Bored? Build your own Gatling Gun – that fires potatoes

Last Christmas, Tony Derose and his family decided on a project for their yearly tradition of building something cool. What did they decide to build? Yep, a Gatling Gun that fires potatoes.

The Gatling Gun cost about $200 to make. It has 6 barrels made of PVC pipe, uses hairspray as a propellent, spark plugs for combustion, an electric drill to spin the carousel and fires the spuds up to 200 feet.

There’s an excellent walk-through of the gatling gun build on their site here:

“We needed a way to spin up the barrels and fire the gun without being right next to it (in case it exploded), so we came up with the idea of having a small control box so we could control everything while standing back from the gun. Since we are using a plug-in drill to rotate the barrels, we hooked up a lightbulb dimmer switch to the drill so we could adjust the speed of the barrels. There is also a safety switch and fire button on the box which when held down energizes the transformer, thus firing the cannon.”