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Maggie’s AR-15/ AK47.....Golf ball launcher!!!!!!

MTFalconer

MTFalconer

Peckerhead on a mountain.
Banned !
Full Member
Minuteman
Mar 10, 2014
313
14
Little Belts, Montana
#1
So this is something fun I have wanted to do for a while and damnit, I just gotta put one together. I have a local guy that I swear has more fun with the damn thing playing with loads and charges. He can launch a golf ball out of fucking SIGHT with that thing and it's pretty damn accurate. We were using it a few weeks ago to stir rock chucks out of their den and shoot them. He'd launch a golf ball and hit a pile of rocks HARD, rock chuck would go running and we'd set in on him.

So I said all of that to say this. I gotta make one on the sly, he can't know what I am planning. Aluminum or steel? I'm leaning towards steel but the ones he has made are all aluminum. By his calculations the longer the tube the more accurate it is, his 10" tube is VERY accurate so of course I want one 11" long. He is using 223 handmade blanks and all I have are 7.62x39 blanks.....see where I'm going with this? I wanna put one into ORBIT.....LOL I know you guys have something like this in your closet so show them. Don't be ashamed, that's on the of the great things about getting old is I can do whatever the hell I want to. I want to launch some damn golf balls at Mach II
 
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#2
I made something similar but much more crude when I was a kid...
An empty aerosol can (with the top around the valve removed) epoxied to a 3' cardboard tube from a fabric store that rolls of curtain material comes on. The tube was the exact size as a golf ball, and I put a nail across the tube about 10" down. I used a nail to punch a hole on the aerosol can about 1/4" up the side and would squirt lighter fluid in the hole.
The process was to squirt some lighter fluid in the hole and then swing the barrel rapidly a dozen or so times to vaporize the lighter fluid and then touch a flame to the hole...BANG!!!
It wasn't very accurate or consistent, but if it was done correctly the golf ball would disappear outa sight!! Its probably still stashed in my parent attic someplace :rolleyes:
DW
 
#4
My grandfather, dad and uncles made one out of steel back in the 60's. It was a 3' pipe, so you need to compete with that too. They powered it with M-80s and often shot the golf balls straight up. That didn't always go so well. Grandpa's new Dodge took one on the hood, uncle Ted's Ford lost a windshield - yea, they were slow learners but boys will be boys.
 
#5
TripleBull said:
My grandfather, dad and uncles made one out of steel back in the 60's. It was a 3' pipe, so you need to compete with that too. They powered it with M-80s and often shot the golf balls straight up. That didn't always go so well. Grandpa's new Dodge took one on the hood, uncle Ted's Ford lost a windshield - yea, they were slow learners but boys will be boys.
Click to expand...

3' might be a lot hanging off the front of a rifle...LOL

He and I were discussing this last night and it seems that inside of a d cell mag lite is very close to the correct diameter for a golf ball. I've seen some of the "solvent traps" guys are making with those and there are adapters available for the bottom that accepts the 5/8-24 thread. So many ideas and so little time. He has a video of some dude that made up an M-203 style launcher. Hung under the AR like the original that launched golf balls with a .410 shotgun shell full of black powder or something. Not too much in the detail department but the thing launched a golf ball 5-600 yards and was able to use the 203 sighting system. Kooky cool if you ask me. Plus for home defense I can't imagine a better less than lethal round than a golf ball doing 1200 FPS. That would take the fucking wind out of you.
 
#6
Seems to me you'd simply lay hands on a cheap single shot shotgun, cut the barrel off a few inches past the chamber and weld on the desired stick of pipe. Buy or load shotgun blanks and get after it.
 
#7
MTFalconer said:
for home defense I can't imagine a better less than lethal round than a golf ball doing 1200 FPS. That would take the fucking wind out of you.
Click to expand...

Golf ball at 1200fps has 2200 lbs of energy about 4x a 45 ACP. Might not be as "less lethal" as you think.

I knew a kid who was killed by a potato gun described by slash above. Potato to the head from about 7 ft away. Slash will tell you that potato is moving fast when it leaves. I made one also and would shoot racket balls lubed with grease out of it they would go over 300 yards.
 
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#8
I made a potato gun for my applied physics class in high school. Farm country (Iowa) and a cool teacher who let the redneck nerd by with a lot.
We put a 6d nail in a potato and shot at a tree from 20 yds. Buried the nail completely. We know it hit from the mashed potato on the tree.

I think a golfball at 200 fps would hurt like a sun of a gun and if it hit the head or just right over the liver or other solid organ it could easily cause trauma.

Wasnt happy with gussing so I looked some stuff up. Mickelson's would travel at 35m/sec according to some stuff I found, another said approx 70m/sec right off the face of the club with a perfect hit.
 
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#9
Yup. Those potato guns would smoke. We shot a steel folding chair with one from about 30-40 yards and it hit hard enough to blow the back off.

Didn't some military force use a device attached to the end of a barrel to launch grenades? I'm thinking WW2 era. Something like that could help keep from reinventing the wheel.
 
#10
When I was a kid we did the potato gun thing. Neighbor kid Tommy made one too. We lived close to each other so he would mortar me from his deck. Sometimes I would return fire. The old man laughed his ass off when we got to shooting at each other. Tommy ran out of mommies hair spray and decided to use starting fluid. They took him to the hospital emergency room to remove the PVC frags from his body. That was the end of that. After high school Tommy ended up in the Marine Corps.
 
#15
Slash0311 said:
Yup. Those potato guns would smoke. We shot a steel folding chair with one from about 30-40 yards and it hit hard enough to blow the back off.

Didn't some military force use a device attached to the end of a barrel to launch grenades? I'm thinking WW2 era. Something like that could help keep from reinventing the wheel.
Click to expand...

In addition to those listed by MTFalconer , IIRC the purpose for the gas block selector on the M14 was for the use of rifle launched grenades.
 
#17
Now I need to build a potato cannon again.
My 5 year old would love it. We can paint it all camo and stuff. She would want to take it to shool for show and tell.
Brake cleaner and a little shot of O2 from the torch launched em well.....

now that Im a tad wiser I realize just how crazy that was.

We also liked to fill balloons with sawdust and oxygen with a little acetylene and then shoot them with flaming darts..... just say we made a black mark on the 20' ceiling in the shop room.

 
#18
Oxygen/acetylene bubbled up through water into a 20.0z coke bottle with a teaspoon of used motor oil in it.....you didn't hear it from me. On a side note, this same procedure done with the exception of filling a Hefty lawn and leaf bag 1/4 full will simulate a plane crash to the churchgoers two miles up the road from your house......or at least that's what the cops and fire Dept. Said when they arrived.

Ever blow something up and the five giddy men that were all laughing at the 20oz bottle get in their truck and immediately go home when the Hefty bag was ignited? Hmmmm...just me I guess.
 
#19
MTFalconer said:
Oxygen/acetylene bubbled up through water into a 20.0z coke bottle with a teaspoon of used motor oil in it.....you didn't hear it from me. On a side note, this same procedure done with the exception of filling a Hefty lawn and leaf bag 1/4 full will simulate a plane crash to the churchgoers two miles up the road from your house......or at least that's what the cops and fire Dept. Said when they arrived.

Ever blow something up and the five giddy men that were all laughing at the 20oz bottle get in their truck and immediately go home when the Hefty bag was ignited? Hmmmm...just me I guess.
Click to expand...

Never did the coke bottle trick. but the oxygen/acetylene torch make a hell of a fuel for the potatoe gun.

We made one out of pvc and it was launching potatoes out of sight. I was lucky enough to use a couple of rolls of duct tape around the chamber, because it failed in the most spectacular way. The cap shot out of the back and left a perfect hex shaped mark in the steel plate behind us, the barrel was in a million tiny pieces, and the chamber was completely fractured and only being held together by the tape. The guy shooting it said he hands were numb for hours and ears rang for days.

A friends dad use to blow balloons up with oxy/acetylene and probably equivalent to an m80 going off. Never thought to try a hefty bag.
 
#20
jbuck88 said:
A friends dad use to blow balloons up with oxy/acetylene and probably equivalent to an m80 going off. Never thought to try a hefty bag.
Click to expand...

We started with balloons but they pop in the sun after a while. We were putting them on the target holders on a private range. Even made a rack to hold them. We were making up some for our little private shoot and I realized that the mix would inflate a balloon, why not a trash bag? We only filled it up the size of a basketball and that was apparently waaaaaayyyy too much. It was the kind of boom where you just stand there in awe. Even at 500 yards away the instant response from everyone there was "SHIT"!!!!!
 
#21
MTFalconer said:
Oxygen/acetylene bubbled up through water into a 20.0z coke bottle with a teaspoon of used motor oil in it.....you didn't hear it from me. On a side note, this same procedure done with the exception of filling a Hefty lawn and leaf bag 1/4 full will simulate a plane crash to the churchgoers two miles up the road from your house......or at least that's what the cops and fire Dept. Said when they arrived.

Ever blow something up and the five giddy men that were all laughing at the 20oz bottle get in their truck and immediately go home when the Hefty bag was ignited? Hmmmm...just me I guess.
Click to expand...

You're my kind of people.

It was basically a requirement to get to get onto my bomb squad that during your interview you had a series of very loud, dangerous mishaps in your past. Getting to go to a national school and sharing "shit I blew up" stories with techs from around the country was a better education than the school itself.
 
#22
I was a weapons SGt. but cross trained in demo and EOD. As Muldoon from the GBs said...." my dad got me a chemistry set for Christmas and it got bigger than the both of us". Field expedient ordinance training was also probably a bad idea but they let me do it....lol.
 
#23
Don't mean to be a buzzkill, but didn't ATF classify these recently as DD's or AOW's? I recall hearing or reading about it a while back, about it being an unlicensed mortar or grenade launcher. I can see how they'd come to that conclusion considering some of this stuff is covered in the guerilla warfare manual.

 
#24
The Navy has been using MK87 Mod 1 Line Throwing kits on the front of M14s and M16s for decades. Might be a good start.

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#27
Strykervet said:
Don't mean to be a buzzkill, but didn't ATF classify these recently as DD's or AOW's? I recall hearing or reading about it a while back, about it being an unlicensed mortar or grenade launcher. I can see how they'd come to that conclusion considering some of this stuff is covered in the guerilla warfare manual.
Click to expand...

I've seen that floating around on the internet but the last update on it was a couple years back. They are still available through many sources without permits or paperwork so I am going to imagine it was either repealed, removed or just false information.
 
#28
MTFalconer said:
We started with balloons but they pop in the sun after a while. We were putting them on the target holders on a private range. Even made a rack to hold them. We were making up some for our little private shoot and I realized that the mix would inflate a balloon, why not a trash bag? We only filled it up the size of a basketball and that was apparently waaaaaayyyy too much. It was the kind of boom where you just stand there in awe. Even at 500 yards away the instant response from everyone there was "SHIT"!!!!!
Click to expand...

LOL.... used to do that at random times for kicks . trash bag in 50 Gal. 'open' steel drum . 1st mistake I made was using a metal trash can, but learned fast when it got laid down flat like it was pealed like a banana on the ground .
 
#29
Fuel/air is just damn impressive! I will admit to some knowledge of such. The thing that sticks the longest is the magnitude once you go past one cubic foot.................. especially when the mixture is right.
 
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#30
When I was playing with all this stuff I was under the apprenticeship of a mechanical engineer/gunsmith friend and he had a LOT of good ideas that we tested from time to time. One of those existential people with a large capacity for free thought. He came up with some ridiculous notions and a few we proved.
 
#31
MTFalconer said:
I've seen that floating around on the internet but the last update on it was a couple years back. They are still available through many sources without permits or paperwork so I am going to imagine it was either repealed, removed or just false information.
Click to expand...

Or they never went through with it?

I remember they were on a big ban kick a while back and reclassified all kinds of shit and that's when I remember seeing this come up.

I'd like one of those line throwers if I could get my hands on one.
 
#32
I may have done the same...

tennis balls used used to be sold in metal cans. I might have had the idea to place a small amount of gasoline in the bottom of the can, perhaps made a small hole with a nail, and maybe inserted the extra Wick from a pack of firecrackers when the pack is broken into singles...

there is also a chance that said said Wick was ignited, and the tennis ball was launched from the tube.

However, this is all pure speculation... Right?
 
#37
85500397.jpg
 
#38
We all know that spin stabilizes objects in flight

The Perfect Spiral on a football
The spin of a Frisbee
1:7 twist on a pill


So my question would be how do you add a little bit of rifling to a golfball launcher?

If not rifling, could you add backspin- aka Airsoft Hop Up?

Start with a long tube and give it a slight bend like in airsoft?
Or could one polish the bottom edge to reduce friction... as the golf ball moved down the tube, it would pick up back spin from friction?

The speed, I think, is based upon the charge and the PSI from the barrel. I do not think the length of the golf ball holder makes a difference as gas is venting to the gas port....



lots of playing could be done... to make it more.. entertaining



 
#39
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop-up_(airsoft)#/media/File:Hop-up_animation.gif

In airsoft guns, this is usually implemented as a projection (called a bucking) into the path of the projectile, on the top of the barrel. The bucking momentarily hinders the top side of the projectile, imparting a backspin that can exceed 120,000 revolutions per minute. This is usually adjustable so that the effect can be tuned to suit the weight or speed of the projectile and each player's preference.
 
#40
could one bore a hole or square into the top of the launcher and insert a rubber or sandpaper flap a few thousandths to make a bucking? or an adjustable bucking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop-up_(airsoft)

In airsoft guns, this is usually implemented as a projection (called a bucking) into the path of the projectile, on the top of the barrel. The bucking momentarily hinders the top side of the projectile, imparting a backspin that can exceed 120,000 revolutions per minute. This is usually adjustable so that the effect can be tuned to suit the weight or speed of the projectile and each player's preference.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Hop-up_animation.gif

 
#44
A buddy of mine bought a golf ball launcher and was showing it off at the range. Needless to say when a golf ball hits a steel plate at 200 yards it will bounce back with enough force to go through a windshield in the parking lot.
 
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