Pumpkin cannon could be ultimate big-boy toy, Farmer, buddy must be out of their gourds

[DainBramaged]

John Gill tucks a gray pumpkin under his arm and climbs to the top of a rusty ladder. He opens a hatch on the side of a steel pipe, drops the pumpkin inside and sprays it with magenta paint.

"So we can find it later," he says.

The hum of an air compressor stops and, for a moment, the Ulster County hillside is silent.

"You guys ready?"

Gill pulls on a pair of yellow leather gloves, grabs a lever above his head and yanks it.

VAZEWWWWWW!

The pumpkin zips out of the pipe. It's a poppy seed in the sky before a second passes. Then it's gone.

"Ha-ha!" Gill is chuckling. "Isn't that awesome? That's why we built it!"

Forget your souped-up motorcycle. Never mind your heavy-construction equipment. Leave your muscle car at home.

This is a real big-boy toy: a pumpkin cannon with a 97-foot-long barrel that shoots gourds roughly 4,000 feet, at a speed of 600 miles per hour. Tilted at a 45-degree angle, the cannon shoots about 3,500 feet high. Gill, a corn and vegetable farmer, and his construction buddy Gary Arold, built the pumpkin cannon in 2006 after they saw a friend's smaller model.

The machine is simple. An air compressor fills two 1,000-gallon tanks to a pressure of 50-100 pounds per square inch. When Gill pulls open a butterfly valve, kapow! Pumpkin missiles.

"Every time we shoot it, it's just as great as the first time," Gill says.

The cannon is mostly used on weekends to attract people to Gill's Farm Market on Route 209 in Hurley, but sometimes the guys get together at the 1,500-acre farm and blast it when nobody's around. Just for fun.

They've shot pumpkins, scuba tanks and a basketball filled with corn and foam insulation. They once scattered some geese by accidentally shooting into the flock. Then there's the time they shot a bowling ball more than a mile.

"The first time we shot a bowling ball, that's was probably the worst thing we ever did," Arold says

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091007/NEWS/910070331

[bbinacan]

1. That is so cool. n/t

[pscot]

2. If they made it longer

could they put one in orbit?

[paulsby]

3. it's not the length

it's the girth that matters :)

[surrealAmerican]

4. Seems like you would want to have a transmitter in ...

... something you shoot that far. Then you could find it easily.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. I'd enjoy having one of those!

When my boys were in cib scouts, we built a basketball catapult out of 2x4s, a bike inner tube and a toilet seat!

We toyed with this kind of thing, but never built one. http://potatocannon.nodice.org/index.html

My neighbor had one of these! http://www.slingking.com/

The bikini girls were an non-available option.

[Old Hob]

6. you'll put your eye out with that thing!