Video: Jorge Sprave, Mr. Slingshot, Built a Car-Sized Shot Put Cannon. We'll Take Two.

Jorge Sprave, slinshoteer extraordinaire, and a man who’s projects and ideals we hold very dear to our hearts, has outdone himself.  After four days of work on super-secret project that he documented with photographs and design points and blogged about it, together with some final help from fellow slingshot enthusiasts, has produced a slingshot of medieval proportion, his car-sized slingshot cannon.

Riding on real antique cart wheels, they trucked it out to some field where they “plinked” it against, what else?  A car.  And some power lines for good measure but if you’ve ever gone shooting in the wide, wide open, you know everything’s fair game.  Except game not in season or without a permit.

The construction of the thing is astounding: “A hot day, sweaty work… but I got it done. The frame is finished. I even found enough time to start on the crank handle. The ‘cross is made from 12 mm solid steel, 33cm at each side, strengthened by a 16 mm steel tube in the critical first 15 cm. This is all welded together, very strong.

“Transmission of the crank is 26:1, means, if I go up to 500 kg (1100 lbs) of a draw, I have to pull with 19 kg (42 lbs) force at the end of the handles, very doable.”  His blog is full of a ton of slingshot jargon, too, which is fun to read, especially coming from the gun world, which as we all has no jargon whatsoever and is entirely spoken of in plain English.  Anyway, on to the video!

His ammunition is impressive: the petanque boules are steel balls weighing about a pound and a half, and shot puts are between 9-16lbs.  They might not have penetrated the door panels, but we’re pretty sure getting hit with one is still, for all practical purposes, shitty.  Watching that, like watching any slo-mo ballistics video, makes us all not want to get in front of it.

The real question now is of course, what’s next?  What type of project do you want to see Mr. Sprave tackle next?