Giant Pumpkin Cannon

John Gill and Gary Arold from Hurley, NY built a compressed air cannon that fires a pumpkin at 600mph for up to a mile.

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 first time we shot a bowling ball, it kept going and going and going!

- Gary Arold

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.

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. “It kept going and going and going.”

Times Herald Record