How to Create a Blowgun

A blowgun is a simple yet effective weapon used by several different indigenous peoples around the world. Creating a homemade blow gun is relatively simple since the main difficulty of creating a blowgun is crafting a narrow tube of uniform length--this type of tubing can be easily purchased at a hardware store and cut to the desired size. The necessary part of creating a homemade blowgun is fashioning darts that will work with the blowgun; darts can be fashioned from almost any hard material that will fit inside your blowgun.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• 6 feet of 1/2-inch electrical conduit
• Hacksaw
• Metal file
• Nails
• Duct tape
• Scissors

Creating the Blowgun

1. Go to a hardware store, and purchase 6 feet of 1/2-inch electrical conduit. Brass or copper tubing that is around 1/2 to 3/4 inch in diameter will also work.

2. Use a hacksaw to cut the conduit to the desired length. You can keep the blowgun 6 feet long if you have strong lungs and don't mind if it is a little bit unwieldy. Otherwise, saw it down to 3 and a half to 5 feet.

3. Use a metal file to smooth off the ends if you cut the pipe down.

4. Wrap duct tape around one end of the tube. The purpose of doing this is so that you don't have to put your mouth on the metal itself.

Creating Darts

5. Tear off a 4-inch strip of duct tape.

6. Fold the duct tape strip around itself and then stick it to itself, creating a funnel with a little hole at the bottom.

7. Put a nail point first through the funnel, and then tamp down the end of the funnel's cone around the end of the nail near its head to stick the funnel to the nail.

8. Fold excess duct tape back into the funnel so that the sticky inside of the funnel is mostly covered.

9. Use a scissors to cut the duct tape funnel off to a uniform length so that it looks like a cone extending from the back of the nail. The diameter of the cone should be slightly larger than the blowgun tube you are using. Once the dart is completed, you can load it point first into your blowgun tube and then give a quick and powerful puff with your diaphragm to launch the dart.

Tips & Warnings

• A longer blowgun tube will result in more power, but it takes more powerful lungs to blow a dart through a longer tube.
• The power of a blowgun dart will decrease substantially the further away from the target you are standing.
• Homemade blowguns are not toys and can cause serious bodily harm.
• Never breathe in while your mouth is around a loaded blowgun, as it may cause the dart or pellet to come back into your mouth.

References

• Information on Making a Homemade Blowgun
• More on Making Blowguns