Tater Tot Gatling Gun

by Gwendolyn Bunnewith

It all started with a question. Two years ago, Caleb Lewis and his dad made a potato cannon to shoot for fun. One night, Lewis asked his dad, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a potato cannon, with a bunch of rotating barrels?” This gave them an idea.

Lewis calls it “The Gatling Gun.” It’s made out of a distributor from an old Chevy truck, a bearing from a lazy susan, spark plugs and various scrap gears and motors. Though it works much like a traditional gun, instead of bullets, it shoots frozen tater tots. It took over two and a half years to complete.

Why? For fun, really. Lewis says, “This was a project completely unrelated to school, it’s pretty much a big toy.”

Though it had nothing to do with school, Lewis learned plenty from the experience. He was surprised at how much math was involved in the project. Lewis also has an interest in cars, so working with the distributor to create the gun gave him a better knowledge of how car distributors work.

Even though Lewis had fun with the project, after realizing “how long making something this complicated take[s],” he remarks that he “will only do this once!”

Watch the video here.