Homemade Cannon Sent Bowling Balls Flying

Homemade Cannon Sent Bowling Balls Flying AG WORLD 30-3-23 DeLari George used to have a blast when he went bowling. His ball would literally fly through the air for half a mile and bounce another quarter of a mile, thanks to his homemade cannon. "The first time we fired it off, we spent two hours looking for the bowling ball, but we couldn't find it," recalls George. "I thought it would go a couple hundred yards, but it went half a mile." Over time, George and his friends lost more than 60 bowling balls. He built his cannon from a 14 1/5-ft. long piece of oil well stem pipe. The 8 5/8-in. dia. pipe had 1/2-in. thick walls. A heavy-duty well cap was welded to one end. A bolt about 2 feet from the end acted as a stop for the bowling ball. The ball fit tight enough to contain a powerful mix of oxygen and acetylene behind it. A stem for the gas input and a spark plug for ignition were installed at the capped end of the pipe. A magneto wired to the spark plug would let them set it off from a distance. "We would set the gas mixture for a cutting torch, get the mix as hot as we could get it, shut it off and hook it on to the stem in the pipe," recalls George. "When we set it off, it would shoot flame for about 40 ft., and the holes in the ball would make it whistle through the air. Sometimes we put in some dirt before loading the pipe, and it made it look like smoke was coming out." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, DeLari George, RR 2, Box 322, Turpin, Okla. 73950 (ph 580 778-3999).

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