Air Cannon

[NoodleKnight]

Originally Posted by Michael223

I am working on building my own Air Cannon. I want to be able to fire multiple shots (of T-shirts), in a short period of time so recharging the cannon between shots needs to be done by either a CO2 tank like on a paintball gun or any other suggestions you might have. Does anyone know where any good Air Cannon designs are on the web? The ones I have found all need to be recharged between shots with either a bicycle pump or an air compressor. The idea is to be able to mount one of these on our old robot and create a promotional bot for high school football and basketball games to shoot our T-Shirts into the stands like they do at professional baseball games and other events. The simpler the solution the better. I am also working on designing a way to auto reload the cannon between shots. Thanks for the help!

How much CFM does it require to shoot off a T-shirt? I don't know the answer myself, but most CO2 paintball tanks don't have a large volume of air, but do have a lot of pressure (HPA tanks will go upwards of 800psi coming out the regulator). Now, if you grabbed a scuba tank size CO2 tank, then that should be plenty =D.

The first thing that comes to mind is just an ordinary pneumatic potato cannon setup, except you have a large HPA tank (scuba tank) with a regulator attatched, then feeding it into the air-storage tank of the pneumatic cannon. This way it'll recharge pretty quickly after you fire (and this is sort of how paintball guns work). Oh, last thing I'll note, I wouldn't use the setup I listed above with CO2 -- CO2 gets real cold when it's depressurized into a chamber, and PVC becomes brittle when cold.

Hope this helps.

[Doug G]

This topic has been brought up before, just search a bit for it. We built an air cannon robot last year and so did Team 1147, they brought theirs to a Kings game if I remember correctly. Ours uses a 4" barrel and can launch just about anything. We run it off of two large tanks as shown in the picks and bring them up to 100 psi with a separate compressor. We then actuate the gun using a spike relay controlling a sprinkler valve solenoid. We usually get 6 or shots before we need to recharge the tanks.

[John Gutmann]

This should be an easy solution. At the fire department for extrication drills we have to use air tools and run them off of the breathing tanks. So if you make a trip to a fire department supply center/store they should have what you need. You just need an air tanks and tool adapter. The tool adapter should include the regulator, and it will end up hooking up to standard air house couplings. After that you just need a trigger and barrel. Hope this helps, if you want more info please PM me.

[Dick Linn]

There's some discussion of CO2 cannons over at http://www.spudfiles.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=308&

Whatever you do, make sure all components are rated for the potential pressures involved at a particular stage, which can be up to about 2,000 PSI with CO2. Do incorporate a quality regulator and an overpressure relief device in the charging chamber. I would suggest using steel or aluminum tube for the barrel and avoiding any PVC for safety reasons.