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Water Guns 120

Posted by michael from the keep-away-from-the-blinkenlights dept.
K4GPB writes: "Animated article shows inner workings of water pump guns capable of shooting 50 feet. In 1982, a nuclear scientist named Lonnie Johnson came up with an ingenious solution...In the late '90s, a new wave of Super Soaker guns came out that boasted higher pressure levels." Super soakers make great cat behavior-correction devices too.
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Water Guns More

Water Guns

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  • Re:Water Gun Ideas? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not a water gun, but there's a water-game thing I found once. A plastic ball with slots, you put a water balloon inside. You set a timer, it goes off and pricks the balloon. Supposed to be a game of hot potato.

    It's also a great "psychological test." Ask someone to balance it on their head til the timer goes off. Hilarity ensues :)

  • Re:cruelty to animals (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The key to all of this is don't let the cat catch you squirting him. As long as he thinks it's divine retribution it works.

  • The Urine effect (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @05:42PM (#107931)
    Yep. Pee in a supersoaker. Nothing makes people run quite so fast. Mind you, a little FOOD coloring in water IS the pee but no need to tell your friends that. Example: At party, PRELOAD supersoaker with FAKE pee water, hide in bathroom. Carry around second EMPTY soaker. Ask friend who is in on the gag to DARE you to fill it with your pee. Take the empty soaker to the bathroom, make the switch. Come out and spray someone. Aim for someone in white for the best effect. Adding SALT to the water will give it a funky smell. Sit back and laugh at how people will freak out at your poor taste and jugement. While you have the partys full attention, shoot it in your mouth, drink it and watch the reaction. Priceless. Note: Do not aim for people who are old or very young. Kids don't mind if you spray them with pee it seems and old people freak out too much. So aim for adults or pets. For more fun, spary the PEE into your buddys mouth.

  • Re:behavior correction? (Score:4)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:07PM (#107932) Homepage Journal
    Cats dislike water on their skin. From what I hear, their saliva contains an enzyme that keeps them from stinking, alerting their prey as cats are predators. Water washes away this enzyme.

  • Cat behavior modification story (Score:4)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:57PM (#107933)
    Neighbor cat used to get on the fence and yowl at our cats something fierce. I kept a super soaker handy but he always ran away when he saw me coming. One day, his luck changed. He had made the mistake of getting too close to our cat on the fence, and when I came out, he didn't dare turn tail or he would have lost face with our cat, so he stood his ground while I got closer and closer. It was a very satisfying march to the fence once I realized this. His yowl got a bit higher in pitch as panic set in. I unloaded on him from about 5 feet away, a good hard super soaking. He never bothered our cats again. A truly satisfying day!

    --

  • Re:Flammable Materials (Score:5)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:47PM (#107934)
    When I was in junior high school, my friend tried this..they ended up with 2nd degree burns on one hand and 1st degree on the other hand and arm.
  • I think compressed air powered water was in used long before Lonnie Johnson "invented" it - just maybe not in water guns. I was a kid during the age of the pathetic pump squirt gun, but you could get water rocket launchers [geocities.com].

    There's also a nearby NASA base with a water powered sled used to test tires and stuff - a 2Mb movie of that in action is here [nasa.gov].
  • I'm an amateur prankster, and have always thought super-soakers to be an untapped source of laughs. Does anyone have any good suggestions on things to use in conjunction with super-soakers at the expense of someone else's dignity?

    Thanks in advance.
  • If you want something that looks like a real gun, get an airsoft pellet gun, but those have to have bright orange paint on the barrel.
    Interesting, but do you know of any water guns that look like a real run?
  • Gawd, I'd love to make a CO2 powered one. (Fizz water anyone?) I'd bet that if you engineered it right you could get 100+ feet range although causing injuries at close range would probably be a bad thing....

    The ultimate water Shooter I have ever used is a 4inch dia firehose at the water filtration plant when they had the pressure cranked to 90psi The arc of the jet went over the 3 story building and hit the road on the other side. I'm betting I could knock people off of bicycles at 30 yards.

    BTW, that big of a hose at that pressure.. you need 2 people, and it still kick's your butt.

  • Not true! (Score:3)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @08:12PM (#107939)
    From the 3-phase power page: Transformers must have alternating current to operate

    Transformers require Energon Cubes, not AC, to operate.

    --
  • Slashdot inserts spaces semi-randomly into long words to prevent a silly attack that some teeenagers think is clever - messing up the formatting of the tables making up the slashdot layout by using a really long, unbroken, sequence of characters - some browsers will make the page really, really wide to accomodate it. This could also be fixed by using a fully CSS compliant browser and some clever formatting rules, but a large proportion of non-white-noise slashdot users still use the old NS4 (upgrade to mozilla 0.9.2, people!)

    As you've just found out, links still work...
  • 1st degree==sunburn, painful red skin
    2nd degree==blisters on the skin
    3rd degree==black or charred skin
    that's from my remembrance of first aid in boy scouts
    1st and 2nd degree CAN be funny, also from what I remember of boy scouts
  • When they first came out with the motorized squirt guns (back in the summer of '85, I beleive), my roommate and I got 2 of them. We filled them up with slightly watered Jergins hand lotion and went to a porn theater. We had a blast (pun intended). Unfortunately, we forgot to rinse them out afterwards and the lotion dried up and ruined the guns.
  • On a semi-related note, I have made a compressed air cannon out of PVC piping and an electronic sprinkler valve. While I won't go into the engineering aspects of it, it can shoot pretty much anything, including water. Can put a decent sized potato through a 1/2" piece of wood, can shoot a giant gout of water 35' into the air, a bunch of rocks, etc. Of course the draw-back is that its horribly dangerous, but BAH!
  • Well, you could learn here:

    http://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/mit-guide.html [lysator.liu.se]

    It taught me well enough :)

  • I probably should have mentioned that Brian Tobin is the Premier of Newfoundland...

    Note to moderators: I already removed my bonus for this totally offtopic post. Go moderate something cool up.

  • Re:Water Gun Ideas? (Score:3)

    by jfunk ( 33224 ) <jfunk@roadrunner.nf.net> on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @03:51PM (#107946) Homepage
    1) Newfoundland is not part of the Maritimes

    2) Neither Maritimers nor Newfoundlanders say 'eh'

    3) In joking about Jean, it's more humorous to suggest a water gun filled with pepper spray (or Inuit carvings...)

  • Flammable Materials (Score:3)

    by tbo ( 35008 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:45PM (#107947) Journal
    Does anybody know what happens if you fill a supersoaker with gas, and light the gas as it sprays out? Instant flamethrower? Or do you just blow yourself up? I've wanted to try this to get rid of wasp hives, but was a little scared about the possibility of horrible flaming death ("tastes like burning").

    Another cool variation would be a 50/50 mix of water and alcohol. Spray on something valuable, ignite, watch people scream before they realize it's not actually being hurt by the flames (because alcohol doesn't burn very hot and the water protects it from the heat).
  • Personally, i think it takes too much time to build up adequate pressure to modify the behavior of my cat. Then again, they dont make supersoakers with reinforced steel pressure chambers hooked up to air compressors.

    STOP CLIMBING ON THE DAMN CURTAINS !@!@()$*

    Deceptively cute. Holstien Cat. [sunfaq.org]

    Slashdot something useful. [thehungersite.com]
    Management is not a tunable parameter.
  • I always wanted to fill it with mercury; then you could wreck things really fast.

    Unfortunately, I suspect it would be too dense for the trigger mechanism
  • Does it explain how DVD encryption works? :)
  • or... take 4ft. surgical tubing, a hose clamp and a pen barrel. Tie a simple overhand knot at one end of the tubing, place the open end over a fairly high pressure faucet and fill the tubing with water. Clamp the hose and insert the pen barrel. Slide the full hose up your sleeve and you have the perfect high pressure, stealth water weapon. With the right tubing it'll go half a city block. Ah..the memories
    Yeah...I remember this as the ultimate portable water weapon. We called it a "sausage." I didn't use the pen barrel, just pinched the end when I needed greater range. That way, at close range, you could open it up full, putting out a stream of water a good half inch in diameter. If you really want to get somebody wet, this is the next best thing to a garden hose. Of course, sometimes the tubing would burst...
  • Oh, the water gun moderator doesn't like me.



    FIRST POST!
    Now we can talk.

  • Must be a slow day.

  • The one with the bipod is great. My ex-roommate had one of them, it shoots the equivalent of 1.5 Coke cans per second, or something obscene like that. Best thing is, it's actually got a kick to it when you fire. Great in a car with a sunroof, too. Stand someone up in the passenger seat, with the gun on the roof..
  • In the US you rarely if ever get 3-phase to your house, you don't even get 2-phase. As the article states on http://www.howstuffworks.com/power5.htm [howstuffworks.com], what you get is one phase of center-tapped 240V. Hot to ground is 120V, Hot to Hot is 240V
  • Better yet was what a friend brought to a water fight and I have been unable to find anywhere despite looking. It was effectively one of those things attatched to about a 6 litre backpack. It could fill a waterbomb in one shot, outranged all our supersoakers and carried more ammo. In addition to this the person carrying the thing shot for his country at under 18 level. The rest of us got very wet.
    --
  • Can that popup be any more worthless?
    You can't disable it! (no matter what the thing says)

  • Re:I've always wanted to build this... (Score:4)

    by Arctic Fox ( 105204 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @03:42PM (#107958) Homepage Journal
    We used to fill 2 Liter bottles with cold water and dry ice (don't use hot, as the bottle will expand, cold keeps the plastic from melting) and seal it up. After moments, the thing would blow.

    The good ones happened when it didn't blow, and some brave sould had to whack it with a shovel. Seeing a guy hit in the sac with a speeding bottle cap is funny.

    Certain bottles would fail differntly. The plastic juice bottles would blow the cap off. The top would just blow itself off the threaded part. It would still be screwed on, just "open" at the top....

    Soda bottles with burst from the side, I guess the tops were pretty solid.

    Aspirin bottles just became flying shrapnel. (Damn childproof top)

    Gulden's spicy mustard bottle made a friggin mess. The metal top would hold, but the sides wouldn't.

  • Years ago, we converted a fire extinguisher ourselves. It was a model that worked with foam and we only had to exchange the pistol.
    The cool thing was that it had a valve like the ones on car tires. So we could pressurize it with a normal pump.

    It could only should 8 to 10 meters. But it totally drenched anybody within seconds!
  • 14 Farads!?! What charging voltage did you use?
  • I'm not so sure the article on power poles is completely correct or at least doesn't explain things all the way to the consumer.

    Having recently installed a power pole here, I can tell you that neutral is brought down from the main power line as the return path for the electricity. It could be that it is just fed directly to ground but I doubt it as it's well known that the voltage of ground between two different locations can vary quite significantly (That is why cat5 ethernet has no ground).

    Looking out my window, it is impossible to tell exactly how many wires come from the main power station as it looks like they are all bundled into one. There are four wires running between the main poles but one of them is cable, one phone co and one is probably a protective ground.

    Besides, I can tell you for a fact that when I lived in England, almost directly under some high tension power lines, the lines were bundled in groups of four with a small diamond shaped spacer at regular intervals. That's three phase and neutral.

    Besides, there's something I don't quite understand about US voltages. I have one neutral, two live ('hot') wires coming into the house. neutral to live is 110V fair enough. However, hot to hot is supposed to be 240V. Now, if you have three phases, each at 110V to neutral and 180 degrees out of phase to each other then one phase to the other would be 190V (in the UK, it's 240V and 415V). The only way you get anywhere near 240V is if you have a two phase supply where the phases are 180 out of phase and then you get 220V.

    So it appears that the electricity coming into the house is two phase. Not three as the article suggests.

    Of course, there is something I could be missing. Sitting up on the main power pole is a transformer. I guess that could be taking one of the phases (indeed, it may be that the locality here is only served by one phase) and converting it to two feeds, each 180 out from each other. That would also account for the single wire between the main poles and would make the article correct (for as far as the local substation anyway). Three phase would certainly be more logical anyway.

    Just for comparison, in the UK, most consumer power lines are laid underground and the homes are supplied with one neutral and only one live ('hot') wire so phases is not something we encounter often.

    Rich

  • Now, after looking at that article, I really want the one with the bipod

    A bipod on a water gun has to be one of the most useless things I can think of... You get it set up and you're guaranteed to be standing still. Need I remind anyone how poor a tactic that is in a watergun fight? I think not...


    --Fesh

  • Re:Flammable Materials (Score:3)

    by Fesh ( 112953 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:48PM (#107963) Homepage Journal
    I've got the double-barreled model (forget what the number is offhand)... Was wondering if you could put a fuel in one tank and a strong oxidizer in the other, so they go off when they hit the target and mix. Come to think about it, methanol and decently concentrated Hydrogen Peroxide'd probably work... Or maybe RFNA and whatever you happen to have on hand?

    But then again, the oxidizer would probably burn the tank it was in, along with the plastic plumbing... I hear that bleach and brake fluid work though...


    --Fesh

  • Several years ago (well over a decade) I bought one of the original Super Soaker pistols for of all things...cat training (yes it works very well). Pissed off the wife using it to train my infant son (now 6), and it kept working until just a couple of months ago. Tried to find a replacement in the store and found that they just don't make small Super Soakers anymore. I thought it would make a great entry into a museum.

    I almost bought one of those chrome-plated anniversary edition Super Soakers just out of deference to my pistol lasting for so many years, but it seemed a little out of place doing cat training. Maybe a little overkill.

  • I used to cheat with a hose and a nozzle. Always against the rules, and the hose length could be limiting, but I had unlimited water and killer range. No one could argue with that (at least not without getting soaked).
  • Umm, right. That's 8.4 gallons per minute - a garden hose puts out that much, and it's got 60psi and a 1/2" "barrel".
  • Supercharging your soaker:

    If you transport a loaded weapon then put a little bit of vaseline on the tip of the barrel, this prevents water from leaking out .
    you can shoot trough the vaseline.

    Vaseline is very useful for making other parts of the gun wathertight too.

    Increase the pressure the trigger applies to the plastic hose with a rubber band.

    With the "single reservoir" soaker you can replace the reservoir with a glass bottle. Dangerous but effective.

    Have fun!
    Menu
  • Some kids in Santa Fe did this at their high school. Needless to say, they were arrested [kobtv.com].
  • I found this with a quick search of google. http://free.freespeech.org/kaosroolz/jynx%27s_jurn al_v2.84/Flame%20Thrower.txt
  • excuse me, I don't know how that space got in there.
    Here's the link [freespeech.org]
  • One of my coworkers told us of a friend of hers that filled a SuperSoaker 3000 (from years ago, with the 2 gal backpack) with kerosene and basically used it as a flamethrower. I don't know about the destructive properties of kerosene compared to gasoline, but this is the same guy that cooked steaks with a real flamethrower at her "Extreme Cooking" party, so he must have experience with this stuff.
  • You think?

    Running water OVER a cat such as in a shower traumatizes the poor things.

    TRy filling the tub of water when the cat is not around maybe only an inch full and using a cup to rinse them



  • There's nothing funny about 1st and 2nd degree burns.

    Says who? [darwinawards.com].
    _O_

  • Super-soakers aren't the best (Score:3)

    by legLess ( 127550 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:56PM (#107974) Journal
    IMHO, nothing beats a Stream Machine (link [amazon.com] to out-of-stock page, with photo, on Amazon). It's really simple - a long plastic tube with a nozzle at one end and a plunger with pistol grip handle at the other end. Stick in bucket, pull plunger, point at target, push plunger.

    Now, it might not sound that great, but it's really very nice. Your GMP (gallons-per-minute, like a shower head) is potentially much higher than a Super Soaker. The release rate is totally up to you - a little or a lot. I can shoot one about 30' straight up, and I'm not exactly muscle-bound.

    I once got in a water fight with one of these things; my buddy had a hose. Sure, I had to carry around a bucket, but he surrendered pretty fast after I shut his hose off ;)

    "We all say so, so it must be true!"

  • cruelty to animals (Score:4)

    by small_dick ( 127697 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @03:45PM (#107975)
    I can't believe anyone thinks it's funny or appropriate to fire a high velocity water gun at a small animal.

    Maybe one of those 'Man-Kzin War' cats should cruise over to your house and drag you out to the fire hydrant and give you a good blasting.




    Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.

  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of SuperSoakers ...

    You mean like this? [fallsview.com]

  • All we need to do is open source the super soaker, and maybe we have something to compete against .NET with.

  • Waterguns have been a strange focus of my life recently, as I have been playing in a game of Assassin [roselli.org] and I have done some significant searching for a truly bad-ass weapon.

    What I've found (after going to about 15 different toy stores) is that even with all the range and volume that ultra-modern water weaponry have they still suck.

    Most of the problem is that sometime around the early 1990's companies stopped making toy guns that looked realistic. All the new supersoakers and even new conventional water pistols are multi-flourescent colored futuristicly aero-dynamic peices of crap.

    I mean, how can you be stealthy with a gun enemies can see from 100 feet away? I understand why the guns aren't made to look real anymore, but when I was a kid (god, I feel old all of a sudden) toys were dangerous and sometimes you poked yourself in the eye, but dammit, TOYS WERE FUN. Nowadays, everything is ultra-safe at the expense of ultra-cool.

    I remember the best watergun I ever had. It was an Intertek Uzi. Batterypowered. All black. Spare clip that could hook onto a belt. It LOOKED like a real gun. It made sounds like a real gun. Just hold down the trigger and you got full auto. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. It only shot 20-25 feet but it kicked ass.

    Hmmmmm....time to go to eBay and see if I can find one.



    I am Jack's broken heart
    I am Jack's complete lack of surprise
  • Amazing how super soakers always managed to leak horribly, break down quickly, or otherwise fuck up.

    Thank goodness for Super Glue, I still have an original Super Soaker 50, damnit that thing was a pain to get! Hehe, cost alot of money too, of course I just had to get one the first year that they came out (and then of course nobody wanted to have a water gun fight with me anymore, hehe)
  • I had one with a 2 gallon backpack on it, hehe. Yes, the MoFo was heavy, but it beat the living shit out of ANY super soaker that came near me. The best part is that they are ALOT cheaper then super soakers, and they are built to about the same piss poor quality so that you can expect them to last almost as long.

  • Hehe, actualy I perfer to take the other stance.

    Scientist got the idea's right, engineers make a proper implementation

    but the *!$#ing bean counter used the cheap ass plastic!

  • At a sci-fi con, I also found a vendor who had reinforced a super soaker to shoot mayonaise. He called it the "ultimate spooge gun". People tended to steer clear of his table.

  • Well no, actually it's more like mussing their clothing. It does no harm and only annoys.

    KFG
  • I have to agree. Cats will do whatever they want, as long as they think they can get away with it. For a cat not do what it wants, they must know that there is no chance of a clean get away. They have a good memory for sound and touch, which is why they run when they hear the sound of a squirt gun...and a can opener.

    One time while petting a cat that was lying down, I tried to rub it's tummy but the cat got after me with it's claws. I then produced a water baloon and rubbed it's tummy with the baloon. Needless to say, the cat attacked the baloon causing it to burst. Although I tried, I could only do it to a cat once. It seemed that once a cat learned what a waterbaloon felt like and what happend to it after he attacked, the cat would only touch the baloon, remember what happened, and then run.

  • charged to 410 VDC. At 440 one leaked (arced). very scary since it not only discharged it's stored energy but shorted two welders in series. nice spots burned on the retinas for days. fun dangerous toys. Their instant magnetic field will crush steel like butter.
  • Would love to try the same experiment with lasers powerful enough to ionize the atmosphere... and bigger/more capacitors. A huge amount of energy is required to pump a laser capable of the same power delivered to a target as can be applied directly with the lasers acting only as conduits for raw electricity. Pretzel tank. Nice electronics frying EMP effects too.

  • Tazer (Score:2)

    by Perdo ( 151843 )
    Take a pair of super soakers. Wire an electrode into each water tank, taking care to get a propper seal again. Fill them with vinigar. Wire 14 1 farad capacitors in parallel to the two electrodes. Charge the capacitors with a DC arc welder. fire.

    Effects:

    Both super soakers explode as the power vaporizes the vinigar but not until you have a complete circuit through your target which had better not be human, because the power discharge also vaporized a beautiful eliptical hole about 11 inches across in a 1971 GMC truck tailgate
  • A simple crosshairs on a refilled 409 bottle handles the cat.
    But for the birds? Air cannon! I got to whistling the same lame calls a bird made every morning at 5am and suffering sleep exhaustion, built a simple air cannon to blast the lowest bass I could muster at him, and any other prick birds loitering on that tree! Works great on crows too (well, they're birds too).
  • A bipod on a water gun has to be one of the most useless things I can think of... You get it set up and you're guaranteed to be standing still. Need I remind anyone how poor a tactic that is in a watergun fight? I think not...

    Did I say I wanted it for usefulness? I've got one at home with a barrel that spins around like a gatling gun when you turn the crank, too...

  • I used to play with these things a lot back at university - a local club [kaos.org.nz] used to stalk around playing silly-buggers with them to relieve some of the monotony and stress of student life.

    The main problem I had with most waterpistols I could find was leakage - almost any pistol with any significant capacity had severe leaking problems. Then again, that could just be the quality of the stuff available locally, I suppose. Still, good to see some of the theory behind them, and why the bits that kept breaking did so (or at least how their breaking made stuff not work).

    Now, after looking at that article, I really want the one with the bipod [howstuffworks.com] :-)

  • Re:Flammable Materials (Score:5)

    by suss ( 158993 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:22PM (#107991)
    Does anybody know what happens if you fill a supersoaker with gas, and light the gas as it sprays out? Instant flamethrower?

    2 words: Darwin Award.
  • Seeing a guy hit in the sac with a speeding bottle cap is funny.

    No, speeding bottle caps are NOT funny. I got hit in the eye with one once. One of the veins inside my eye burst, the eye filled up with blood. I couldn't see out of it for about a week. (And it hurt like BUGGERY when it happened, obviously). While I was recovering, I had to use these eyedrops that enlarged the pupil, which meant it really hurt in bright light.

    Thankfully, my eye is totally back to normal. But trust me: speeding bottle caps are NOT fun,

  • It may.... oh wait.

    :P

    -Gnight
  • www.howstuffworks.com is an awesome site!

    Where else can you learn how to pick locks [howstuffworks.com], see how speakers work [howstuffworks.com], and learn how to program in c [howstuffworks.com] all at the same place?

    Hmm... I think I'm gunna check out how MP3 Compression works.... [howstuffworks.com]

    -Gnight
  • ....it sure is easy to get useless stuff posted here now-a-days. this will probably get modded down, but i am trying to make a point.

    .brad

    Drink more tea
    organicgreenteas.com [organicgreenteas.com]
  • Hot to hot at 240V is two phase (180 degrees out). Three phase is 120 degrees out (and hot to hot on any two is 208 volts). The 220-240 thing are averages. The max voltage on any one phase is 170V so none of the voltage numbers are accurate.
  • Now you have me thinking...
    If you've got a double barreled water gun, why not attach a cattle prod [flemingfarmsupply.com] to it? Fill the tank with an electrolytic solution, connect a lead to each barrel, and wire a switch to the trigger of the water gun, and watch the neighborhood kids run...

    ..ok, maybe not...
  • Don't suppose you are from the Maritimes, eh? In that case, go ahead, give some major public personallity a real good soak, just don't don't do it Canada, Jean dosen't like competition.
  • Yeah, they also skipped predecessors. Anyone else remember the "Cosmic Liquidator", circa 1980? It had a water-filled belt pack with a hand-operated air pump for pressure, and a delivery tube connecting it to the gun part. It was awesome. J-.
  • My dad is immune to poison ivy. When he was young, he would pick poision ivy and put it in a buckey of water for a several days. Then he would fill up his squirt gun with that water. He'd go around squirting neighborhood kids in the ears and that is where they would get the poison ivy rashes.

    Bry
    --------------------------------------------- ---

  • The Ultimate Water Gun (Score:4)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @05:22PM (#108001) Journal
    There is, of course, the Ultimate Water Gun [tikaro.com] page, featuring a portable unit that can reach 75 feet and more, with a helmut mounted nozzle, etc.

    It is built out of a converted fire extnguisher. You pressurize it to the spec of the canister, often in the range of 100 PSI.

    Do Not Over Pressurize!

    How to build instructions at the page.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Word of advice to your "friend"...let go of burning object.
    If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
  • I wonder if that flash animation would set off censorware... you know, all the thrusting back and forth, in and out...
  • Who modded this up as Funny? There's nothing funny about 1st and 2nd degree burns.
  • My mates and I are hiring a Castle in Wales for a week, soon. We are planning to get a load of super-soakers and play some real life Deathmatch. In a real Castle! How cool is that? :)
    So can I ask UK-slashdotters, while we are on the subject, where's the best place to buy SuperSoakers on-line in the UK?
  • Here comes Gijs with his water spilling Desert Eagle... >:) Nice water cooling dough.. ;)
  • A much better way to get rid of a hornet's nest is to get a insect fogger and tape it to a stick. Start the fogger, jamb it into the nest, and enjoy a rain of dead hornet's! Works great for two story houses.
  • I've done that with butane from a lighter. The only problem was that plastic nozzle started to melt (and then burn) after a few seconds. It's not too unsafe because the gas in the reservoir is mostly butane, not enough oxygen for an explosion to happen (not much gas either, it would propably be a very small explosion in any case).

    --

  • or... take 4ft. surgical tubing, a hose clamp and a pen barrel. Tie a simple overhand knot at one end of the tubing, place the open end over a fairly high pressure faucet and fill the tubing with water. Clamp the hose and insert the pen barrel. Slide the full hose up your sleeve and you have the perfect high pressure, stealth water weapon. With the right tubing it'll go half a city block. Ah..the memories
  • The article went straight from squirt pistols to second generation Super Soakers, without ever mentioning the originals. The original Super Soakers weren't of the 2 reservior variety, but were a single reservior into which you pumped more and more air, not water, to build pressure. Doesn't say much for their research.

    If you had bothered to read page 3 [howstuffworks.com] you would have seen them mention the original Super Soakers.

    Doesn't say much for their research.

    I wonder what that says about your research.

    CoreyG
  • Ever heard of holding a fortification? In complex water battles this is a huge advantage. And, the bipod can be folded up so the gun becomes (in principle) portable. I wouldn't want to have to hold one with a full tank while pumping and firing and running at the same time, though...
    ---
  • I doubt it's having the effect you assume. I tried this about 10 years ago on a couple young cats I had (Bill and Ted) and about the only behaviour modification I could observe was that they knew what the motorized water gun looked like and ran. Didn't do squat to make them keep off the mantle or stop gnawing on each other.

    Nice timely story though, as I expect Chinese workers have labored long and hard to keep these, and ripoffs like them, on the shelves of finer Walmarts everywhere.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • We used to fill 2 Liter bottles with cold water and dry ice (don't use hot, as the bottle will expand, cold keeps the plastic from melting) and seal it up. After moments, the thing would blow.

    Friend of mine did this, but for added effect, put an object over the bottle (like a colander or trashcan). Fortunately, he videoed it. The exploding bottle would fire the trashcan for some distance. On the video you heard >BOOM! They then had the idea of putting one of these bottles in the bathroom, on a stool, and videoing it at close range (running a video cable, so they could watch it from the safety of another room). The first one wasn't very good, so they wrapped the bottle in tape to make the pressure build up.

    The second one was rather too successful. It exploded, blowing the sink off the wall. The sink hit the toilet cistern, putting a hole in the cistern! Somehow, the videocamera remained standing during all of this. The first words on the tape when they re-enter the bathroom were "Holy Cow!" followed by "Oh don't worry, these aren't too expensive"...with the sound of running water in the background...

  • I wrecked my super soaker 50(or 75?, the model numbers were much smaller then) about 10 years ago doing that very thing. The cheap plastic hoses inside the unit were the first thing to disolve, limiting amount of damage I could cause to myself and surroundings.

    Maybe the engineers at Hasbro had thought ahead "What other liquids would a 14 year old boy put in this toy?", took the two most logical, being urine and gasoline, and attempted to work the implications of this substances into the design of the device.

    For the gasoline, disable the device ASAP by having the internal connections erode.
    As for the piss, well...

  • CO2 Powered Watergun (Score:3)

    by Afreet1 ( 224290 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:49PM (#108015)
    This got me thinking, what if you took a CO2 tank from a paintball gun, removed the handle from the slide and made a pneumatic piston for the main chamber. If you used a solenoid and pressure sensor to avoid shattering the gun you could have an "auto-pumper". That would REALLY kick some ass at a squirt gun fight.
  • I just can't wait till they merge those Super Soakers with the old back pack waterguns.

    Super soakers make great cat behavior-correction devices too.

    I can see it now...

    Muscular man with shiny futuristic armor walks in, metal jingling on each footstep, holding a bazooka-shaped water gun with the emblem "SuperSoaker XPS 3000a." He stops in front of a small grayish brown feline, licking its paws.

    MAN: Hasta la vista, kitty.

    A wave of water flushes the kitty down the street as the cat's bellowing cry diminishes over the horizon.

    His next victim has been perambulating the streets for quite some time. The figure's bowl-cut haircut and PocketPC protector both shadow over the evil lurking beneath. Only the twinkle of dollar signs through his thick glasses and the insignia of framed flying windows give away his ebony demeanor...

    No real cats were hurt in this whimsical tale of pure delight, much to anyone's displeasure.

    -Mr. Fusion

  • You made PETA mad! (Score:3)

    by tarbabyxxxx ( 241558 ) <n6jpaNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @09:34PM (#108019) Homepage
    Super soakers make great cat behavior-correction devices too.

    I imagine that tomorrow morning the FBI will break down your /. cult doors and haul off all your cats while screaming PETA members spray you with water cannons. Remember what happened to the Bonsai Kitten plant! [bonsaikitten.com]


    --

  • Um...Dude...Brian Tobin is not the Premier of Newfoundland anymore. He's been in Federal Cabinet for, like, a year or so (Minister of Labour or whatever...). Furthermore, he's touted as Uncle Jean's hand-picked sucessor.
  • Actually, it was at Scout Camp; we had these old portable fire extinguishers that were basically a big pump action nozzle attached to a big metal tank, worn as a backpack. As I recall, they had pretty good range and firepower, (waterpower?) and with something like 5 gallons of capacity, gave you pretty good staying power. They were made for putting out fires, right? I advise anyone who sees one at an antique store or where-ever to grab it.

    Also, I wonder if somebody could hack something together using an old portable marine bilge pump. Full automatic would rock.

  • I used a squirt gun to teach my cats not to scratch the couch. Unfortunately, what I taught them was to not scratch it when I was around. The squirt gun was more effective than the thrown TV Guides, though. Those just taught them that I didn't like them. After I switched to water, they learned what they had to learn, unfortunately not quite what I was trying to teach them. Oh well, failure on my part.


    "You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."

  • I played Assassin about 20 years ago at college, using the orignal rulebook from Steve Jackson Games. By the third game we had almost the entire college (150 people) playing. Total mayhem and paranoia for about a week. Of course, back then a banana with a lethal weapon. You could stab or shoot someone with it.

    I've still got my Intertek Uzi somewhere, but the damn things kept breaking down, and you had to take them apart to fix them. I had one of the battery operated pistols, too.

    The reason toy guns look fake is a federal law. Some kid pulled a toy gun on a guy a few years ago, and the guy shot him with a real gun. With the screwed-up gun laws in this country they decided to ban toy guns, the work-around being toy guns that look like toys. If you want something that looks like a real gun, get an airsoft pellet gun, but those have to have bright orange paint on the barrel.

    "What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"

  • The article went straight from squirt pistols to second generation Super Soakers, without ever mentioning the originals. The original Super Soakers weren't of the 2 reservior variety, but were a single reservior into which you pumped more and more air, not water, to build pressure.

    Doesn't say much for their research.

    -Jade E.

    P.S. Yes, I've emailed the author about this and posted it in their forum. No response yet.

  • Re:How Stuff Works (Score:3)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:48PM (#108030) Journal
    Sorry, that's How lightsaber effects work (with links to make your own). [howstuffworks.com] Wrong URL before.

  • How Stuff Works (Score:5)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @02:38PM (#108031) Journal
    How Stuff Works [howstuffworks.com] is really an amazing site.

    Ever wondered why power poles have 3 lines? [howstuffworks.com]
    Or how silencers work? [howstuffworks.com]
    How to pick locks? [howstuffworks.com]
    How lightsaber effects work (with links to how to make your own!) [howstuffworks.com]

    I could spend hours there.

  • Re:Flammable Materials (Score:4)

    by number one duck ( 319827 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @01:54PM (#108033) Journal
    Best thing I've ever seen shot out of a water gun was unset jello (which sets rather nicely in the cool spring air). If you want to be a cruel bastard, I've seen bleech done too.

    And yes, gasoline melts the plastic. This fact alone is probably all that has kept dumb hicks from making these flamethrowers for all this time.

  • Firstly, the supersoaker is made of plastic, which would be dissolved by gasoline. Secondly, again with the plastic, it would melt under all but the briefest flame bursts - and if the fuel reservoir melted you'd be having a bad day. Thirdly, you need some way of keeping the flame away from the outlet so that it's not sucked back into the fuel container, and it wasn't designed with this in mind.

  • The Ultimate Watergun (Score:3)

    by mcowger ( 456754 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2001 @06:27PM (#108040)
    I can't believe no one has mentioned John young's Ultmiate watergun [tikaro.com] Aside from being a pretty ridiculous hack (imagine 100+ PSI from a backpack mounted FIRE EXTINGUISHER BOFY), he gives it out free to people witha good reason. He gave it to me and my friends for a college party (the "Beach Party") and it was the collest thing I have ever played with...I am working on building my own version. This guy truly has the ultimate water gun.
  • ...I always wanted a Super Soaker as a kid. All my friends had them. I was given one recently, and the magic is still there.

    I still believe, though, that a Paintball gun is far more effective for a good afternoon's fun.

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