PVC Pipe, Physics and Flying Marshmallows

This weekend we not only gave the kids guns … we made them for them. While at Maker Faire, Matt and I succumbed to the pretty displays and bright lights and allowed Tabby to bring home a Marshmallow Shooter kit. I had no ethical qualms about this you understand – just financial qualms over paying $20 for a few bits of PVC. But it was a neat souvenir and since we got home she’d been begging to build them.


So when we knew we’d be at our friends’ house all evening on Saturday I grabbed a bag of mini marshmallows at the store and we brought the kit with us. This is a ridiculously easy kit to put together. You just snap together a few pieces of PVC and err … that’s it. You load a mini mallow into the mouthpiece of the shooter and puff some air in and it zooms off at an impressive speed. As they’re marshmallows, the projectile doesn’t really hurt anyone. The dads got into it big at the BBQ and kept shooting the kids who would then look down for the marshmallow and eat it.There also may or may not have been a shootout at our house between my sister, Matt and myself after the kids went to bed and everyone else had gone home on Sunday night. I’m not at liberty to say.

If you want to build your own marshmallow shooter, and I recommend you do because they’re all kinds of fun, here’s an instructable to show you how to do it. Though even that isn’t really necessary. You take 1/2″ PVC pipe and connect it with Ts and elbows and such until you have the configuration you want. You have to have only two open pipe ends one for blowing air into and one for the marshmallow to exit and you can do just about whatever configuration you want and see what works best. Don’t glue the PVC – not only is it unnecessary but PVC glue is pretty toxic and definitely something you want to avoid if you can!

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