SpudFiles

I am currently building a pneumatic cannon, although it is not finished I have done some test fires. Everything works great, the sour grapes make a nice splat against the garden shed.

The only problem is that if I want to fire downwards, then I have very little time to aim and shoot before the ammo falls out the end of the barrel. How do I overcome this problem? I cant use magnets because that doesnt work on sour grapes and many other objects. My barrel is 20mm diameter. Any ideas?

Ever heard of wadding?
Do some research before asking a question which can be answered in under 5 minutes of searching.

harsh

if your using a breech then out some solvent at the very beginning of it so that th ammo get slighly stuck. this also works with a muzzle loader, you just have to push it past the glue

i know how you feel, and im too lazy to make wadding for every shot

Or stop firing undersize ammo.

Use potatos and you'll have a perfect fit and it stays there even pointing vertically down.

i find potatoes relatively lame. to squishy and soft for any good penetration

Like the others before, just use tighter fitting projectiles, or prehaps reverse a sabot (but that would end with the destructuon of said sabot most likely )

A-98 wrote:i find potatoes relatively lame. to squishy and soft for any good penetration

Hes firing grapes. How much less penetrating could even a soft potato be?

Actually I havnt heard of wadding. This is my first gun that I have made and I am not very experienced. But yes that should work, thanks for the suggestion.

I also dont like potatoes for ammo because my gun is too small to fire a whole potato so I have to mush it into the pipe which ends up getting messy and also because it is not heavy enough.

just use a tissue or toilet paper as wadding.

In that case you'd be amazed how many people don't actually fire whole potatos.

The idea is to fire a potato slug cut by the barrel or a barrel sized cutter.

If you think your barrel is too small for potatos at 20mm my cannon has a 15mm copper barrel and it fires them like nobodys business.

Mind you copper is a lot better than most pipe for cutting into spuds.