For those of you who always wanted to know: A pumpkin shot out of a cannon flies like a knuckleball. Its imperfect aerodynamics cause it to lurch up and down and side to side as it soars through the air.
This fact was put into action — repeatedly — at the 2004 Punkin Chuckin’ Contest in Morton, just east of Peoria. More than a dozen teams put devices of all shapes and sizes through their paces in a harvested cornfield outside the town that bills itself the Pumpkin Capital of the World.
Don’t let the “chuckin'” in the event title fool you; this is serious business. The overall winner was the home team and its Aludium Q-36 Pumpkin Modulator, an 18-ton artillery piece with an 80-foot barrel built on the chassis of a concrete mixer. The Q-36 uses compressed air — no explosives are allowed in competition. When its team prepared for a shot by filling its tank from a compressor truck, the roaring sound hushed the crowd into silent anticipation.
A warning klaxon sounded. And then an almighty FOOOSH!
A pumpkin chucked by the Q-36 has a muzzle velocity of about 600 m.p.h., near the speed of sound. Moisture from the air tank gave the pumpkin a wobbly contrail in the clear, blue sky.
The winning shot was 4,444 feet. That’s a few hundred feet short of a mile, the winning distance by more than a thousand feet and a stand-out chuck even for the mighty Q-36.
Matt Parker, co-owner of a Morton machine shop, is the captain of the team that built it. Of his sport, he says, “It’s weird enough that people must think, ‘Well, they have too much time on their hands.'”
Turning members of the squash family into projectiles is not a pastime unique to Morton.
Ground zero is Sussex County, Del., which hosts the annual “world championship” chuck, to be held this weekend. The competition — and the sport of mechanized chucking — began in Delaware in 1986 as a spinoff of a local hand-thrown pumpkin toss. It has since grown into a national event; in addition to air cannons, there are competitive classes for devices that use centrifugal force, for catapults and trebuchets (a catapult of medieval design), and human-powered slingshots.
Parker’s Q-36 won the Delaware championship in 1996 and 1998, but was out-gunned on three other occasions; there are about a half-dozen other cannons in existence that can rival its power, with names such as the Second Amendment, built by a team from Michigan, and Universal Soldier, hailing from Delaware.
Morton has had a competition since 1996, as part of its longtime fall pumpkin festival.
The town is home to Nestle SA’s Libby’s plant, which processes about 80 percent of the nation’s canned pumpkins, and pumpkins are a matter of civic pride. When the local chamber of commerce learned of Delaware’s event, it urged a local team to enter the arms race and build a pumpkin cannon that would put Morton on the map.
As Parker recalls, “My first thought was `That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.'”
And his second: “Well, just how would you go about throwing a pumpkin?”
Parker has never been one to shy away from a new project.
The 35-year-old businessman was born and raised in Morton. He played football in high school and pursued a degree in robotics at Illinois Central College until dropping out to take a job working with generators. In 1990 he started Parker Fabrications with his father. The company constructs exhaust systems for industrial engines and has 15 employees.
To build the Q-36, he assembled a team of five other guys with various expertise. Rod Litwiller works in construction. Chuck Heerde is in auto body.
After some sketches on cocktail napkins at the local tavern and a fair amount of procrastinating, they built the first version of the Q-36 in a month of 18-hour days, using donated scrap parts and a $1,700 budget.
Parker’s wife, Michelle, says her husband’s new undertaking didn’t surprise her.
“He just said, `we’re going to build a machine that throws pumpkins,'” she says. “Although I didn’t realize at the time he’d be working night after night until 2 or 3 in the morning. At that point, I sort of said, `OK, tell me again what we’re doing here.'”
But that’s always been Matt’s way, she says. “He’s always sort of walked to the beat of his own drum. I think that’s why he owns his own business and doesn’t work for anyone else.”
The air tank on the gun is a 2,000-gallon “quench tank” once used in metalworking by Caterpillar Inc. Its huge size gives it an edge in air pressure and a longer blast to launch the pumpkin. There’s a weather station at the end of the barrel that measures windspeed, temperature and humidity; the barrel itself is made from 10-inch water pipe and is aimed by hydraulics. A computer program written by a family friend to analyze shotgun ballistics was modified to determine the ideal firing angle and air-valve timing.
Clambering around the gun on game day, Parker’s muddy boots and well-worn gloves say “construction foreman.” Until he starts to explain the physics of velocity and that changes to “rocket scientist.”
Cannon challenges
For instance, one of the challenges of blasting a pumpkin out of a cannon is figuring out how to deliver the greatest acceleration without turning it into pie in the barrel, he says. “If we think a pumpkin will blow up at 10,000 feet per second-per second squared [a scientific unit of acceleration], then we want to be at 9,000.”
Before the shot, all the variables — pumpkin density and shape, weather conditions, everything the team can think of — are plugged into the computer program on a laptop to determine firing angle and valve timing.
If it weren’t for the sheer delight of punching a big, pink button on the Q-36 control panel and watching a pumpkin get lost in the sun, this would seem like a lot of work.
The team’s efforts have paid off — in 1998, the Q-36 made the Guinness Book of Records with a pumpkin chuck of 4,491 feet.
Expensive pastime
During their most competitive years, they attended both the Morton and Delaware contests and did exhibition shoots from coast to coast. They shot a pumpkin across the Hudson River on “The Late Show With David Letterman.” The contest prize money and fees they were paid for their appearances didn’t even cover their expenses — a single cross-country trip with the Q-36 can cost $4,000 in travel costs and to haul the gun, compressor and other support equipment, Parker says. He won’t say how much he and Parker Fabrications have invested in the Q-36 in the years since, only that it’s in excess of $100,000 and that he has received financial support from various donors.
The team was once driven by a desire to win. But then the pace got to be too much.
“The enjoyment was going out of it,” Parker says. “It got to be where just coordinating our schedule got to be a second job. So we all decided to go back to our first jobs.”
For this year’s competition, they decided not to use the laptop and just eyeball their shots. They enjoy spending the afternoon talking to spectators about the gun, and act as mentors to the high school science teams that compete.
Their winning chuck was just a few dozen feet short of the record, but chuckin’ can be a game of inches, Parker says. The Q-36 has the same power; it’s the hair-splitting and the computer analysis that means extra few feet.
“And it’s a certain amount of luck,” he says.
At the end of the afternoon of the competition, after their shots for distance, they lower the barrel of the Q-36 and take aim at some donated used cars parked a few hundred feet into the cornfield.
There’s another FOOOSH. And then BLAM.
A 10-pound pumpkin at that speed tears a hole straight through sheet metal. The crowd laughs and applauds.
So is there ever any crossover back to his fabrication business? Does he learn things working on the gun that help him professionally? Has the publicity won him exhaust system contracts?
Parker thinks.
“No,” he says.
Punkin chuckin’ has become a family tradition for the Parkers. His father, his wife and his 2-year-old son, Tristan, all come out to help.
“Tristan thinks it’s great,” Michelle Parker says. “He knows, `What does a cow say? Moo!’ And what does a pumpkin say? `PSHEEWW!'”
