Tennis Ball Canon/mortar

In this project, we constructed a tennis ball mortar cannon.  We made some minor modifications to improve the quality of the cannon.

One of these modifications was making the first hole smaller so more energy from the lighter fluid is focused all onto the tennis ball.

Step 1:

1.  You will need to find 3 Pringles cans.  You must cut a hole at the bottom of one, small enough to hold a tennis ball.
You will need to cut a much larger hole in another can big enough for a tennis ball to go through.  Leave the third alone.  Discard the lids.

Step 2:

2.  Stack them in this order: Can with no holes, can with small hole, can with big hole on top.

Step 3:

4.  After layering with duct tape, make a small hole at the bottom of the bottom tube.  This is where you will put in the lighter fluid, and later, the lighter. We added handles to hold when we launch it.

Comments

[jared.fuller.3998]

What did you use to cut the holes with?

[MrE]

YOU NEED TO PUT A "SAFETY ALERT" this item is very dangerous. In my opinion you should delete this instructable. You have made an EXPLOSIVE chamber out of cardboard and duct tape. I have built tennis ball mortars and potato cannons for years. I am in my opinion somewhat of an authority on construction and use. My first bit of advice is. DON'T. Mortars and cannons are extremely dangerous. You run the risk of losing fingers, a whole hand, possible serious internal injuries, or even you life.

All of these devices should be built with much stronger materials than this. Even using such a low combustion fuel as lighter fuel. Let me explain if you have a tennis ball that gets deformed from an impact and is put back into your chamber it could cause to much compression from the ignition of your fuel. This pressure has to go somewhere. I know you have an injection port for your fuel but the pressure built up from the explosion can overload the amount coming out of your injection hole. From that point you a small grenade.
there is something called "The stoichiometric point" please refer to this wicki page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoichiometric_point
If you hit that you get max explosion. And cardboard and duct tape is inadequate for anything holding pressure. Please take what I say into consideration and delete this, I have said my peace and leave the rest to you.