Three Little Pigs? No Problem With A Vortex Cannon!

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By Michael Arcand on July 30, 2009

Vortex_Cannon_largeOK guys, it’s time to get your nerd glasses for this one.  Seriously, this is one of those things you have to see to believe.  Straight out of the Little Red Riding Hood story comes an incredible new experimental air cannon designed to, you guessed it, huff and puff and blow your house down.  Well, sort of.  Powered by an incredible explosion between acetelyne and oxygen gases in a combustion chamber, the blast forces a compressed vortex ring of air out of the cannon and across a small pond towards the target.  Barely visible at standard speeds this ring of air is revealed when the images are slowed down using footage from a camera capturing the images at 1300 frames per second. Yeah, that’s really damn fast.  The video below shows the potential of this grand “weapon” against three houses: one of straw, one of wood and one made of bricks.  So go notify all your friends that the jig is up and those three pesky pigs can now be yours – all for the price of a one-of-a-kind vortex cannon.  Swine flu, take that! (Note for all the politically correct out there: no real pigs were used in the experiment, so chill out.)

Reader Comments

  1. Alex July 30, 2009 - 11:14 am

    pretty cool, but those houses were pretty shitty – especially the brick one. it was just one wall! and it was just bricks sitting on top of each other. no cement or anything. and he still only hit the top off!

    still, would love to have one of these

  2. Michael Arcand July 30, 2009 - 12:25 pm

    Yeah, the bottom of the ring grazed the top of the brick “house,” but it still makes for an impressive experiment. I wouldn’t turn one down as a Christmas present. ;-)

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