Tales from the REAL O.C. - The Beer Can Cannon
- posted by Legal Bitch @ 9:26 AM | Permanent Link

In honor of this past 4th of July, this week's post will explain to you how to make your very own cannon with ordinary objects found around your house. We learned this from one of my dad's friend when we were kids, and it is called THE BEER CAN CANNON.

Cops have groupies. Usually washed-up cop wannabes who either drink too much, or are too fat or too stupid to actually make it through the academy. My dad's #1 groupie was a little of all three. For anonymity's sake, we'll call him Bluto, circa Animal House. Bluto loved to drink beer, and hang out with my Dad as he worked his side job as security at the McDonald's parking lot (keeping those rowdy high school kids in order on Friday and Saturday nights!). But one night, sitting around his trailer picking up empties, Bluto invented something amazing. He shared his knowledge with my father, who shared it with us the next morning, to our mother (and the local fire department's) horror.

You have to understand that since we were dirt poor, we made a lot of toys to entertain ourselves (for instance, I once got a "Barbie dream house" made out of wood planks ganked from the house being built down the street, constuction paper I raided from my school's supply closet, and carpet samples my dad stole from the trash of the furniture store down the road). And we all had an interest in things that would blow up, shoot, or catch fire. My brother and I would watch MacGuyver every week and take notes whenever he'd make an atom bomb or something else far fetched out of duct tape, chewing gum, a compass, and rubbing alcohol, while out mother shouted "You know they leave off a few key ingredients, don't you? You can't really build a bomb out of that!" (she would then call our father at work to make sure that we really couldn't build a bomb from those ingredients).

But back to the cannon already. The materials you will need are 5 beer/soda cans (empty of course), a knife, duct tape or electrical tape, and lighter fluid. It's construction is simple:
1. Take five beer cans. Cut the top and bottom off 3 (which is the middle), and cut the tops off the other two (which will be the end/combustion chamber and the front/firing hole).
2. For the two cans that still have the bottom attached, take the first and poke two holes in it (one directly in the middle and one near the bottom). For the other, saw out half the bottom).
3. Tape the cans with no tops/bottoms together as the middle, and then tape the can with the holes in the bottom to the back with the holes facing out, and the other can to the front with the half bottom sticking out. (Please reference the quick drawing I did on a post-it note here at work).



Once you have assembled the cannon, squirt lighter fluid in the middle hole of the back can, and shake the shit out of it, but being careful not to shake any out the front. Then strike a lighter under the bottom hole in the back can and BOOM - fire shoots out the half moon on the other end like a rocket. Simple. Cheap. Dangerous.

So of course we spent some family time together building our beer can cannon and shooting it out the door of our back porch that morning when my dad got home from work. Then of course, Dad went to sleep, and despite his warnings of a severe beating if we were to play with the cannon without his supervision, we did anyway. Of course, I hadn't paid much attention the night before during our safety briefing, and therefore shot it off BACKWARDS, with the firing hole pointing into our house, and more particularly, at our back door and the curtains my mother had lovingly sewn for it out of her old nightgown. The curtains immediately went up in flames, and my brother almost crapped his pants. We ran around screaming as the curtains burned. I ran to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Hawaiian Punch and threw it on the curtains, while my brother frantically looked under the sink for the fire extinguisher. My mother walked in after hearing the commotion, saw the fire, and said "You have 10 seconds to put that shit out before I wake up your Dad." Luckily, my brother had found the fire extinguisher by then and saved the day. Then my mother astonished us by saying "Kids, get in the car - we gotta get to Lowe's and replace that damn door before your Dad wakes up!" Typically, she let us get our asses beat for doing something stupid, but this time was different somehow. I guess she figured she'd be implicated too for her lack of supervision when we played with fire. Like we didn't play with fire without supervision every day, but whatever! So we hauled ass to Lowe's, picked out a cheap new door, and hauled ass back home to replace it (we carried the old door deep into the woods behind our house until we could find the time to either chop it up, bury it, or finish burning it). My Dad didn't even notice the new door (or the scorch marks we had missed cleaning up on the ceiling of the back porch) until about a week later.

QUICKIE LEGAL DISCLAIMER: If you are stupid or bored enough to try this at home, don't blame me or sue me if you get burned or burn your house down. Oh, and don't shoot it toward anything but open air, or you'll burn your shit down.