Generally I find you cant tell about a project you have done without showing pictures, especially if your the new guy. I have recently got the itch to purchase a lathe and made a list of projects I could do with it and cannons were right at the top! I havnt run a mill or a lathe in 20+ years, I do know its much like riding a bike, I look at the tooling and it all starts coming back, kinda exciting really. Well on to the pics.
These cannons were made in high school machine trades class. They are not replicas of any make that I am aware of but cannons all the same. This first one is 50cal... rusted and showing its age. It surely will be redone when the lathe arrives. Barrel is 9.5 inches long, carriage is black walnut. Brass trunnions and aluminum clips. The wheels were parted off an old chunck od cast iron pipe with spoke holes done in an indexer. Each spoke was hand turned and beveled on a mill. All the hub parts were hand turned also. I have fired this cannon once. There was a weak spot in the carriage and it cracked under stress and broke. I put it all back together and its sat ever since.
This next one was built right after the first one. I Wanted one I could take out and really hammer on! Its exactly twice the size of the first one with a few changes. 1" bore again with a black walnut carriage. Barrel is 18 1/2 inches and started from a hot roll steel. We had to use what was in the material rack and this was the biggest piece we had that would fit the bill! The blank weighed 65 pounds when I started and I had it down to about half that in a couple days. Press fit steel trunnions, polished alum clips that use carriage bolts all the way thru and hold a reverse trunnion for the axle. The wheels are 11" dia. from alum plate that I cut out on a rotary table. I remember the school wouldnt provide the plate for them. I had to buy that on my own and was pretty expensive for only having a part time job back then. Talk about a stressful couple days on the mill, I so didnt want to screw them up and have to buy more material! I had the barrel chromed when I finished it and as you can see theres a bit missing around the muzzle.. LOL! Finished the whole thing weighs 40 pounds. There were only two of these 2x larger cannons built in the long history of that class. The instructor was a friends dad, so mine was one and he (the instructor) had the other. He wouldnt let just anyone do the large ones and I had to make him a few promises about its use before he let me do mine.
Since its been 22 years since my last cannon project, I'll have a ton of questions coming up. I have done lots of reading here in the last week or so, looking forward to more. I think my first project with the new lathe will be a mortar or two, then on to a few other barrels and projects of some sort.
