Building beer can mortar

Great work and it smacks of quality. My brother has a 1/2 scale Mountain Howitzer. It shoots juice can size projectiles. We don't shoot it often, but waht a hoot when we do. He is a Civil War reinactor so I get to see some "real" cannons going off at times. Loud devils for sure.
 
A friend and I built Zeus before we built Thor, the one you see on the pic.

They have identical barrels, and near identical beds.

We we do reenactment, my brother and I shoot a 4 pound naval gun... :D:D
 
Heinrich,

The cannon has a 2.75 inch bore diameter correct? There a couple motorcycle engines that have bores of that diameter. The old ACE and I believe some old Honda's as well. If you can find them engine pistons make for good projectiles as they are high strength pieces and seal the bore well.

I knew a guy who used to have a 4" coehorn, and he used pistons out of diesel engines that were out of spec on the con rod bores. They flew pretty good, and he advised that outside of losing one or two in a field, he hadn't ever had to get new ones.
 
Did a decent amount of shooting this weekend, got the most distance into a headwind when shooting at 25deg, not that makes sense, cause the longer the hang time, the more the wind can influence the projectile.

I managed to get 396 meters (1300ft) as a 4 shot average.
 
The greater the headwind, the greater the lift produced by the spinning ball, thus the greater the distance produced. Could easily be greater than the loss of distance due to the air mass moving in the opposite direction. The direction of lift is also a function of angle of incidence of the wind's vector on the ball, which clearly affects distance as well. However, all this may not be repeatable, as the spin of the ball may not be consistent. It's essentially what we baseball fans know as a "knuckleball", that is a ball that is propelled without consistent control of the direction and amount of spin. It could go anywhere, at any time, as many batters have learned the hard way.
 
Here are some mortars in action. First of all, a friend of our Trevor has built little baby mortar, basically a 1:2.5 scale of ours.

mort4ze8.jpg


mort5dl5.jpg


Here I am shooting my own, Thor.

mort1tw8.jpg


mort2et6.jpg


And shooting his brother Zeus...

mort3hx3.jpg
 
Um, beer can mortars are made out of beer cans. Top and bottom off of two cans, top only off the third. A small hole is poked in the side of the bottom can for a fuse. The cans are jammed together to create the barrel(have the one with a bottom on the bottom). Lighter fluid is put in the bottom can. A tennis ball is loaded from the top. The fuse inserted into the wee hole and lit. Lighter fliud goes WHOOOSH and the tennis ball is launched. Or so I've been told.
 
FUSE? FUSE? Who used a FUSE? :eek:
We just lit it off with our lighter or Old Blue Tip(Kitchen matches). What's a few singed fingers among friends. Only we used pop cans cuz we weren't old enough to buy beer yet.:D
 
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