This past summer brought lots of crazy adventures, including snowboarding in July, wild bonfires, and general mayhem. A particularly mayhem-filled event was the spontaneous decision to construct a potato cannon with PVC pipe.

A short trip to Rona Home-Building Centre, and 40 dollars later, we had all the materials necessary to build an impressive looking cannon. The first attempt ended in failure, with nothing at all happening. Cannon 2.0 worked a little better, but still needed work. A few modifications later, and we were finally getting ignition of the fuel, only it was shooting flames out the top, side, and everywhere but the barrel of the cannon.

Cannon 3.0 involved a fair amount of duct-tape added on, after the whole backside of the cannon shot off and hit me in the stomach. It was now igniting the fuel every time, but still having problems. It was back to the work bench, trying to make it work. While doing so, a friend that was “helping” us build the cannon, decided to look around at the various screwdrivers and other tools, and found an old pair of children’s’ handcuffs, the older all metal kind.

He started to play with them, closing and opening them, and told another friend helping out, Krystal, to try them on. She was skeptical at first, of course, but agreed once he showed her that the safety unlock tabs worked. Krystal put them on, and when the novelty of it wore off, wanted to take them off. The only problem was the safety on one of the handcuffs was malfunctioning. Krystal began to freak out, getting anxious about the thought of going home to her parents stuck in handcuffs. It was simple, she had to get out of them, by any means possible.

We, of course, had a solution. It was simple really, a hacksaw, piece of Kevlar, and a big vice. Krystal put her arm in the vice, with the Kevlar between the handcuff and her wrist, and my friend Alan pulled out his trusty hacksaw, proceeding to cut the cuff off. In tears, Krystal watched as the razor-sharp blade passed just inches over her arm, slowly freeing her.

Alan stopped about 5 minutes in, realizing it was going nowhere. We needed a different tactic. Alan pried off the casing on the handcuffs, and mangled the locking mechanism inside, freeing Krystal, finally.

The outcome of that night was not only a hilarious memory, but an impressive potato cannon, that we were, and still are proud of.