SpudFiles

I was wondering where everyone got their inspiration to begin spudding... I'm, asking this because the person who introduced me to it just recently contacted me asking what I've been up to lately. So i showed him the Dubya and he was a little bit afraid... that he'd have some kind of legal connection to that since he told me how to build my very first spray and pray. So, The person who introduced me was my 7th grade social studies teacher, Mr. Meeks.... So, who introduced you to spudding and do they know how much your "plumbing" skills have increased?

brogdenlaxmiddie wrote:... and do they know how much your "pluming" skills have increased?

Hay, that’s what we can do when anybody asks us what were doing with all the pipe and stuff: we tell ‘em we’re “Plumbers”!!!
Sorry, a bit off subject…

As for what got me started… probably paintball, but I don’t remember for sure…

I was introduced really by a guy on youtube named bholowick, or something of that pseudonym. (is that the right word i was lookin for?)
My first cannon was a pneumatic.

I can remember being amazed at his sprinkler valve cannon that didnt work too well for me because my sprinkler valve was 3/4 inch valve with a 2 inch barrel.

My skills has improved alot. With my first cannon i used dwv and didnt use primer, but that was junked upon learning of the danger, so now i got a new large bore cannon, my 4SPC thats in my signature, and my advanced combustion with a 2 inch diameter barrel.

Now i look at his stuff on the youtube, and im like wow......that's weak, lol. And he even told me to make the chamber from abs, in which he did, but i didnt because i couldnt get it at home depot, so i got pvc.

Now i look at how much better my cannons are, which makes me think of only the possibilities of hybrid power!

So, thx bholowick for catching my interest, but now you cannons are crap compared to mine, lol.

Well, Joel Suprise's website definitely, his launcher's inspired me. But i've never met him personally

I was at my brothers sailing regatta and some guys were shooting spuds out to sea, my brother thought it was cool so when I got home I jumped on the net and started researching.

Most and my brothers friends knew about them, but no one dared to make one, until I did

I think Advancedspuds and Spudfiles were the first few sites I came across.

I built my spray and pray with my grandad and now I look back at how stupid I was, I knew nothing about pipe and now I know enough to scare most people

Edit: And now I do all the plumbing for my house unless there's something that I can't get and/or do.

yeah. I've also learned a lot about plumbing... Like in my dads shower, there was a leak somewhere and it was dripping water on the cieling in the mud room and he wound up tearing out the whole ceiling and he couldn't find the leak. I walk in from outside and he tells me the story. I take a flashlight look around for about a minute then run upstairs and look at the drain. A simple crack around the ring of a DWV drain spout. I actually had one on hand and i fixed it in about 5 minutes. So, had I not known to check the DWV, then we might have been looking at a big hole in the ceiling for a loooong time

well I got inspired on youtube, by singularity's 25mm, thus I built my first sprinkler valve cannon out of sch 80 pipe, then after I saw MrC's SGA I was like OMFG!, then this was the time I really really wanted to build somthing as powerful as that, thus leading me to SpudFiles. I evolved so much, I started with a crappy 2 doller bike pump, then to a 10 doller 12v electirv pump, then to a 20 doller foot pump, then to a 70 doller2 gallon aircompressor that took 9 minutes to pump up, and now a 10 gallon 2.5 hp beast thanks MrC and singularity.

About 35/36 years ago I was spying on my older brothers, they where tapeing tennis ball cans together and shooting tennis balls across the yard.

11/16/2005 I was shopping for fuse and seen the link to Spudfiles, clicked it, looked it over and joined up. Looking over Spudfiles brought back a bunch of fun memories. Been having fun here every since!

Another fun thing about Spudfiles is meeting people from around the world and getting to know you guys.

A demo at Science North of some sort of spray'n'pray combustion piqued my interest. Firing a mid-sized combustion inside a room that is essentially a sphere with a flat floor, hollowed out of solid rock, makes quite the noise, especially when you're sitting 10 feet from the muzzle. This was in the spring of '06. I forgot about it for a while, and then one weekend in the fall of '06 I was bored and looking for entertainment, and stumbled across the AdvancedSpuds website. I used the plans for a mid-sized handheld combustion with limited results, as the fuel was condensing on the chamber wall in the cold.

Most people would have though it's just a waste of time and quit there. But not me. When I build something good, I won't quit until it works, and as the winter was winding down, I thought "hey, if the chamber was filled with oxygen before the fuel was added, it'd be almost impossible to get an unignitable mix". It's been going uphill from there on, and the success of the SCTBDC secured me into this hobby.

So, I guess I can thank whoever it was that came up with the brilliant idea of firing off a spudgun indoors a few feet from the audience at a "Science and Technology Olympics". Now I've got an outlet for all my creativity and desire for large explosions that's only somewhat illegal. AdvancedSpuds seems kind of primitive now...

There was an article a while back in Popular Mechanics featuring Joel from Spudtech. I thought it was pretty cool and checked out his site, which led me here.

My first cannon was a 1" ball valve pneumatic that had DWV and sprung a bunch of leaks since I used hardly any primer.

Now I look back on it and laugh about how stupid I was. Now I'm working on my first piston valve cannon (which should be done this weekend). No leaks at all now, my priming has gotten much better.

Spudding has taught me more than just about plumbing parts (which I now know too much about) but also just about basic mechanical know-how and how to fix things when they go wrong. I seem to get all the DIY jobs that need to be done around our house, even if its just as simple as a screw coming loose.

i think i started because i wanted a rifle, but my parents wouldnt let me get one, so i built my own...

One summer, about three years ago, I learned about match rockets. You shape some aluminum foil over the head of a match, and when you light it, they go like 10-20 feet. I thought that this was awesome.

I bought a little book called Backyard Ballistics (yes, I am sure many of you have heard of it). I went to the match rocket section, and tried for weeks to build one to no avail. I just couldn't do it properly.

I flipped through the book, looking at the other experiments, and I deemed them too unsafe, especially the spudgun they listed. It used hairspray as a propellant, and I would have never considered that, for the risk of the combustion blowing up the PVC pipe and scotching down surrounding trees was just too high ( ).

At this time, I simultaneously researched vacuum bazookas (look them up on Google; very simple devices). I built one of them, and was very pleased. I needed more though.

I looked back in Backyard Ballistics, and saw "Pnewton's Petard", a T-shaped ball valve pneumatic. Because it used compressed air instead of flammable liquid, it was much safer ( again). I constructed it, and was very pleased with the results. When I first charged it up to 10 PSI to check for leaks, and let that ball valve go, I thought it was incredible. 30 PSI was even better (I was afraid it would explode though ( ), so I never went past 30 PSI, the recommended top pressure that the author of the book suggested, a surprisingly smart move considering many people would use DWV).

My interest only grew. My second cannon was from a website online, and my third was done completely on my own (I did, however, copy the design of Joel Surprise, on his dual chambered, dual sprinkler valved pneumatic). I continued to build and buy better valves (spoiled myself by buying two Supah Valves for my fourth cannon; only topped them when I built myself the 3" porting valve for the Americannon).

And thats how it happened.

Velocity wrote:One summer, about three years ago, I learned about match rockets. You shape some aluminum foil over the head of a match, and when you light it, they go like 10-20 feet. I thought that this was awesome.

I bought a little book called Backyard Ballistics (yes, I am sure many of you have heard of it). I went to the match rocket section, and tried for weeks to build one to no avail. I just couldn't do it properly.

I could never get that to work either.

Im not trying to spam here or anything, but Velocity, i would like to know your opinion on my cannon thats in my sig. After all, you and schmanman inspired me and i would like to know if theres anything i can do to make it better.

it would probably be when i made my own blow gun, then went on instructables to find how to make darts and i came across this simple bv cannon and made own using a 2L soda bottle which i still have now and is still very powerful and basically went from there, tell you what though my parents are so considering getting me physiological test done or something they dint like it that im making so many, but hey the only small

When I was 16, my friend made a bunch of black powder golfball cannons -- and told me about his other little hobbies.

Fast forward to ~2002, I met Joel from spudtech shortly after he took the SGTC from Ed. That's when I got more serious about it, and he showed me his shop.

That, and my affinity for being that one friend who may secretly have a nuclear arsenal in the basement. I'm the crazy one