Good Clean Fun, with Potatoes

Some time ago I saw a book on the Vision Forum (http://www.visionforum.com/) website called Backyard Ballistics.  Just the title sounds cool!  We managed to find it at our local library and were able to build one project from the book while we had it and that was the Potato Cannon.  The book is very good at walking you through the construction process as well as explaining what is happening and providing many, many safety tips.  The book called for PVC, but I could not find the correct reducers in PVC but HD did have all the parts in ABS, so we went with that.  The most expensive part was the replacement BBQ igniter, at around $10.  You can tell my priorities are a little out of whack when I won't buy one of these igniters for my BBQ, but I will splurge when it comes to anything with "Cannon" in the name.  Once it was all assembled and had an adequate amount of time to dry we decided to try it out.  It was raining the day we were ready to fire it, but you can not wait around for it to stop raining here in Oregon, or we may never get to fire it.  Luckily our barn has a covered area on the end (Loafing shed) to fire it from.  The whole family came out for the event.  Here are a couple of videos.

And another:

We did find out that it is really hard to get it to fire when you have close to freezing temperatures.  I had to click the igniter a bunch of times and when it finally went off I was not expecting it.  Yikes!