A YouTuber set out to build the holy grail of spud guns: a fully automatic, belt-fed potato cannon, and against the odds, he mostly pulled it off. He started by repurposing an old air-powered salad cannon, then upgraded it to a beefier, shoulder-mounted chamber that could blast large potatoes through targets at 80 PSI, but the tricky part was making it belt-fed. He built a rotating indexer to feed potatoes one at a time, driven by a big stepper motor, plus sliding covers powered by pistons to seal the chamber before each shot.
After plenty of mishaps, including a badly placed weld he had to grind off and redo, he got everything lined up. Mounted on a turntable and a wobbly homemade tripod, the finished cannon fired a potato about every 6 seconds, though it struggled to build pressure fast enough between shots. He called it technically working and incredibly cool, but plans to redesign the whole thing in a future video.
You can see the video to the right.
Source: BoingBoing
