This simple design of blowgun can be made in just a few minutes and for only a couple dollars.
It uses soft reusable ear plugs as ammunition and can be decorated in dozens of different ways.
I'm betting a lot of you have seen made or used the toy guns that use marshmallows as ammunition.
Those are pretty fun, but marshmallows have some severe downsides.
If you play around with marshmallows for a while
There's a good chance
you'll end up with some of it stuck to the floor and your shoe. In addition to being really sticky marshmallows can also attract ants
and other pests.
So we wanted to come up with a way that we could use something similar to a marshmallow that doesn't have those
downsides. These small orange ear plugs are pretty similar to marshmallows in a few different ways: they're small, they're very squishy
and they're soft enough that even if they hit you at a high speed. It's not really gonna hurt. I
wanted to find a good way to make a blowgun that uses these ear plugs as a projectile.
Normally marshmallow guns are built out of 1/2 inch PVC,
but the diameter of these ear plugs is small enough that in 1/2 inch PVC too much air travels around them
And you don't get much velocity. After walking around the hardware store for a while,
I found this stuff called PEX tubing which is usually something that runs through your walls
carrying water from one part of your house to another. This PEX tubing is lightweight very low cost and best of all is a
perfect fit for these foam ear plugs. A 5-foot length of this tubing costs less than
$2 and best of all it comes in multiple colors.
If you are in a dire situation in an earplug based war and you need a weapon
ASAP it can be as simple as cutting one of these pieces of tubing to the length you want,
loading in an air plug and joining the game.
The piping easily cuts with a knife or hacksaw.
As is this works as a blowgun. Carry around a handful of your earplugs, and you can start shooting
But it's not very exciting in fact.
It's just about the most boring looking weapon I have ever seen. So what I think we need to do is find a way to
decorate this and just overall make it a little more snazzy
Decorations are made easily with tape or if you like the original coloring of the piping you can leave it like that. It might be
a good way to split things up into teams of red or blue
I want to try making one of these blowguns a little bit more tactical.
So I'm gonna try adding some hand grips a little bandolier that holds multiple shots and maybe a sight down at one end.
Those hand grips look good now. Let's see if we can add something in the middle that will work to store ammunition.
Bullseye
If you're a fan of the old classical marshmallow gun shooter style these, 1/2 inch copper adapter pieces fit
beautifully over our PEX piping. We can lay out whatever style we want attach all of the pieces using just a little bit of glue,
and then we'll have a little bit more of a gun style ear plug shooter.
These earplugs don't make it around of tight corners very well because it fits so closely into the PEX.
But we can load an ear plug into the back, put our thumb over the hole and then fire.
Our blow guns are working great and for the most part this ammunition would even be safe to shoot at other people well.
Let's build a fun little target out of it anyway.
We've got ear plugs as ammunition, so it kind of seemed right that what we shoot at is an ear.
It is too sensitive.
Got seven out of nine with the ammunition I have in the gun. Not bad!
Hey, what's up guys is grant here with a brand new Galaxy
S9 + smartphone that I'm giving away to one of you for subscriber appreciation.
I've got a link down in the description so you can get your name on the list and qualify to win.