Breaking the Sound Barrier

Some friends of mine and I decided to have a bit of a farm get away weekend recently. One of the things we decided would be fun while away was break the sound barrier... With a really big cannon.

Some of you may be familiar with the pNuke system of air toys which have featured in videos such as Sleepeater... The cannon used here is a more powerful and scary version with a custom built valve and some other trickery.

Modified deluge valve fitted to the air tank.

Fire deluge valve with a 5/2 3/8th inch pilot valve.

The barrel is a 6m length of 40mm scaffolding pipe coupled to the pNuke via some very big rubber hose and Mikalor super heavy duty hose clamps.

Clamps securing the rubber hose to the steel pipe. 

Rubber hose coupled to the deluge valve.

Unfortunately we were unable to achieve supersonic projectiles, I think this is due to the maximum flow through the valve not being high enough or the interior of the barrel is too rough.


Despite this the result is pretty spectacular...

As usual, Glow Sticks are pretty impressive in the dark:

We made a projectile out of rolled up newspaper and gaffer tape... It promptly disintegrated when launched.

An attempt to fire a lemon resulted in a lemonade mist... No pieces of the lemon were found.

SHIHAD - Sleepeater

When Sam Peacocke approached me about doing some effects for a Shihad music video I had no idea how apt the title was going to turn out :-D

I was given a ten page PDF of how the video was to play out... It required a spinning shaking chair, water cannons, smoke machines and a wind cannon. For me it simply read: Lets make some cool stuff :-)

The pNuke:

This cannon resulted from my initial "more power Igor!" approach to the water cannon idea. The pNuke is a 9kg gas tank fitted with a 2" solenoid sprinkler valve. The tank is pressurised  with an air compressor, activating the valve dumps the tank with quite some violence.

Thanks to: Greg at work for helping me out with the welding and James at Deeco for the valve.

Testing the pNuke with no nozzle:

The water is thrown even further when you fit the pNuke with a nozzle:

The following video shows why we decided to only use the pNuke as a wind machine... It's simply too violent when shooting water:

My Dad being pNuked:

Smoke Ring Cannon:
We did initially want to shoot smoke at everyone in the video... Software glitches filling our tent with smoke made us decide at about 1am on the saturday morning that smoke was a bad idea.



The Gentle Annie Water Guns:
These were used for generating the streams of water than fly behind and into each person as they spin on the chair.

A bank of 3/4" solenoid valves fill a bunch of polypipes with water and then use compressed air to "empty" them in a hurry.


Valve Bank:

The Gentle Annies required two different air supplies in order to achieve the desired effets. The pNuke was also supplied with regulated and filtered compressed air.

Air Supply Manifold:

The Final Result: www.sleepeater.co.nz/

Check back soon :) This is a work in progress...