Flight of the orange gourds

It’s kind of like sneezing with a mouthful of pumpkin pie, except it can take 2,500 feet for things to get messy.

When Russ Vilhauer and Joe Barbera want to blow an orange smear over the vicinity, they use artillery.

Vilhauer and Barbera are longtime practitioners of pumpkin chucking. Now they are sharing some exciting news about dramatic advances in the field of pumpkins to go.

The firing technology on their pumpkin cannon has been upgraded. And the barrel is longer and stronger. Instead of 20 feet of sewer pipe, they crafted a 38-foot barrel from steel heating duct and braced it with a metal frame built by collaborator Jeff Peterson.

Add an 8-pound pumpkin and an 80-gallon tank of compressed air, and their industrial-strength popgun can shoot a farm-fresh cannonball almost half a mile.

Barbera and Vilhauer have been readying their invention for weekend firing exercises at an Oregon farm, where an abundant supply of ammunition lives. The festivities continue Sunday afternoon at Heiser’s Farm, 21425 S.E. Grand Island Loop near Dayton, Ore.

“Our tag line is, ‘Some pumpkins are just born to fly,’” Barbera explained.

And so, apparently, are some bowling balls.

With a barrel diameter of 9 inches, “It is sized to shoot a bowling ball,” Vilhauer said.

Rather than a splattering of orange pulp and stringy seeds at the point of impact, “You get a good crater,” Barbera said.

However, “You do have to find it,” Vilhauer noted.

Their personal record for pumpkin chucking is 2,525 feet. They hope to stretch it another 756 feet, which would put them at 1,000 meters.

Some pumpkineers have even loftier goals. The world record is just under a mile, but those folks are pumping their organic ammunition through a 100-foot-long barrel, mounted on a flat-bed semi-trailer and powered by a 300-gallon tank of compressed air.

Not that the Vilhauer/Barbera entry in this arms race is anything to … well, sneeze at.

When they recently parked their trailer-mounted cannon in downtown Vancouver, it didn’t take long for large share of the guys lunching in a restaurant across the street to gather on the sidewalk and stare in open admiration.

But Barbera and Vilhauer have drawn “ooohs!” and “ahhhs!” from much bigger audiences than that, such as at a Portland Timbers’ soccer match. There they set up against the wall at the far end of the stadium and fired youth-sized soccer balls toward the fans in the main grandstand. The soccer balls tended to fly right out of the stadium.

Kid-sized basketball are fun to shoot, too, Vilhauer said. Their pebbled surfaces produce a clean trajectory, kind of like the dimples on a golf ball.

Barbera said he even shot a ghost. He didn’t shoot at a ghost, you understand, but actually launched an apparition.

“A guy made me a flying ghost,” Barbera said. It opens up in flight, unfurling a 4-foot-long white shroud.

The pumpkin is sent on its way at a muzzle velocity of 240 feet per second, and not all of them survive the first few feet of their mission.

“We do implode them,” Vilhauer acknowledged.

In which case it kind of becomes a weapon of biomass destruction.

Tom Vogt: 360-735-4558; http://www.twitter.com/col_history; tom.vogt@columbian.com.