twist!

[raven1962]

Hate to resurrect an old thread, but...

Did this get built? It comes really close to what I'm thinking of, for arming some styrofoam pirate 'ships', as a sort of water cannon that would fire laminated pulses of roughly a quart, for my kids...

I was thinking the piston should be free, and have air-pressure to move it, rather than a spring, with a pressurized water supply to create about 1 quart volume, to fire... 5 gallons would make for 20 shots... Through a laminator, to help gain distance. Water side would have to have higher pressure, even past 'empty', to insure filling of the firing chamber.

The boat-things will be roughly 8 ft long and kids will be using kayak paddles. Valves could use an upside-down 'Y'- handle, or maybe one made from a 4-way 'x', with the valves turned 90*, so they can't both be open at the same time, making the firing sequence semiautomatic.

[raven1962]

In addition... A 'T' valve could simplify the check-valve/double ball-valve arrangement, doing the same functions, by my interpretation of if, as a 'Pulse Cannon'... Set so that the flow through the 'T' is to fill the piston-pulse-chamber, as a 90* elbow, from the pressurized water tank; then, when rotated, the straight-through section allows the flow from piston-pulse-chamber, through the laminator and nozzle. Rotating the valve 90* more, or opposite direction of the single pulse mode, would allow use as a continuous stream, but defeats the purpose of the pulse-chamber. In the continuous-flow mode, it can be a straight-forward APH, while pulse-mode is an APH with a piston, like SS2 and SS3. The difference is loading the chamber with pressurized water, re-compressing the air that is behind the piston (instead of filling, then pressurizing for water pressure).

[the oncoming storm]

Not being rude but I find that you want a blaster similar to the XP 90, unfortunately no known homemades exist like it. Worse still XP 90's are ultra-rare and CA99's broken one is the only known example if you wanted to look at one to duplicate the pulsating device.

[raven1962]

Not so much pulsating, as single shots. There
s a time span involved in re-pressurizing/loading the piston volume, which will make the simulated naval warfare a bit more realistic. Time-wise, I think it's going to take several seconds, just to go through the motions, for an effective pulse.

May make one for the dock, as well. Increase the capacity with a larger, land-based cannon of a relatively fixed position (dock is about 8' X 10')

My kids are mostly military-history buffs and have several of us veterans in the family, so they will appreciate that, more than others. As a built-in limit, I don't think water-war gamers would really care for it, but I think it works more to my intended purpose.

Thanks for the ref, though! Will look at it, to see what it does and how it works... Who knows, I might get more ideas to work with...

[the oncoming storm]

If you are just looking for boat mounted water "artillery" a Peumatic water balloon launcher would be more realistic. Basically if you make a potato cannon with 3" Dimitor barrel instead of 2" and cradle the water balloons in pringles cans to launch they can hit ranges up to 300' with just 2' of barrel

it takes an average of 55 seconds to reload and presurize for a second shot. And is not to be used at ranges closer than 50' (it takes that far for the pringles can to fall with drag fins)