Tater Shots: Boys Love 'Em

It is these latter paragons of self-reliance that are epitomized by Payne and Anders.

Hold the Spam

Theirs is a world that worships the canny. Payne, for instance, pays for his workshop and his six-wheel F350 Ford pickup with his day job "trying to break software" as a quality-assurance maven for an information company.

Anders, a plumber by trade who now runs a home restoration and renovation business, shops in a sufficiently valiant part of Virginia that when he went to Wal-Mart and asked for a flint and steel lantern igniter, the guy took one look at the parts list in his hand and "knew exactly what we were doing. He took me straight to them. I bet he has a spudgun at home."

The gun he and Rob Payne decided to build is a classic muzzle loader -- you stick the potato down the business end.

Anders cuts the 36-inch barrel out of a piece of plumber's heavy-duty two-inch-diameter PVC plastic pipe. He then shaves this barrel with an abrasive wheel at an angle such that the inside of the muzzle comes to a sharp edge. The idea is that when the potato gets jammed in, it is peeled in one stroke, leaving a cylinder of brown-skinned spud exterior on the ground, and a perfectly formed slug of nice dense white potato inside the barrel, ready to be rammed all the way down with a T-handled plunger.

Anders cuts the 14-inch-long combustion chamber out of a three-inch-diameter piece of PVC. Then, steadying the assembly on the rear bumper of his truck -- the one with the sticker reading "Virginia Terrorist Hunt Club, Permit No. 9.11.01" -- he cements the two into a reducer coupling designed to connect a pipe of one size with a pipe of another size.

A photographer observing all this asks what would happen if you put a super-hard black walnut on top of the potato.

Payne looks at him, dazzled by the destructive possibilities.

"Is it wrong to fall in love with a photographer?" he asks.

The choice of projectiles is limited only by imagination. Potatoes are obviously really good. They're dense, and fly well. Apples are good. Limes work well. Carrots will work with a one-inch barrel.

Spam does not. Joel Suprise once cranked up an air cannon to 110 pounds per square inch and fired a ball of the stuff, and the result was a V-shaped pattern 100 yards long and 50 yards wide. "Every bird in the neighborhood had gas for a year," he says.

Spudguns can be surprisingly accurate. Suprise says that with one of his custom-made rifled barrels, he can consistently hit a five-gallon bucket at 150 feet. Grigg Mullen Jr., a civil engineering professor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, swears that he has nailed a clay pigeon in the air. He says he has two witnesses.