Ben's Projects
Ben is a very busy man, but in the spare time he has, he works with potato cannons. Here's what he's come up with so far.

Ben's cannon catalogue

	CSG-100 This is the basic potato cannon configuration, consisting of a large-diameter piece of ABS pipe with sparker, end cap, and pipe size converter acting as a combustion chamber; with a 1" screw-ended pipe as the barrel. This works well, but tends to be rather noisy. Also, the barrel isn't rifled, which cuts down on distance and accuracy (although our own testing has shown that rifling the potato works almost as well as a rifled barrel would.) We haven't just shot potatoes though - we've found that paintballs, when wrapped in plastic wrap, work well. There was another time during a grade 12 trip that instead of potatoes we made canisters out of conical drinking cups filled with sand and wrapped in duct tape, which worked well also.
	CSG-100 with TP Launcher The combustion chamber here is the same, just the barrel is a giant 4" length of pipe. This barrel was originally built as a crap gun - we planned to take the cannon winter camping, put crap in the barrel, set it on fire, and FOOM a fireball goes shooting over the winter woods. It didn't work out though. Since then we've tried large apples, which didn't work; and rolls of toilet paper, which although didn't work too well, did look like we were firing chickens or something. This barrel is also useful for making really loud noises and big flames - we'd simply spray additional fuel into the barrel before firing.
	ASG-1000 This is totally unlike any other cannons Ben has built. Rather than use a fuel and sparker, compressed air is pumped into the large upper chamber and released using a screw-on water valve. Using its own short 3/4" barrel with potatoes, it gets about the same distance as a conventional potato cannon, only with much less noise. Another plus is that if you also fill the upper chamber with water and use a cap with a hole instead of a barrel, you have a very powerful water gun. Its main drawback is that you need big heavy equipment or have to do a lot of pumping to get enough air in for it to work well.
	ASG-2000 This gun is currently being built. Dissatisfied with the ASG-1000, Ben decided to make a much larger, superpowered version of it. This cannon will also be air powered, but it will have two very large air compression chambers, possibly a dedicated water chamber, and a much longer and possibly flexible barrel. If Ben had any enemies, they'd be terrified.

Key: CSG = Combustion Spud Gun, ASG = Air Spud Gun

Other spud gun photos

The Ben Series - Ben really likes taking people's cameras and making self portraits.