Passion Project 2024-25

Why i chose a Potato Cannon as my passion project

I chose to make a potato cannon as my project because both me partner (Duncan Smith) had an interest in military technology and we both like explosions and fire. when we first started making the cannon we wanted to base it off an artillery weapon and our first idea was an howitzer, but we changed the planning to make it look more like a German PAK40 anit-tank gun due to it being easier to make.

Project Progression

There were a lot of setbacks during the earlier stages of development, we found out that the stand that we were basing our potato cannon off was way to complicated to replicate the design, once we landed we mainly freehanded because we didn’t do much planning for the second model and we had a “Lets see if this works” mindset. which actually ended up working in our favour, because if we did plan most of it out we would have probably ran into many problems during the designing process which would have thrown us off track.

End Process

The end result was a completed project that did work, while making the potato canon we had a deeper understanding about how combustion works and we learned that hairspray is very combustible.

Overall me and Duncan had tons of fun constructing and demonstrating our potato canon, and we look forward to next years steam fair, where we can create even an even more dangerous project.