This week, I spent the majority of my time working on the final rewrite for my book. During my writing breaks, I decided to try my hand at building a marshmallow gun – I figured I could whip something together in a few days.
A marshmallow gun is basically a gun built from PVC pipe that shoots marshmallows or Nerf darts.
They usually function like a blowgun, but they resemble a rifle:
I built this one:
The bottom PVC pipe is sealed and can be filled with air.
The pipe has a protruding bicycle tire stem on the front – you just hook it to a tire pump and fill it up to about 40 PSI.
The air is released by tapping on the “trigger”, which is actually just a small pneumatic pump connected to a sprinkler valve. When you tap the paddle, it forces air through a tube which causes the sprinkler valve to open, and allows the compressed air to flow to the barrel.
I can’t take credit for the valve design; I learned about it from YouTube, and purchased it online.
It’s amazingly powerful at 40 PSI. Theoretically, it should hold 100-150 PSI, but I’m not really stupid enough to test it at that pressure.
Shooting marshmallows only lasted for about two minutes before I started shooting marbles and nails into the garage wall.
For my next writing break project, I may try my hand at cloning a Kardashian.
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UPDATE: I decided to paint the marshmallow gun to make it a bit less conspicuous to zombies:
Read part 2 here.
If you build a Kardashian, you will need a lot more air!
And probably a lot of silicone, and a trunk for the junk.