By Dan Beard
Look in hobby stores or plumbing supply stores for a tube, three or four feet long [please Email me with other suggestions for good tube material for blow-guns]. While glass can also be made the best of blow-guns, they are objectionable on account of being liable to break at any moment from some accidental blow or jar. With some flannel or wool cloth and an old piece of cane fishing-pole a cover and a case can be made to enclose a glass tube and prevent its being broken by anything short of a severe knock or fall.
Select a good straight piece of tube about three or four feet long. To discover whether the tube is straight or not, hold it horizontally level with the eye and look through it, and any deviation will be quickly seen. Wrap the tube with strips of flannel or wool cloth, as illustrated by Fig. 131, A.
The cloth will make a soft covering or cushion for the outside of the glass if you should decide to use it, and render it less liable to break. With a red-hot iron rod, or some similar instrument, enlarge the hollow in the center of a piece of cane until the blow-gun can be slid inside the cane. With putty, shoemakers' wax or beeswax secure the tips of the tube in place. Trim off the ends of the cane until they are flush with the ends of the glass. You will then have a blow-gun that can he used to hunt with (B, Fig. 131).
For missiles may be used arrows, tacks, peas, or clay. The arrows must be very small, and a pin with its head filed off make, a simple point; some raw cotton bound on the butt end to make it fit the inside of the gun finishes the missile (Fig. 131, D). The tack is prepared by fastening short pieces of worsted or carpet ravellings to it just below the head with shoemakers' or beeswax (C, Fig. 131).
This not only fills up the space inside the blow-gun, making it fit, but the yarn also acts as a feather does upon an arrow and causes the tack to fly straight and point foremost. The worsted-headed tack is a "tip-top" missile for target practice. The clay pellet will bring down small birds, stunning them, but doing them no serious injury, so that if the birds are quickly picked up they can be captured alive.
Along the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to Nashville, there are still some remnants of the Indians that in that in olden times paddled their canoes up and down the Father of Waters. The boys among these tribes make splendid blow-guns out of cane. When the inside is bored out they straighten the cane by heating it over hot coals, and then, after attaching a heavy weight to one end, suspending it by a string attached to the other end. The heat from the hot coals makes the cane pliable, and before it becomes cold and hard, the weights make it almost as straight and true as a rifle-barrel.
