Brutal Water Cannon Defeats Summer Heat; Kills It On Documentation

There’s a war on, and while this over-the-top water blaster is certainly an escalation in the Water Wars arms race, that’s not the war we’re referring to. We’re talking about the Documentation War. Hackers, you’re on notice.

Gj3YAOLIf you want to see how a project should be documented, look no further than [Tim]’s forum posts over at WaterWar.net. From the insanely detailed BOM with catalog numbers and links to supplier websites, to scads of build photos with part number callouts, to the finely detailed build instructions, [Tim] has raised the stakes for anyone that documents any kind of build.

And that’s not even touching on the merits of the blaster itself, which has air and water tanks plumbed with every conceivable valve and fitting. There’s even an inline stream straightener made of bundled soda straws to keep the flow as laminar as possible. It looks like [Tim] and his colleagues are obsessed with launching streams of water as far as possible, and although bad weather has prevented an official measurement so far, from the video below it sure looks like he’s covering a huge distance with a stream that stays mostly intact to deliver the full blast to its intended target without losing a drop.

For as much fun as amped-up water guns appear to be, we haven’t seen too many grace these pages before. Going way back we covered a DIY super-soaker. For something much less involved than [Tim’s] masterpiece, you can pull together this pressurized water pistol in an afternoon.

21 thoughts on “Brutal Water Cannon Defeats Summer Heat; Kills It On Documentation

  1. If only some of us could build our own crap, full time and didn’t you know, have a life with bills to pay and a full time job.
    I have racked up hundreds of not thousands of cool hacks and builds over my lifetime, I even have tons of photos. But I don’t have the time or energy to sit down and document any of them! One, I like my own stuff just fine. I’ve never been huge on needing validation from other people. I guess that’s sort of a generational thing? It would seem that way seeing how some of my younger co-workers from the millennial era behave…. I guess I don’t care if someone else thinks what I’m doing is great and since I am enjoying what I do or build, I could care less if someone else builds it, let alone showing them how. And if they think what even I’ve done sucks, I don’t really care either.
    But great super soaker. I’m sure this guy is a hit with all the 10 year olds and college frat kids.

    1. You could have saved yourself a bit of writing by writing “Waahhhhhhh what about me? Guys? Guys? Guuuyyyyyysss?”. Your problems are entirely self made, only you have put yourself in the position of not having enough time to do things like this and I feel no sympathy towards you. Get your own life in order.

    2. Or maybe he just gets as much satisfaction from documenting his build as he does building it.

      No need for the psychoanalysis. Not everything is a generational fault.

    3. Yes, all millennials are the same, fantastic generalization work.

      Perhaps he thought “You know what! My hack is cool and beneficial to people beyond myself, and I’d like to share that know-how and instruct people on how to do it” That’s how communities grow, people learn, and our tech improves. To me, documenting isn’t about validation, it’s about showing people what can be done with some basic skills, tools, and parts. The whole point of a scientific experiment is that it’s repeatable, and documenting what you did and how you did it allows the scientific method to work. You seem to say “I don’t care” a whole lot, and that’s not a good thing. You would really tell someone interested in replicating your work/project that they should get lost?

      That last line is kind of a rude, backhanded compliment, isn’t it. Just because you find something ‘trivial’ or ‘beneath you’, doesn’t mean that his work has been relegated to children and frat kids. You claim in the previous paragraph that you don’t need validation, but apparently get your kicks judging others?

    4. Documentation isn’t about self-validation. It’s about helping others do cool stuff and building a common public knowledge base, and often results in great feedback that helps you inprove. Give it a try!

    5. “I guess I don’t care if someone else thinks what I’m doing is great and since I am enjoying what I do or build, I could care less if someone else builds it, let alone showing them how.” But I sure do want everybody to know just how superior I am to them. Wasting time writing up their projects when they could be trolling on the hackaday comments, what losers!

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