https://www.etsy.com/shop/PiekittenProductions

I'm not sure if there's a better place to put this, since, well, I've started a pertinent store that sells something other than content.

I started building WAM devices for myself about a year ago and recently decided to turn what I've learned into a hobby business, starting by selling the best damn slime tanks money has ever been able to buy.

They are easy to fill / clean, they can be used either outdoors or indoors in a sufficiently wide shower / tub / inflatable pool under at least 9ft ceilings, they are the correct size to hold a 10-12L batch of slime / gunge, and they are electronically triggered by remote control with available upgrade for IoT functionality so that you can have them be triggered through the internet by friends and frenemies.

It's a good product that I'm genuinely proud of - something, well, that's specifically of the quality I wanted for myself. I honestly don't have a clue how much interest there will actually be - as far as I know there's nothing like it available for purchase to compare to, hence the need to build it myself. Frankly, this is all intended to be a side-gig / hobby business for me; what would make me happier than this venture succeeding is if I get a few people to ask, "What if?" and it leads to more vendors of supplies / equipment in WAM. If it does succeed though... well, my bigger interest is pie devices, so that's what I'd be looking to expand into next.

Love the idea.

Love the pie idea even more.

Alright im so looking forward to this it's Awsome

looking forward to the pie device can't wait too see it.

So, like, I've already built a couple pie devices (and have posted about them extensively over the past year on my personal Twitter and my Fetlife page - I imagine anyone who likes male WAM would very much enjoy pics/vids from those sessions I've posted to Twtter). Perhaps posting about them here might make it clearer how much hobby work I've already put into the task.

It's a fair bit harder to make the leap to pie devices up to a state where they are ready to sell.

The catapult is something that got built and re-built about 5 times and I would need to carefully built 1 or 2 more prototypes before I had something that made sense to put in a box and ship. Probably talking mid-4 figures of material costs developing it and a mid-4 figures price tag if I could even get there. There's also the problem that presumably there are consumer safety / liability concerns that I don't even know where to start with for an item that is intended to hurl 1kg objects at someone's head.

A pie cannon has similar issues with respect to cost to develop, but also if I want to sell it internationally gets me neck deep in needing to figure out "Is a pneumatic tube cannon technically a firearm in X country?" It's basically a very low-pressure purpose-built potato gun which are explicitly legal in the US under ATF guidance, and are similarly to my knowledge a non-issue in Canada, but the rules in the UK, for example, actually set an extremely low bar for how little muzzle velocity makes something into a "rifle" and I'm not even sure I could lower the pressure enough to be sure that it falls below threshold there.

All of it would take capital investment to make a niche product. The slime tanks were a smaller leap of faith to go for first, especially given my personal design was already pretty close to where it needed to be to build it out into a market-ready version. I kind of have to figure that I shouldn't be pouring the cash and labor into commercializing pie devices until I know there's actually a market for stuff that can't be done nor sold for cheaper than mid-4 figures, so, basically, I'll need to see some success with the slime tanks first.

My outsider's understanding of UK firearm regulation was that the threshold is 12 ft-lbs / 16J of muzzle energy.

I'm fairly certain I can get clearly below based on counting frames on 240fps footage and doing the math at the pressure I actually use (less than 20PSI) and I could thread-seal in a limiter valve to make it impossible to exceed that without destructively modifying the device.

I'm not sure though whether that's actually good enough nor does it seem wise to be casually testing a country's definition of a "firearm". Pretty sure at best this would be something I'd need to pay for an actual legal opinion before trying, which is as good as saying it can't be done at this scale.

I absolutely love this!

Maybe if you had a pie-dropping device it would cover you in terms of liability?

I have actually been working on a cream dropping device that could be swapped in to mount on my slime tank frames (because the idea pushes my buttons hard), but my approach thus far was to use pneumatic tubes pushing into a 90-degree elbow to avoid having to worry about anything dripping via gravity. That approach, of course, has the same basic legal headaches if I wanted to export it.

I probably would need a completely different design that either gravity drops cream via trapdoor or which literally spins a pie 180 degrees from right-side up to down before dropping it. Realistically, the trapdoor route would be dramatically simpler and easier.

I remember the game show game for a laugh (sadly for me, always had male recipients) had a pie machine which basically had three pies on arms one front, one each side, when the lever was pulled, they all moved together to give a great mess. Something like this would also save you having to build an improvised explosive device
Also, check out Wam with benefits, who had a fantastic pie pod device, maybe he could give some tips?
Sorry, can't remember his umd name

Okay, further to the above, it's archnemesis who runs the awesome wam with benefits

If I had the confidence to make a safe frame for under £100 in the UK, I would definitely buy this.

100 GBP seems low for a frame that's 7.5ft / 2.3m tall and can safely support a tank assembly that weighs ~50lbs / 23kg while full over a person's head. In the listing on the storefront, I've suggested a practical test for the strength you need for appropriate margin of safety is "Would an average adult male feel safe doing pull-ups on your frame?"

Potentially there's a way to do a very basic fixed frame with lumber? I wouldn't be a good person to ask about using wood.

For my frames, I'm using Sch80 PVC pipe (usually a different shade of grey than conduit pipe, thicker walls and more rigid than conventional white Sch40 PVC pipe). You could presumably do it with Sch40 PVC pipe, but you'd need wider pipes for the same structural strength and the price of fittings scales with pipe diameter. Especially given that PVC pipe has seemingly increased 50-75% in price YoY, it's several hundred USD to make a purely fixed PVC frame.

The advantage with PVC pipe is that it's structurally strong relative to its price compared to metals and extremely easy to work with (cuts with a $15 hand tool, fittings and pipe "solvent weld" quickly and easily with PVC cement). You do have to be careful if using it in taller structures to use something that's actually thick enough, because "rigid" pressure-rated PVC pipe is a lot more flexible than metal tubes.

A lot of the cost of my frames though comes from needing a lot of fittings and additional labor to make something that can disassemble down to smaller pieces - convenient for storage, but also necessary as a practical matter to be able to ship it in a box. If you're making a permanently-assembled fixed frame or even something that doesn't break into many pieces, you could make them cheaper than anything I can make and ship to you.

(Also, for now I'm not even going to try to ship the full frames outside of US / Canada given the full frames are expensive enough to create customs paperwork headaches and what I'd need to charge to ship them across the pond is astronomical).

Was looking at something like this, do you reckon it'd be a death trap? I mean, I know it's not something you could ever guarantee, but I'm wondering whether it's something to pursue further or to rule out straight away?

Multi Purpose Platform and Scaffold Combination Step Ladder, Work Platform https://amzn.eu/d/a99D57J

Looking at that step ladder / scaffold, a couple issues come to mind: (1) you'd have to kludge together 2 of them to actually have something tall enough and (2) the cross bars do not look like they are intended to bear weight.

There is probably a way to make a frame IKEA-hack style from some type of commercially-available scaffolding product, but you've got to be very sure that the "heavy object suspended above a head" is definitely well-supported by a structure that definitely won't shift if it gets bumped.

As per the description, tank is intended to passively sit in a square hole of approximately 10-11in per side. This is going to be a somewhat unusual width for an off-the-shelf product.

Thank you for the honest opinions, I appreciate your experience with this. Might be trying to bite off more than I can chew, seems like.
Thanks again.

HOW DO I BUY THESE IS THE REAL QUESTION??


THIS IS AMAZING!!! HOLY SHIT!

Store link:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/PiekittenProductions


This is basically what I'm doing by selling the tank + electronics module available without the frame to suspend it. That's "the hard part" that required figuring out the best ways to do a bunch of things including figuring out all the niche parts that actually made sense for a remote-control tank.

There's not really a good way to offer a smaller minimum viable product. Ya, I could sell "the plans and part list", but this just wouldn't save people as much money as they might expect because the parts aren't cheap and aren't massively marked up, aren't from a single source and some of them involve having to buy the specific correct thing from Chinese suppliers, tend to be cheaper in orders of some bulk, etc. If I tried to sell a less than the full tank + electronics module, I expect I'd need to spend a lot of time after the fact walking people through things anyway.

I should perhaps say that the tank itself is fairly specific and I had to look around quite a bit to find something that actually makes sense, and as an industrial product is something that benefits price-wise from ordering more than any one person needs as a time, so it's a good example generally of a component it makes sense for me to include.

A big part of the appeal of the product as-is is that it "just works". It's a complete unit (excluding the Li-ion battery, which Etsy ToS doesn't allow me to include and which is a ~$30 purchase on Amazon). You plug the battery pack, turn it on, and everything is wired correctly, the parts chosen work well together because I already went through all the mistakes getting it to this point, etc.

These look amazing, great work! I've looked at PVC pipe for the frame previously (am in UK) but struggled with the tank. Are those called conical or cone tanks? In the UK I can't find them smaller than 100 litres (which would be tonnes of fun )

The practical issue here on the tank was finding something that was small enough to use with ordinary-sized batches of slime / gunge that nonetheless had a wide enough outlet with standard pipe threading to mate with an electric valve. For that, it's more about finding industrial tanks for very specific use cases where unusually fast drainage would be needed rather than any particular kind of tank.

One thing I found out the hard way was that for thicker slime / gunge, you need wider pipes than are cheap and easy to find parts for and you have to drain pretty much straight down because it won't gravity flow very easily. If it flowed anything like water instead of like molasses, you'd have a lot of much cheaper parts to choose from. Moreover, you can't just take any random tank and install your own bulkhead fitting because that tank won't drain completely and cleanup is a nightmare.

I basically could count the number of tanks commercially available in the US that let me build this product to be capable of fitting indoors on one hand. I kind of have my eye on tanks with even bigger outlets without being all that much larger volume-wise that could just dump a whole 12L batch of xtra thick slime / gunge in <5 seconds, but those can't quite fit indoors, triple the cost of the tank, and almost double the cost of the valve.

Noting that US / Canada use a different standard for pipe threading than Europe, you're going to need an entirely different tank than I use or you're going to also need a valve with North American standard NPT threading. It would be hard to recreate my specific solution in the UK without having the import the parts from the US at great expense anyway, so you'd need to find a tank from the European market with the correct threading, or it would be cheapest to buy my solution as a unit.

Interesting, thanks. We have a lot of small flat tanks that get used in leisure vehicles. I've thought about getting a 40-50litre one and sticking in more plastic to baffle it internally. But an annoying amount of work as those you've found look perfect.

The closest thing at scale is conical fermenters, but they are prohibitively tall.

What about using straps instead of a frame?
A similar set-up to the 'over the door' sex swings, where a pair of straps support the tank under tension and it leans back against the door.
Or even a single strap if the tank had to short legs to stabalise it and push it a bit further from the door.

It probably wouldn't be rated for the ''chin-up test'' but then again most over the door swings aren't rated for full suspension either. They can certainly take a reasonable load- much more than a few buckets of gunge.

Standard door frame isn't tall enough - this needs to be suspended at approx 7.5 ft high unless it's only going to get used on short people. You'd also be stuck with a slime tank that dumps slime onto the floor in a doorway.


Perhaps with a purpose-built design and an unusually tall door....but to be blunt about it, this is something where safety has to be 100% unquestionable. If tank this were to fall on someone, they are going to get hit in the skull with a stainless steel valve that has 40-50lbs of weight on top of it. This is not a situation where corners should ever be cut.

It seems prudent given where the discussion has gone and that the thread has made it to a second page to just repost the frames I'm actually selling as a point of reference for what degree of support you need for something like this.

It can be argued that my frames are a bit over-engineered for the task (especially for the single tank) but not wildly beyond all reason over-engineered.


Where they're "over-engineered", at some cost, is that most people won't need something that breaks down into pieces small enough to not spike the cost of shipping to the moon. When I'm making the frame, I can either spend your money making a better product that's more portable or I can spend your money paying to ship larger more permanently fixed pieces, but what I cannot do is make you something that's cheaper because it's more permanently fixed.

I'll note again the use of schedule 80 PVC instead of much more familiar schedule 40 PVC. For the same strength, you'd need wider diameter pipe. The price of larger fittings scales modestly exponentially rather than linearly, so here where I need a ton of fittings to make the thing portable, that would get expensive in a hurry.


What someone else could do though, if they're willing to make their own frame that's more permanently fixed, is just use wider Schedule 40 pipes. I don't know what to recommend off the top of my head because I intentionally avoided doing this with Sch40, but based on https://formufit.com/pages/formufit-pipe-deflection-guide you'd probably want to use 2", and if 4 poles isn't enough, it's probably cheaper and easier to add 1-3 poles over going up in width.

If one has a tight footprint because, say, one needs a frame that fits dimensions of a bathtub, one may need to use Sch80 but with fewer fittings it's still not remotely as expensive as if I make and ship you a thing.

(...and for the love of all things holy don't accidentally buy cellcore DWV pipe for this task.)

I'd be surprised if someone can make one that isn't sketchy (i.e. can make anything safe enough) for less than $300 in materials (PVC pipe being 50-75% more expensive YoY doesn't help the math), before accounting for any wasted materials along the way. You can however definitely beat the price point I have to charge to make and ship something though, and by a lot.


You could also go the other direction on price and make a nicer frame than what I offer out of metal pipe / tubing. That may not save much if any money but it would be a nicer frame and it would look pretty sweet.

I'm somewhat confused here as to what you think I'm doing that's insufficient here.

My point is that someone could build their own frame if they wanted that would be effective while being cheaper than what I can make and ship as a full frame. I've just explained approximately what strength of materials one would need to do that if they were going to make their own fixed frame, citing literally a resource provided by a company that specializes in "furniture-grade" PVC pipe / fittings. I suspect minimum $300 is what the amount of 2in Sch40 PVC + enough SxS (solvent-weld) fittings would be to build a minimum viable frame that is sufficiently safety, by making something that is permanently fixed. Further I'm noting that I personally haven't built that cheaper version myself - only the pricier versions I sell - so I don't know precisely what materials are enough for a cheaper fixed version, and suggesting that if I've undershot that estimate I would expect the best way to modify the design would be to add more poles (which to me makes more sense than trying to do this with pipe sizes which are harder to work with and have much more expensive fittings).


I've repeatedly replied to this thread to shoot down a lot of ideas that have been floated to try to come up with something cheaper using something not purpose-built that can be acquired relatively cheaply.

My listings for the tank + electronics module alone are not ambiguous that the user needs to build a serious frame with a wide margin of safety. Specifically, it reads:

"THIS LISTING IS FOR THE TANK WITH ELECTRONICS BUT NO FRAME TO HOLD IT. YOU MUST BUILD YOUR OWN FRAME TO HOLD IT WITH AN (~10-11 INCH / 25-28 CM) SQUARE OPENING AT RECOMMENDED HEIGHT (7.5 FT / 2.3M). FULLY LOADED WITH WATER, THIS TANK ASSEMBLY WEIGHS (~50LB / 23 KG), AND YOUR FRAME MUST BE ABLE TO SAFELY SUPPORT THAT MUCH WEIGHT WITH A WIDE MARGIN OF SAFETY. IF AN AVERAGE ADULT MALE (~200LBs / 90KG) WOULD NOT FEEL SAFE DOING PULL-UPS ON YOUR FRAME, YOU PROBABLY SHOULD NOT BE USING THAT FRAME TO SUSPEND HEAVY OBJECTS OVER A PERSON'S HEAD."




I'm not sure how much clearer I can be that people should not half-ass a frame than an all-caps warning while stepping in to pour cold water on ideas that are less than safe.

A little late to this particular thread as have been away from the forum for a bit to catch up on a bunch of stuff on account of illness that unfortunately met I had to miss out on the recent munch.

So having built a number of previous gunge tanks on the cheap.
First cheap tank was built for around £200 about 10 years ago and had the ability to swap the tank top either for a large gunge tank or 4 medium tanks that fed into a funnel. Tank was rigorously tested for safety by an independent 3rd party. In todays money though that is around £230.

The recent portable gunge tank I built parts wise was around £150 for just basic thing (single stream only and no fancy shit). The vast majority of that being the frame as the tank itself is just a bucket with hole drilled in with cheap valve fitted. It also isn't as tall as the quoted 2.3m one mentioned here as when I built my first tank all those years ago I undertook extensive testing and calculations on a whole bunch of shit from height of the tank (the high a liquid is raised the more pressure it is under) to the height and design of the perfect gunge tank seat (distance gunge is in free fall determines velocity just prior to impact and therefore how much lands on victim and how much splatters up the wall instead, and seat design determines how easy it is to duck out the way) and came to the conclusion the optimal height for a gunge tank for maximum coverage didn't need to be as tall as quoted. That and the standard height of most rooms in the UK is about 2.4 meters which would make indoor use difficult.

The portable tank was designed and tested to be able to hold a load 3 times the weight it needs to hold for use. However it was meant mainly as a prototype to test a bunch of features for a much fancier tank design (not PVC based) for me to build at a later date with it being portable as a secondary feature to be useful post prototype life. It was sort of meant to be a slightly beefed up version of the Soak 'n' Wet thing being sold on the internet that could hold a full bucket rather than the small one on that rig.

Inevitably people are going to ask whether I would build something like it for public release. Unfortunately I must decline on that. I've had many people consult me on their design for a gunge tank that has been frankly terrifying. From people balancing a makeshift frame on the edge of a bath to hanging a full bucket from a shower rail which itself was designed only to hold a shower curtain. The truth is that whilst the tanks I've designed are safe to use when used properly I have absolutely no confidence that if I sold them out to the general public someone thinking with their dick/kink first rather than their brain won't do something stupid with it with regard to the portable tank design I could foresee some moron deciding a 10L bucket wasn't good enough so attempts to replace it with one of those large 60L plastic boxes you can easily get hold off from like IKEA that the frame absolutely will not hold.

Whilst obviously I wouldn't want to deal with the legal troubles if the police eventually find someone dead under a tank I built that they were misusing. Public liability insurance isn't my issue, I just don't want the death of an idiot on my consciousness. Unfortunately I think many see a gunge tank as a cool toy rather than the serious bit of equipment that improperly used, stored or taken care of could result in serious injury or death and as such I'd only be comfortable building a device for something like a producer where I could have some confidence that they observed appropriate health and safety during shoots to keep people safe.

Now if the OP here is comfortable selling bits of devices that is up to them, I personally wouldn't as I wouldn't like to wager on someone not trying to build something dodgy resting on a bathtub to support it.

But if people in Europe don't give a shit about price but still want to build a frame to put a gunge tank on top of then I suggest people try building it out of Quadro playframes. The stuff is pretty strong designed to support the weight of little ones playing on it and designed to be easily put together. It is however insanely overpriced if you know how to replicate it with raw materials but lets be honest if you already did know you'd have built a tank already and if you're willing to shell out thousands for a frame then a Quadro option is probably cheaper and you can probably put a little pool in to catch some slime to contain clean up. Just don't go freaking out the company with silly questions it's a toy company. If necessary I can put together a parts list if people would struggle with that rather than bother the company.

I mean if anyone wants to go down the route of bothering a company for a frame rather than bother Quadro there will be companies that work with aluminium extrusion (what I intend to use for my eventual fancy gunge tank design) that'll cut the pieces you need for your project for you for probably less than the Quadro option.

Anyway I'll shut up now as definitely blathered on too long

This is basically the difference in 4 words.

Yes, one can make a much cheaper tank with little more than a bucket and a mechanical hand pull, but comparing it directly would be a category error because I was very specifically trying to make something that can do fancier things that a simpler purely mechanical design cannot do.

I wanted something that could be remotely triggered through the internet, easily cleaned, and fit a footprint of a decently large tub or shower under a 9ft ceiling (these became the standard in new US construction ~25 years ago). Those requirements pushed me towards needing a tank of a certain size that had an unusually wide outlet with standard pipe threading for its size, since I needed to attach an electric valve to it. While you can take your own tank, drill a hole, and install a bulkhead fitting (which was my first instinct), this causes an issue that thicker slime/gunge will pool around that fitting instead of draining completely.



The height is necessary for my particular design because the tank is tapered to its outlet, the valve sticks down further, and, well, I'm tall so I designed something that would in fact work for myself *while standing up*...which appears to explain the design discrepancy for "optimal height":


I have not made the assumption someone under the tank would be sitting down, perhaps because I designed it to be able to work indoors in a moderately large shower or tub where sitting down can be awkward (at least the US version of a moderately large shower or tub).

You could definitely use a lower height if you add the condition that the person will be sitting underneath.

And assuming a mechanical hand pull can't be cheaply and easily converted for IoT operation would be an error of imagination.

I was just giving the details for a bare basic cheapest build with nothing fancy but if you want to go into the additional fancier stuff the portable tank prototype was also designed for I didn't include in the above bare basics quote.

The trigger mechanism I chose form my "little more than a bucket" was also specifically chosen to use a chain that I was able to hook up to a servo motor operated by an Arduino and a Wifi module that I've successfully tested it on which I could permanently fit to it but haven't for as I said it was mainly a prototype for another project and I use that Arduino for other projects but the thing could be easily retrofitted for IoT functionality for about £50 or even less if one goes for an alternative to the Arduino. And as for cleaning the bucket I can just take the bucket off the top and hose it down.

The other fancy bits for this "little more than a bucket" included different nozzle fitting for either a single stream of gunge or a shower spray nozzle. Pythagorean siphon tank for time delay with a gunge pumping hose slowly filling the bucket etc etc. Each with various differing costs.



I personally went with sitting for the following reasons:

1. Safety - The second the gunge splatters down the entire floor of the gunge tank is coated in a slippery substance, being in a standing position here increases chance of occupant slipping and falling if they attempt to move about.

2. Stability - The taller the tank is the wider and deeper you then have to make it to ensure the thing isn't likely to topple over - especially if there is a chance of a standing occupant slipping and falling against the side of it. This means further building materials.

3. Accuracy - I was anal enough to go find the perfect gunge tank stool for my first gunge tank design. As it so happens that perfect stool was also possibly IKEA's worst design for an ergonomic bar stool ever but the upshot was that I had a stool that I was able to put in the tank to ensure someone was sat directly under the outlet (and sat upright from the ergonomic design) to ensure less "misses" especially with squirmers.

4. Efficiency - I know I've touched on the Bernoulli Equation already mentioning liquids at higher pressures the higher they are raised but a common mistake people make about tanks is they think to increase the amount of mess they should focus on bigger capacity tanks whereas efficiency can actually make someone messier with less gunge. We are all familiar with the "dome" effect you get at the beginning of a single stream of gunge from a gunge tank and whilst some of that can look impressive the reality is that gunge is just bouncing straight off the top of the occupant's head and splattering the walls of the gunge tank instead without making the occupant particularly messy. A good example would be the Myleene Klass gunging where the first burst of gunge dumped what looked like a full 40 litres into making a spectacular dome effect for a number of seconds but when it briefly stopped you can see only a small patch of slime on the top of the head. It isn't until later when the gunge pressure drops a bit on the other squirts from the tank any reasonable coverage is achieved. But most of the actual gunge in that example was wasted not actually covering anyone.

Now sure some people like a little dome effect which is why I tried to find a right balance between like a short duration dome at the beginning with an as efficient as possible gunging for maximum coverage with minimal waste. Some tank designs I've seen have shoved in giant tanks but then had an inefficient design that wastes most of the gunge but based on the principle of people standing to use this design tank the shorter fall from tank to target for gunge to pick up velocity will offset the higher pressure from being higher up.

But as a general principle for others reading with plans of their own raising a gunge tank too high can result in a less efficient gunge coverage. Want to see the principle in action have someone seated whilst you pour gunge on them from high above them on a step ladder then repeat it but pouring from just a little bit above their head and compare the difference in coverage.

Now what you've built certainly is impressive, and whilst I personally might have made a number of different design choices myself such as going with aluminium extrusion for something of this price level the intent of my initial post here was to give local context of the costs of building a budget frame over this side of the Atlantic rather than estimates to support your earlier posts but having been condescending about the "little more than a bucket and a mechanical hand pull," that you didn't know I was able adapt for IoT cheaply I thought I should at least correct that record.

This was in specific reference to you naming a price for a basic tank with no frills. It wasn't intended to be condescending.

I'm not interested in picking a battle here - we clearly have two different visions for how precisely our designs would be used and each designed according to those visions.



However, I do think it is important to state that the price that someone could build something themself assuming they already know exactly how to build the thing, waste no materials getting anything wrong, and assuming their hobby labor hours will be uncompensated - that's a very different number than what it's going to cost me given inventory/overhead costs, a need to design for shipping compatibility, my labor having a nonzero cost, various seller's fees on the final transaction, etc.

Frankly, I was hoping to hit somewhat lower prices initially when I started but my spreadsheets ultimately said otherwise.