Ha Ha, you are most generous Fred, but that's OK. I was only picking on you as you are the only Québécois that I know of for sure on this board. Now if they made those things in my old favorite brand from my younger days, Labbats 50, I'd book you in for a truckload. It became a Quebec only beer as well sometime back in the late 90s I think.

As for potato cannons, I'll have to see if I can find any pictures or video taken from a Canada Day party we had where we built a tripod mounted potato cannon to have a contest to see who could get the closest to a buoy out in the bay. A friend, an engineer turned machinist, kind of went crazy in taking over the build process and it ended up being an extra long aluminum tube powered by oxygen and acetylene tanks from a welder, a home made electronic gas mixture controller and a remote control firing mechanism complete with a countdown warning buzzer.

First time we shot it, after several weak attempts at getting the gas amounts and mixture tweaked correctly, the muzzle velocity was so fast that we weren't sure if the potato left the tube. It did but we had no idea where or how far it went. 2nd try, we try firing it straight up and stood inside his garage, knowing that it had to come back down. Well, it didn't. Well, I'm not saying we put it into orbit, but we didn't see it leave the barrel and we never knew where it came down.

Knowing that this contraption was wayyyyy to lethal for a party game, we greatly reduced the gas levels and now we could see the potato land but it was being blown to bits before even leaving the barrel. In the end, we bore holes in the aluminum tube, just ahead of where the potato sat, to exhaust some of the explosion propelling the spud and brought it down to a device that was comparable to a typical back yard version. Looked very cool at night with the fiery exhaust gas spitting out the base of the tube at launch.

In the end we were still too paranoid to do anything but some impressive demonstrations with it at the party and we put it away before our beverages overcame somebodies common sense.

With great power comes Awesome irresponsibility.