I bought the parts on the way home Friday night, built it within the two-hour time specified and we test fired it on Saturday morning. I did have to make two minor design changes - instead of a 'T' for my pressure tank I used an 'L' (it's what they had) and because I couldn't find a 1.5" - 3/4" reducing bushing I wound up going with a 1/2" valve. This has dropped my range significantly but I'll try a longer barrel when I get a chance. As it is I still have some high (well, 30PSI) pressure left in the tank when the tuber reaches the end of the barrel. Because of this I'm only getting about a 200 foot range. Here's a pair of shots showing one of our test firings (before we painted the beast):
For the technically inclined refer to the picture at the top: you can see the air inlet valve up by Winnie's shoulder, the air pressure gauge under her elbow and the release valve between the blue sections.
If your connection supports it, here are a couple of .MOV files of test shots out into the Missouri river:
Right-Click here and select 'Save Target As' for a 2.9M mini-movie
Right-Click here and select 'Save Target As' for a 2.7M mini-movie
(one taken with Winnie's Minolta DimageX, one with my Minolta Dimage F100 digi-cams). Please note:
the movies play in QuickTime and RealPlayer but some people have had problems trying to play them with
the Microsoft Media player.
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