Having too much fun with Bowling Ball Mortar

[Webleys]

Having too much fun with a Bill McKenna Bowling Ball mortar. We went through 10 lbs of powder and about 30 bowling balls (some of them more than one shot) in the last 10 days.

My cousin's son shot this with the movie mode of his autofocus camera and put it together with a soundtrack (gotta love Capt Dan and the scurvy crew)!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4018156484997099923

And, yes, I know my brother shouldn't be so close in, downrange.

[Webleys]

Couple of still pictures. Bill builds a nice mortar, all 550 lbs of it!





The smaller on is pop can bore. Bill built that one in 1994.

[radio2]

Nice Mortar, What did that cost? As I want one!

[Webleys]

The bowling ball one was $2400 but will be going up with the price of materials. I believe that Bill has another in progress.

http://www.bigshotsofidaho.com/

The pop can bore one was $1400 but I don't believe Bill is building any more of those, this one was from 1994.

Bill is a good guy to deal with; I picked both of them up in person and we fired about a dozen balls at his place before we loaded them up. I did put 3800 miles on my Mazda pickup in the process but that included a week of work on the way back. He can ship them on a pallet.

[Will Bison]

Nice looking BB mortar.

An older Navy Master Chief once told me "If you feel the urge to run, your fuse is too short".

At 550 lbs how the hell do you position the thing?

[Webleys]

Nice looking BB mortar.

An older Navy Master Chief once told me "If you feel the urge to run, your fuse is too short".

At 550 lbs how the hell do you position the thing?

Good advise from the Chief! Actually, in this case I was running for my camera to get some video.

We have been shooting it at my cousin's farm where we're lucky enough to have a Bobcat with forklift. I'm planning to make up a ramp that will get it up into the truck; I'm going to need a winch of some sort too. It rolls around pretty well on some short lengths of 3/4" pipe. It makes my little Mazda PU squat a bit but I hauled them both back from Idaho to Minneapolis with no problem. Two of us can tug it around for aiming without too much trouble.

My powder bill has just increased tenfold!