*laughs* Look at that! It's soaked the wall.
That wall was like 25 feet away from me.
Hey guys, welcome back. Thanks for joining us today on the King of Random.
Recently, we got to show you our flamethrower which
shoots flame up to 50 feet.
That would pretty amazing, but its a fairly expensive project
We're gonna do today is to show you how to make a smaller version of the flamethrower
that can be built for a lot cheaper, and just to give it an ironic twist
we're going to be building it out of a fire extinguisher
This is actually a pretty simple build here's the materials we'll be using to make it.
A fire extinguisher, a Schrader valve, a hose clamp, a 1/4 inch brass hose adapter, a wind-resistant barbecue lighter
and two types of fuel we'll be trying out: some lamp oil and some lighter fluid.
With all of our parts gathered we're ready to start building our flamethrower
and the first step is to empty out the fire extinguisher
of what's currently in it. This thing just pops right off.
These chemical fire extinguishers are usually of a yellowish powder and I don't want to spray it inside
because it'll fill the room and get on everything so
I'm going to take it outside and I'm gonna try and spray it into a plastic bag, to contain the mess
Seems to be working alright.
Alright! That is empty. You can see our pressure meter is now showing that this is empty, nothing left in it.
See what comes out into this plastic bag. I don't really want to breathe this anything, there you go that's yellow powder
Now I know that this cap is something that screws on. I'm just not sure how hard it is to get it off.
There we go! Not that hard apparently. A little bit of brute force, and this will just twist right off.
There you go. We have the nozzle that controls the flow,
we've got threads that attach it to the bottle and we have this pipe that will feed whatever is in the bottom of the tank
up through into the nozzle before we proceed let's empty this out and wash it a little bit.
so we have a clean tank to work with.
Oh wow! There was a lot of powder still in that.
Hmm...yellow dust...
With the tank cleaned out, it's time to attach the tire valve. First, I'm going to screw this back on
about as tightly as I can to figure out which direction it's going to point when I'm using it
Alright, that's on there pretty tight.
But, I want to add my tire valve on the opposite side of where it's pointing now let's take this back off
So it doesn't get in the way while we're drilling a hole into our tank
Since this is a round metal container, it's gonna be pretty hard to drill right into the side so I'm going
to use a nail to give an indentation that will help guide the drill bit.
Alright, hopefully that little dent will make it easier for my drill bit to stay in place.
We need a drill bit that is slightly smaller than the widest portion of the rubber on the valve. I'm using a 1/2 inch
drill bit.
Now, we need to get the tire valve out through the hole we just drilled.
Since I can't reach my hand inside the bottle, I'm going to pass a string
inside the hole and out the neck of the bottle, tie that to the top of the tire valve and try and pull it through.
Ahh...there we go...
Valve is now attached through the hole in place and
hopefully that'll give us a nice tight seal that will hold against any pressure we put in. At this point, I want to test really
quick if the whole setup is going to work.
So I'm going to fill it about halfway with water,
install the valve back on, fill it up with some pressure and try spraying it to see if it's working.
Alright, that's installed.
Alright...that's just about 80 psi right there, let's try that out. Alright here goes.
There you go, that is a nice spray.
and with less pressure, it's a less nice spray
That seems to be working, so let's add on the other parts to turn this into a flamethrower.
As you saw the water is spraying out in kind of a cone shape which i think is the intention with these extinguishers.
They're suppose to put out fire over a larger area so it's better if the powder sprays out in a sort of a cone
However what we want is more like a squirt gun for the water or the fuel
to spray out in a stream that will then light on fire, instead of just going everywhere.
That's the point of our little brass connection here. We're going to thread this into the nozzle
to try and narrow down the stream of water so it doesn't spray out as much. Now I've seen these fire extinguishers
where this nozzle is plastic and in that case we would probably be able to just drive our little brass fitting down into it using
a pair of pliers. However, this one's made of metal so first we're going to have to tap it to add some threads.
Put a little bit of thread tape on our brass fitting.
With the brass fitting attached, let's do one more test with water to see how the spray has changed.
Alright, let's see if our flow is any better now.
That's way better!
Got a lot more distance, it's a much tighter stream. That's what we're looking for right there
With the bike valve installed and the brass fitting on the nozzle, we have an excellent sprayer. Let's add a source
of heat so that when we fill it with fuel and spray it it'll turn into a flamethrower.
I'm going to try to attach our wind-resistant barbecue lighter to the side of the tank so that the flame is in the path of the fuel.
We'll use our hose clamp around the tank and the lighter and try and secure it in place.
To make it easier to get the hose clamp in place without also trying to hold the lighter, I'm gonna use the little electrical tape
to hold it in place just for a second while I clamp it down
At this point, our spray should go right through our flame. So if we use some flammable liquid, hopefully we'll get a flamethrower.
We're going to try two different types of flammable liquid in our flamethrower, the first is lamp oil and the second is lighter fluid.
The lamp oil isn't quite as flammable as the lighter fluid, but it's a popular liquid for using and breathing fire.
Since I think we're gonna have a similar spray from our flamethrower, I want to try it out. I don't want to try anything more
flammable than these. I could put gasoline in here and it would almost certainly light on fire since we're using compressed air to power our
flamethrower here. I don't want to risk an explosion by mixing it with gasoline. Let's test out our miniature flamethrower.
Some of you might recognize, this is the same spot where we test it out our larger flamethrower.
I thought it'd be a good idea to test out our mini one in the same spot because it's really fireproof.
First we'll try it with the lamp oil, which as I said is the same stuff used for breathing fire most of the time.
Perfect! Now, we add pressure.
Alright, just over 80 psi.
So I'll light the lighter and then while the flame is going I'll press the trigger and see what happens.
Oh, a little...
Hmm...
Well I think this type of flame doesn't have enough heat and fire coming off of it consistently to light the oil.
So let's try one more try using lighter fluid and see if that's a little bit more flammable.
Hopefully the lighter fluid is a little bit more flammable and work with our lighter.
So I tried firing, I got a little bit of it to light and then it went out I think that even though this is
supposed to be a windproof lighter, just the gentle breeze out there is blowing it out watch this
the amount i'm blowing wouldn't even come close to putting out a birthday candle this is kind of sad here goes
Shooting right through the flame.
Well, that was mediocre.
Well as you saw using our lighter as a heat source didn't work very well. I think the pressure from the oil flying out of the fire
extinguisher was enough to just blow out the flame, I have another method that I want to try that I think will hold up to
the pressure of the oil a lot better than the lighter.
Instead of the lighter, we're going to try using a lamp wick. I picked up a few of them at Hobby Lobby for just a
couple bucks. To hold our wick, I have what's called a faucet supply tube. It's a small piece of chromed copper tubing and since it's
made of copper it's very flexible. We're going to use that to attach
to the front of our tank, add a wick in front of it and light that on fire.
This tube is a little bit too long, so let's use a hacksaw to cut it short. I'm going to cut this one
so it's about seven inches long.
Now, I'm going to put the bottom two inches of this pipe in a vice and flatten them out.
Clearly, if I leave the pipe straight, the flame is going
to be in entirely the wrong place. But fortunately, since this is copper, it does bend very easily.
We want the pipe straight in front of the nozzle about an inch and a half in front of it and maybe an inch below it.
Now, we use our hose clamp again to secure that in place.
Alright, that feels pretty secure and just as a safety measure so I don't scratch myself on it, I'm going to bend the end of
the hose clamp over into a bit of a loop. Now that we have our tube attached
to the fire extinguisher, let's cut off about three inches of one of our wicks. take one end of your wick and roll it up.
You want to fit this rolled end into the copper pipe.
Try to fit one and a half to two inches of the wick down inside the pipe,
leaving at least an inch of it exposed.
Now we're ready to test our flamethrower, we'll soak the wick in either our oil or our lighter fluid and that will be the source
of ignition for the flamethrower. We now have our new wick attached to our fire extinguisher flamethrower, so let's test it out again.
We had better results in our first test with the lighter fluid than with the lamp oil so I think we're gonna skip using the
lamp oil and just go straight to the lighter fluid in this one. However before I do that, there is another thing I want to
test and that's using coffee creamer. This is a corn syrup base powder that's actually pretty
flammable when it's separated out. I'm gonna see what happens if i put it into the fire
extinguisher and see if the pressure is enough to drive the powder through the nozzle. Coffee creamer torch in 3, 2, 1
That's actually working pretty good!
Alright it's already out of pressure but,
that work...that worked all right...
When it was blowing full pressure, it did sort of seem to
have so much pressure that the coffee creamer was flying past the flame so fast, it couldn't heat up
But, as the pressure dropped and even if I just
sort of halfway pressed the trigger to lower the pressure, it was lighting up pretty good and i think this might be a good
relatively safe way to do this since it really doesn't have a light flammable liquid getting everywhere it's probably a little safer than lighter fluid.
Alright, we had sort of mixed results using the coffee creamer. Now let's move on to the lighter fluid and see if that works any better.
Alright...
3, 2, 1
Haha!
That worked for a second.
Then it worked for another second. That part in the middle, I'm not really sure what was going on there but
the beginning and end worked pretty good. I think what caused the gap in the middle is that there was too nice of
a stream. When it was first starting there was enough high pressure
that it sort of aerosolized a little bit and that caught on fire and then as the pressure got lower
it had just a nice little stream and that wasn't broken up enough
for it to really light on fire and then as the liquid got low it started getting air and liquid
into the tube again and once again it was air sliced and was able to light.
Alright. Let's try this with lighter fluid again.
See if we can get some good distance on it.
3, 2, 1.
*laughs* Look at that! It's soaking the wall.
That wall was like 25 feet away from me.
Well, that was beautiful!
There we go. All the pressure, almost all the liquid gone.
That was...the wall is still on fire.
It's still got lighter fluid soaking on it. That's pretty great!
That is how you want it to work. That was a great little just...
...spurt of fire that went 25 - 30 feet away stuck to the wall burning the whole time. That was beautiful.
It's on fire! Put it out!
*camera shaking*
I caught the ceiling on fire. That made a really cool noise too.
There you have it. That is how you can make your very own
flamethrower out of a fire extinguisher,
which seems a little ironic but it works really well. If you use the right fuel
this thing can shoot pretty good and it lights on fire beautifully.
We tried using coffee creamer and got mixed results and I think the biggest problem is that we switched between
using oil and lighter fluid and then the powdered coffee creamer and I think it kind of got gummed up.
So if you're gonna use coffee creamer,
just use coffee creamer. Don't switch between the two unless you have a very good way to clean and dry it completely.
Lighter fluid worked great as a fuel. This whole bottle cost about four bucks at Walmart and when you only fill a fire extinguisher
halfway, which I found works very well, you can get four or five different
firings out of this thing. It's all pressure just by using a bike pump and I got best results when i pumped it as high
as 95 psi. I got a really good distance and I got a really good spray of the droplets that still traveled quite away.
This thing fired almost as far as the full-sized flamethrower.
Once again if you're going to build yourself a flamethrower,
don't be stupid about it. Make sure you're wearing protective clothing.
Don't point it at anything that's alive. Don't point it at anything that's gonna light on fire unless it's in a carefully controlled location.
Always make sure you have the proper equipment to put out any fires that you start while you're using it. Even if those fires are
exactly where you want them to be, you want to be sure you can put them out in a moment's notice if you need to.
It has been a really fun project that's easy to do and doesn't take much time at all.
This doesn't have quite the same flame output as the full-sized flamethrower but it's a lot easier and much cheaper to build.
If you've got any great ideas, if something that really needs to be shot out with a flamethrower, let us know down in the comments.
Thanks for joining us for this project today and we'll see you in the next one. Talk to you then.
I didn't say it's used for breathing fire
Hey guys! I hope you're enjoying these new videos with Nate as much as I am. He's got some
phenomenal talent when it comes to building and crafting and he really loves what he does.
Give him some validation if you agree and i'll see you in the next video.