This project was born after I spent a few too many nights watching videos of cool potato cannons on Youtube, and because I saw some friends with one, and using theirs was a TON of fun. My immense passion for Napoleonic warfare and the artillery that came with it also didn't help! Once I had the idea, I went into onshape to sketch out my idea, with the main element that would set my cannon apart from the pack being the frame that it sat upon. It was to be constructed out of 2x4 planks, and the reasoning behind it's existence was that using the aformentioned friend's cannon was quite cumbersome as you had to hold the big hulking PVC tube. With Project Tuber Shooter, I aimed to make a cannon that would be more aimable and more comfortable to use, and in that I largely succeeded.

The Gravity Car project was my first real engineering project, and was part of an engineering class I took a few years ago (which I still have fond memories of). The goal was to make a foambord car that could carry a weight and roll down a ramp, stopping after a specific distance traveled. My plan to ensure that my team's car could make it the full distance was to incorporate suspension into the design, and I did this with popsicle sticks acting as torsion bars. The idea ened up working fairly well, albeit with some hiccups due to having to use some makeshift materials. This was one of the first projects of mine that took atvantage of 3D printing, with both the wheels and axels being made of plain PLA.

The first project on this list (which is in no particular order, by the way) that was born purely out of my own desire to make something better. I had the idea after going on a long stint of watching Youtube videos of the foam blaster enthusiast variety, and I really started to enjoy the idea of a modified blaster. I had already taken apart and painted two other blasters of mine, but I had never done any REAL mods to anything of mine. That changed when I decided to up the power of my old Nerf Hammershot, by adding in a few smaller springs to give it an extra kick. Unfortunatly this came with the side effect of reducing the accuracy, which is where the real engineering of this project began: to help keep the dart straight after it's initial burst of speed, I added a large barrel to the front, with a muzzle brake for fun. This actually worked very well, and after some painting to make it look even more like a zombie-killing weapon, this stylized peice of kit stays on my desk to this day. You can check out and print the files for yourself here.