Projectiles - Dart cannon

I thought I'd make a cannon, and use the little dart I made when I built my blow dart gun with a laser sight as the projectile.

Making projectile launching things that shoot projectiles can be fun.

And stupid.

This project was both.

I started with a jumbo bag of party poppers.

They might be called something different where you live, but they are a little explosive device designed to deliver a quantity of litter into the environment.

They do it surprisingly effectively.

I pulled all the streamers and other junk out to reveal the small firework.

Then it was a simple matter of finding a tube that would fit over the bit that goes bang.

I found a bic pen worked a treat, and the tapered end meant it was easy to create the required seal by just forcing it into the handle of the popper, to surround the firework.

Like this.












Before jamming the pen into place I put the dart in at the firework end.

And this is where the stupid bit comes to the fore...

Then I pulled the string.

Luckily I had taken the precaution of wearing a scratched pair of sunglasses, and aiming in the general direction of the back wall of my shed (garage/iron clad building full of junk in my backyard).

The result was that I no longer own my little hand made blow gun dart.

It's gone now.

It's definitely still in the shed, but it really could be anywhere.

It went away really, really fast, and obviously didn't want to be found.

I think it must hate me.

The pen/cannon has a new fracture as well. You can see it in the milky burnt picture in the pic before last.

I put the inky bit of the pen loosely into the little cannon and re-loaded it to see how much power it had, and was a little surprised to see it actually shift it ... perhaps....6 feet.

That could come in handy if you ever needed to project a full stop to the far wall of whatever room you were in.

Very handy.



According to my calculations, all this means I could shoot a 44 magnum slug nearly a thousandth of an inch.

Which is nice.

Generally I prefer to blog about things that are kid friendly, but this time I guess I have to say...

Don't try this at home...

Unless you really, really want to.

But please, please, put on an old pair of sunglasses or some safety goggles, or wrap your kids in a mattress or something. And maybe just launch a polystyrene ball from a bean bag or a pug of potato or something. It's always embarrassing to rock up to emergency with a little dart poking into your kid's brain through one of the soft, squidgy, eye portals that the gods built into heads as a sick party joke to make you look silly when you rock up to emergency with a little dart poking into your brain.

Don't encourage them.

Besides, wearing safety goggles shows you and your kids that you at least have a certain confidence in your ability to create mayhem.

I count the cannonic loss of my little home made blow gun dart a total success.


120 Things in 20 years thinks it might be a good time to quit while I'm ahead. I can see making cannons is a thing I could rapidly get addicted to. Like crack and cross-stitch, some things are (apparently) too addictive to mess with.

Just say no.