Homemade Valve

[caliban]

I've built pnuematic cannons before, for shooting things other than water. I had used solenoid valves but they seem a little touchy for a water cannon and seemed like it would be difficult to turn them on and off efficiently. Im not really worried about the price of one, they are only $10 around here. I thought I would use something like the nozzle on a garden hose. From the inside of my CPS 3000 it looks like super soaker has a similar firing mechanism. The nozzle seems to work by forming a seal against a reducer. To fire you would just pull back on a pin allowing the water to rush around and out the nozzle. Would the water pressure be too great to pull the pin back however?

Thanks

Caliban

[BlueSmudge]

I'm not sure what you are saying, or asking here. It sounds sorta like you are talking about water balloon launchers, in which case a selanoid is great. It also sounds like you are asking about homeamde SS valves, in which case, yes you could use a garden hose pistol grip. I made one with it. The porblem is, you can't ergonomically attach it to the end of the soaker where it needs to be. A simple ball valve is the best.

[Ben]

I get what he's saying. How hard to pull back the pin thing depends on 2 things, the area of the seal and how much pressure is being put against it. There's no equation or anything to calculate that, but that's what it's based on. Sometimes, especially when using modded Super Soakers, the pin can be hard to impossible to pull. In that case you would have to manually remove the pressure chamber from the gun and let the water go everywhere.

If you don't want to use a garden hose type valve, you could make your own. I would base it off the already popular Zero Valve but make it much larger to allow more output. Based upon diameter, area goes up exponentially, so the larger the better basically.