cuchulainn
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from the Daily Oakland Press (Mich.)
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10426058&BRD=982&PAG=461&dept_id=467992&rfi=6
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10426058&BRD=982&PAG=461&dept_id=467992&rfi=6
Punkin' chuckers set to defend title
By BOB GROSS , Of The Daily Oakland Press 10/29/2003
October 29, 2003
HOWELL - "We pied," said Bruce Bradford after a loud whoosh and a cloud of vapor - and nothing else - emerged from the barrel of the enormous cannon. While most folks associate pumpkin pies with good things, "to pie" in the arcane lingo surrounding the sport of punkin' chunkin' is something to be avoided.
It means that all that's left of an 8-pound pumpkin is, as Bradford puts it, "an orange fog."
Punkin' chunkin' started in the late 1980s in Delaware as one of those backyard contests in which someone - usually a guy handy with a welding torch - builds a Rube Goldbergian contraption that serves no real practical purpose.
In this case, the idea is to see who can shoot, propel or otherwise fling a pumpkin weighing 7 to 10 pounds the farthest.
And that's where Bradford comes in. The president of S&G Erectors in Howell, he designed the Second Amendment - named for the section of the Constitution regarding gun rights - pumpkin gun, a compressed air behemoth weighing 18,000 pounds with a 100-foot long barrel that last year boosted a pumpkin 4,594 feet at the 2002 Punkin' Chunkin' World Championships in Sussex County, Del.
That was good for first place in the air cannon category.
"It's something to do," Bradford said. "It looked interesting. It was a challenge.
"It took us four years to accomplish it, but we're world champions."
Bradford's quest for the title of top punkin' chunker actually started after reading a magazine article in 1998. Bradford and a number of buddies went to the competition that year to see what it was all about.
"We couldn't see the shots and they wouldn't let us in the pits," he said, chuckling around a thick cigar stuck firmly in his mouth. "We told them we were reporters ... and they gave us press passes."
They were back the next year with the Second Amendment, finishing in fifth place in the air cannon category. They took third in 2000 and again in 2001, winning the whole shooting match in 2002.
But not without controversy - one of their pumpkins overshot the field and the judges refused to count it.
Bradford dismissed that as politics - most punkin' chunkers are from Delaware and they really didn't care for a bunch of outsiders from Michigan taking home the world champion trophy.
"They'll drink beer with you and compete with you, but they don't want you winning," he said.
The 2002 Punkin' Chunkin' World Championships were televised this summer as part of a Discovery Channel documentary. Bradford said the controversy and the documentary raised his profile.
"I see people and they say, 'Aren't you the punkin' chunkin' guy? You got screwed, man,' " he said.
Not that he could stay incognito if he wanted to. Livingston County may be the fastest growing area in Michigan, yet Howell is still in many ways a small town.
And the Second Amendment draws a crowd and slows traffic: Bradford and his team have been fine tuning and tinkering with their monster gun at a farm on Grand River, getting ready to defend their title on Halloween in Delaware.
The test site is right next to a Halloween attraction called The Slaughterhouse - and that's appropriate considering the carnage the cannon wreaked on a junker van, firing 15 pumpkins at a range of 150 yards to turn it into a pile of scrap.
"We did a number on a van," Bradford said.
The gun uses two air compressors and two compression systems to generate that kind of power while minimizing the chances of "pieing."
"We shoot the low-pressure first, get it started down the barrel, then kick it in the (rear) with the high pressure," Bradford said. "At least, that's the theory."
The pumpkins also are special - they're grown in Cuba by a Roman Catholic priest, are white - not orange - and have a shell about 11/2 inches thick compared with 1 inch for the garden variety pumpkin.
The Holy Grail for punkin' chunkers is one mile - 5,280 feet. The Second Amendment has been regularly launching pumpkins 4,600 feet, so Bradford's team just has to find some way to squeeze another 680 feet out of the gun.
They're leaving nothing to chance - the team has several spotters equipped with walkie talkies to make sure all its shots get counted this year.
"They changed the rules because of us," Bradford said. "They used to give us 30 minutes to find the pumpkins; now they give us three hours."
©The Oakland Press 2003
