At the beginning of this semester I decided to build a miniature cannon for my advanced machine shop class, starting on a vacuum engine soon. Anyways, here is some pictures and info regarding the cannon.
I looked at some pictures online of various cannons, and used that to draw up the plans, some tweaking in SolidWorks and I was off to the races. Materials used were mild steel for the side plates and the axle, sand cast aluminum for the wheels, 6061 for the trail, brass for the trunnion caps and 4041 chromemoly for the barrel itself.
The pattern on the barrel, the slight band around the trunnions was actually a side effect of the tool path and I decided to keep it as I liked the look of it. I did not make the wheels, and had the barrel sent off to get bored (don't have a drill 10.25" long) and had a local shop to the black oxide treatment, however all the other work I did myself, including creating the wireframes in MasterCam and creating the tool paths.
The bore is .50 cal and I have test fired it with patched lead balls up to 100 grains of ff black powder, I'm positive it can take at least double the powder as the wall thickness at the chamber is .749"
Up until this point, everything I had built was either small stuff like center points, tap wrenches, die holders, tap guide block, and various parts for the Michigan Magellan Fiber System, a multi spectrum instrument for the Magellan telescope in las Campanas, Chile.
I looked at some pictures online of various cannons, and used that to draw up the plans, some tweaking in SolidWorks and I was off to the races. Materials used were mild steel for the side plates and the axle, sand cast aluminum for the wheels, 6061 for the trail, brass for the trunnion caps and 4041 chromemoly for the barrel itself.
The pattern on the barrel, the slight band around the trunnions was actually a side effect of the tool path and I decided to keep it as I liked the look of it. I did not make the wheels, and had the barrel sent off to get bored (don't have a drill 10.25" long) and had a local shop to the black oxide treatment, however all the other work I did myself, including creating the wireframes in MasterCam and creating the tool paths.
The bore is .50 cal and I have test fired it with patched lead balls up to 100 grains of ff black powder, I'm positive it can take at least double the powder as the wall thickness at the chamber is .749"
Up until this point, everything I had built was either small stuff like center points, tap wrenches, die holders, tap guide block, and various parts for the Michigan Magellan Fiber System, a multi spectrum instrument for the Magellan telescope in las Campanas, Chile.
