Here's Waddy Thompson and his "small" melon musket shooter. That contraption on the right is an air cylinder that can be pumped up using pedal power. This provides the air pressure to shoot the pumpkins. He and the Melon Musketeers used this at Raleigh last year to win that competition( but that was last year). 

This is their big air cannon - why it looks like a huge ........

.........Johnson makes boat motors powerful enough to pull skiers like Gregg here.

Andy tries his hand at skiing, but gets a mouthful of Florida water instead.

Back to the fling - one of the melon muskets pulverizes a melon!

Here is Waddy's machine shooting a melon almost straight up. One of the coolest shots of the day was when they fired a bowling ball out of the big air canon. It whistled as it flew, then actually created a sonic boom as it sailed off over the tree tops!

Waddy brought us a crane scale, so we hooked it up to the Onager and started to crank down the arm. Because of the size of the scale and the hardware necessary to attach it, we couldn't crank the arm down as far as when we're actually shooting. You can see the arm, Bad Ash, is at an angle. When we shoot, we crank it down until it's parallel to the ground.

2,200 Lbs. Those last several feet of cranking are always the hardest, so who knows how much tension is there when it's cranked all the way down!

  Back to Previous Page                                                                   Go to the Next Page  

Return to Onager Online Home Page.