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The Best Idea, Ever People at work were talking about all the holiday parties they were hosting and all the friends they were having over and I was sitting there, thinking:
'Tis the Christmas Season, and libations will be flowing. Whilst in preparation for an evening's entertainment, I noticed wine corks seem to be fairly uniform in size. I bet a cork could fit into a piece of pipe or conduit and be used as a blowgun. Then I had the best idea ever: Know what'd be really cool at a multi-day family get-together where the booze would be flowing freely? Projectile weapons - that's what'd be cool.
I took my cork down to the local Home Depot and checked it against various pieces of piping and tubing. It seemed to fit quite well into 3/4x10 PVC Class200 PE Pipe. $1.21 for 10 feet of this stuff? Oh, baby, this is ON! I piddled around with some numbers, estimating human lung capacity and doing some volume calcs and decided a 20" section of PVC would give a blowgun of reasonable performance over a wide range of people (kids, included) and still get good materials usage.
PVC is dead easy to cut - you can do it with any manner of saws. For me, however . . .
I likes me a chop saw. In less time than it took you to read this sentence, I had 6 blowguns at a per unit cost of 21 cents, each.
21 cents per unit is too cheap, even for me, so I felt we had to dress them up a bit. Step 1 was a quick wash to get the Home Depot stench off 'em.
Next was a wee bit 'o color. Duct Tape, you are a friend of mine.
Zip, zip, zip and 6 dull white tubes were turned into colorful barrels of sub-lethal potential.
A full cork is a little massy for a good projectile. It has too much drop. Slicing the cork in half and all the sudden you have 2x the projectiles that can travel 2x as far.
And there ye have it, 2 for the price of 1. Safety Message
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