After weeks of building and waiting for free time I finally got some time to do some shooting. What seems to work best for a 'bullet' is your standard size 'pork & beans' can full of concrete. A $3 bag of ready-mix will fill dozens of cans. If they don't hit a rock, you can use them over and over. And, best of all, they are not prone to tumble. I have found that if you put an empty can in the gun first and let it push the concrete can out the barrel that the can will fly end-on. At least the first 100 yards or so. It does wobble some. I put plastic electrical tape around the open end of the empty can until it fits the barrel. It is loaded with the open end down. Then the concrete can goes in last, also with the open down. It looks like the muzzle blast will start a single can to tumbling. In the case of using two cans I think the can in the rear shields the front can from the blast and it's flight is not disturbed as much. In this photo you can see the rear end of the can all the way to the target(100 yards). One of these cans hit a tree at about 160 yards and cut a circle out of the bark. This impact was about 15 feet off the ground. In the right view the cut is about in the center of the frame.

Close-up Shooting:

It is always nice to blow stuff up. Here is a watermelon getting splattered. In the first frame you can see the two cans end to end as they come out the barrel. The front can was painted white but now is a dirty color. Frame two shows the melon being blown apart by the concrete can. The pusher can is seen right in front of the target. After impact parts are moving out in a nice round pattern. This appears to indicate good hit. In the final frame you can see a dirt cloud from the concrete hitting the ground. The can is also bouncing away. I also have a 221k mpg video of the shot. A bleach jug full of water also worked very well(385k mpg video). Once again, you can see the 'pushing' can following the bullet into the target. It would have been better if I had put a cup of white paint in the water. The mist shows up in the air better, with the white paint in it. Then there was the old cassette deck. It took a can of concrete right in the middle(217k mpg video). The concrete can is white and the pusher can is behind it and sideways in frame one.

Long Range Test

It seems like someone always wants to know how far it will shoot. Me too! The internal leak I have keeps me from going to max. pressure. The higher the pressure the faster the leak. I can get to about 63 PSI, on my gauge, and that is it. Maybe I will work on that leak again later. I am looking around for something light that will fly good. Well, I had a couple of the 2 inch PVC bullets laying around. It is like the one at the top of this photo but the nose is a little more round. One is 15 and one is 18 inches long. I put a empty can in the gun with the open end out. Then I put the bullet in the can with some plastic bags around the bullet, close to the nose, to keep it centered in the barrel. I then set the barrel at about a 45° angle and pointed the gun in a direction where there were few trees and lots of room. I fired at about 60 PSI, on the gauge. I did not time the flight but it seemed long, maybe 12 seconds or more. My aim was pretty good. I found the bullet within 50 feet of the path I had started walking downrange. I paced back to a to a measured 300 yard marker from the impact point. It was 303(or 305 I forget) paces plus 300 yards. Call it 600, I guess. The next shot was the shorter bullet. It went 47 steps further than the first shot. This was on Saturday. Monday evening I set up to repeat the same test. My brother-in-law and sister live about 300 yards 'downrange'. With cordless phones, we fired the shots while talking on the phone. The gun was aimed to where the bullets should have passed about 200 feet in front of him and pretty high up. He said he could hear them go over. The long bullet fell a little(maybe 10 yards or so) short of where it landed Saturday. The short version fell a few yards further that it did Saturday. Both were sticking in the ground with the tails up in the air. There were pretty easy to find. This time I took my bicycle instead of walking. You would not want to be hit by one of these even this far away. It was no problem to hear it hit the ground even 600 yards away.

Knocking down a dead tree, 25 Oct 98

I wanted to try to down a dead tree. It took several shots but finally went down. Find out all about it here.

More later.