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Dad Builds 700 Pound Cannon for Son's Birthday
Hugh Pickens writes "The Charleston Daily Mail reports that machinist Mike Daugherty built his son a working cannon for his birthday — not a model — a real working cannon. 'It looks like something right out of the battle at Gettysburg,' says Daugherty. The 700 pound cast iron and steel howitzer, designed to use comparatively small explosive charges to propel projectiles at relatively high trajectories with a steep angle of descent, has a 4-inch gun barrel that is 36 inches long mounted on a wooden gun carriage with two 36- inch diameter wheels and took Daugherty about two weeks to build at a cost of about $6,000. 'I've always been interested in the Civil War and cannons, so I thought it would be a good gift,' says Daugherty's 11-year old son Logan. Daugherty said he is not worried about the federal government coming to get his son's cannon because he spoke to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and found it is legal to own such a cannon because it does not use a firing pin and is muzzle loaded so the government does not consider the weapon a threat. Two days after the family celebrated Logan's 11th birthday, father and son offered a field demonstration of the new cannon on top of a grassy hill overlooking Fairmont, West Virginia and on the third try, the blank inside the barrel went boom and a cannon was born. For a followup they popped a golf ball into the gun barrel, lit the fuse, and watched the golf ball split the sky and land about 600 yards away. 'Any rebels charging up this hill would be in trouble with a cannon like this at the top,' Logan says."
The article didn't say it cost $6000, but that it would be worth that. It would be hard to spend $6000 in materials for a Civil war era cannon that you build yourself.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
You get about one shot every 2 minutes if you have four guys that know what they are doing, and you burn more than $10 worth of powder for ever shot. And the things are heavy. They will not get far.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The West Virginians saw the Secession for what the sham it was; protecting the property (slave holding) rights of the rich tidewater plantation owners while forcing the poor (the working class and dirt farmers) to fight for them. The south had the draft before the North. After Bull Run, the militias were effectively drafted for the duration. Unless you were a rich plantation owner in which case you were considered too important for the economy and released from service.
The West Virginians being dirt farmers themselves, and a bit ornery, seceded from Virginia and joined the Union as their own state in 1863.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I can assure you Baltimore is not a state.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Yeah, Steel is the way to go.
My uncle made a cannon for fun (he works in a metal shop) that we took to the local shooting range. They had some wooden spools setup for targets, but the lead balls we fired at them made a neat hole through them and embedded in the gravel hill behind. I can only imagine how far it would have gone had we aimed it higher.