Watch: Homemade Cannon That Shoots Bowling Balls 2 Miles

Here’s the perfect example of American ingenuity: A fellow who started out by making a small cannon to shoot golf balls and worked his way up to this one, which fires bowling balls as far as two miles. And every Independence Day, he invites friends and neighbors to come watch him fire it!

After a brief intro, we see him loading a prefab powder charge into the cannon, followed by a big black bowling ball–after he cleans out a hole in it for loading purposes while discussing how versatile black balls are as compared to colored plastic bowling balls.

After that, the fuse is ignited and he gets busy aiming the cannon, saying they usually have 3 to 4 minutes of fuse burn time, although he was once surprised when the Chinese fuse burned as quickly as a minute and a half.

The video quality isn’t the greatest, but this is just some friends having fun together, and it’s pretty cool.

I definitely want one.

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.