Tater Shots: Boys Love 'Em

"We're tired of being called rednecks," says Payne. "We prefer Appalachian Americans."

The Lore

The origins of the spudgun -- a.k.a. the potato cannon, the spudzooka and the starch resource deployment facilitator -- are lost in the mists of time. Legend has it that in the United States, the ancestral device was built in the 1960s out of beer cans with their tops and bottoms cut off and then duct-taped into a long tube in the service of seeing how far a tennis ball could fly if enough gasoline was detonated behind it.

Spudguns have evolved over the decades. Suprise, who makes and sells potato guns and their air-cannon cousins and ships them all over the world, offers his SP93xx compressed-air device, richly equipped, in the $600 range. "I kid you not," he says. The device "will fire a golf ball 800 to 1,000 yards." A three-inch-wide barrel will accommodate a full beer can. Some units are powered by scuba tanks.

The appeal of these things may be universal, even eternal. People in the Philippines have long celebrated Christmas and New Year's by taking a six-foot length of bamboo and hollowing it out except for the bottom, near which they drill a hole. The reveler then adds kerosene, sticks his mouth on the hole near the fuel, blows in air and introduces a spark. The resultant explosion fires empty condensed-milk cans. The Philippine Embassy explains that people often try to avoid taking their heads off by wrapping the bamboo with rope.

If this suggests that safety issues have surrounded spudguns since their inception, that would be correct. To start with, if you hate all guns and the people who admire them and everything they stand for, listen to your cardiologist and read no further. If, however, you want to get down to business, the rule of thumb is that it's not a good idea to fire a spudgun anywhere you would hesitate to fire a shotgun. Never look down the barrel of a spudgun. Never let kids use one without adult supervision. Never load one and rest the muzzle on your foot. "Imagine a brick thrown at your foot from an office block roof," writes an Australian spudgunner with the voice of experience.

And let none dare call it folly.

"This is what I do for a living, damn straight," says Suprise, who sells as many as 1,500 cannons per year, as well as parts, kits and accessories, and has an order backlog of six months. He is not just the big fish in the small pond of his specialty, "I'm the mako shark in your swimming pool."

One of his busiest periods is this very season, this time of mourning for the passing of summer, the long Labor Day weekend. Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Christmas are also intense times. His simple spudguns cost $59.99, although custom upgrades open a universe of possibilities, including an onboard propane injection system, dual pistol grips and a flashy paint job.

The top of his line is the Tornado Simulator Mega-Launcher II. It costs $2,500. It fires a 12-foot-long, 15-pound two-by-four at 100 miles per hour. Turns out, he says, that if you can build a room that will survive an assault from the Tornado Simulator without the interior wall being breached, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will certify it as tornado safe.

Interest has also been shown by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, which plan to use his cannons to launch global positioning system tracking units onto icebergs. The Navy is interested in using them to launch 12-pound torpedo countermeasure devices that "buzz around and make a bunch of noise that the torpedoes home in on rather than the screws of the ships," according to Suprise.

The Army is also a client, but, he says, its schemes are classified.

The biggest market for Suprise's fully preassembled spudguns is on the coasts, where you "tend to have more yuppies," he says. "Maybe doctors and lawyers and PhDs in astrophysics, for all I know, but you hand them a screwdriver and they'd probably kill themselves." Inland, he says, you generally find "that farmer mentality -- 'I can build that.' "