Thread: Very realistic cannon!

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Excelent cannon.

Awesome job !

I have made several cannons, ex cetra, my main vandalism worry (and not at all unfounded) is some Idiot would stick a 1/2 stick of dynamite in the barrel, just like some one did to the excellant 357 magnum pistol.mailbox located near this town. The schapnel could have killed someone.
Since I work with scrap steel I weld a small plate about 3 inches inside the muzzle , just far enough after I paint it flat black, that it looks right.
A man told me he bought a very realistic looking Civil War cannon made out of foam? Once he got it home he didn't know where to keep it?
He left it at the end of his front room sofa, pointed at the sofa.
This was alot of fun for his daughter's nervous boyfriend who was sitting looking down the barrel as he talked to "The DAD"!
Yes! It's a concensus, VERY NICE WORK on your cannon!!

Nice cannon!

But, wouldn't it be fantastic to make it fire?

So, here's my idea; utilize a flash pot device to fit into the end of the barrel. I'm not sure if a traditional flash pot would work since it operates by a glow plug. You would have to play around with it. I was thinking that since you would need a simple reload method (you don't want to be trying to spoon flash powder into the main cavity, etc.) you could create a flash "ball". Basically, you take flash paper and put a small amount of flash powder and smoke powder in the middle. Then you simply ball up the flash paper trapping the powder mix in the middle. You could then drop the flash ball into the cannon. It would need to be touching the ignition surface, so I'm not sure a glow-plug would be the right way to go. I was even thinking of a cigarette lighter from a car with the outer jacket stripped away at the bottom of the flash pot (thus, a large glowing surface when powered to ignite the flash ball) and that would be much more resilient than a fragile glow plug.


You would have to let the igniter cool before reloading, but you should be able to fire the cannon every few minutes. By having a bunch of flash balls pre-made they would just need to be dropped into the cannon barrel. You could even fashion a "ram rod" that actually has a cup in the end holding the flash ball and you just load the cannon as if you were ramming the load down, but you're actually just dumping the ball into the pot.

This is just an idea, so you'd have to play around with it to work out the details, and to time it with the sound effect, but you could pull off a very realistic effect that is completely safe.

Looks real good. I like it.