In lab yesterday one of my students asked if the vacuum bazooka that I
was demonstrating could shoot through a Gatorade bottle. I figured there
was really only one way to find out, so we tried it. What we found was
that the ping pong ball does not penetrate the plastic of the bottle.
However, while doing this I noticed that the label from the bottle
looked a lot like the foil that I use to seal the ends of the tube (I
usually use the gold foil that flowers come wrapped in, much less likely
to give way than heavy duty aluminum kitchen foil or sticky tape) so we
used the label from his bottle for the next firing. It worked
wonderfully well, I left the pump running for 5 minutes, with no sign
that the label was going to tear, nor, as far as I could tell, did it
leak, and the ball passed through the far end of the tube with no
problem. The same material is used to label many types of plastic
bottles, guess we don't need Reynold's wrap any more ;-)
cheers
David