Homemade Flame Thrower http://mirror.linnwood.

org/flamethrower/

Homemade Flame Thrower

Mirrored from the Something Awful Forums

Posted by: RolandTower

Posted on: Jun 27, 2004

Like any red-blooded, masculine man of the male gender, I love PVC weaponry. You should too. If the
concept of heading on down to the local Home Depot and transforming $100 worth of random pipe bits
into a killing machine doesn't appeal to you, you're a goddamn pansy. Also, you're probably sane and
will live significantly longer than I will. Nonetheless you disgust me, and I take comfort in the
knowledge that your obituary will be nowhere near as humorous as mine. For those of you who laugh
in the face of hypersonic shards of plastic puncturing your spleen, here's an intimate look at how I've
kept myself busy for the past week: building a PVC flamethrower. If you're not interested in the
building process, skip to the bottom of the post for the fire.

My flamethrower has two main parts, a gun/hose assembly, and the tank. I made the gun first:

It's made entirely of parts you can get at your average hardware store. The hose connects to a stop
valve, which connects to a short pipe nipple that's tapped directly into the tank.

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The tank took a while to make, because I let each set of chemical welds dry before doing the next
ones. The ends of the tank are two 90° elbows and two 90° street elbows, welded to make two full
180° "U"s. One side of the tank is a 2' length of 4" sch.40 PVC, the other is a 4"x4"x1.5" T with
standard pipe attached to each 4" socket.

Before assembling the parts, I drilled and threaded the two holes I needed in the tank ends: a 1/4"
standard pipe hole for the outlet to the hose, and a 1/8" standard pipe hole for the valve that I would
use to pressurize the tank. Interesting note: 1/4" and 1/8" pipes have no actual relation to the
measurements of distance commonly known as the quarter inch and eighth inch. The holes are
actually 7/16" and 11/32" respectively. Hooray for non-metric measurements.

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Next step: cement one end of the tank:

Then the other:

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After the tank dried, I dredged up an old camping backpack to hold it. I cut a hole in the bottom of the
pack and screwed the gun/hose assembly into the base of the tank.

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Finally, I screwed in the Schrader valve (tire valve) to complete the tank:

Now the whole rig was ready for some pressure testing. Since I would soon be running the distinct risk
of giving myself heat-assisted, deep tissue exfoliation, I was extra-careful to make sure there weren't
any leaks. I used up a lot of Teflon tape.

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And, after filling the tank with water for a trial run, made sure the cleanout cap was on nice and tight

before flipping on the air compressor.

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No leaks! At this point, I had quite possibly the world's most kick-ass super-soaker.

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Of course, I didn't go through all that effort for a damn squirt gun. So I added a pilot light in the form
of a blow torch.

Much better! The finished product:

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There was only one thing left. Add some fuel (denatured alcohol; PVC is soluble in gasoline)

And TURN UP THE MOTHERFUCKING HEAT. I accidentally set my camera to long exposure, so some of
the pics look blurry. It worked out well for capturing the flames, though.

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And two animations I made from video clips:

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Two more animations:

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