How-To: Life-Size Replica Artillery Piece

When I first saw this shot from user eqqman in the MAKE Flickr pool, my thought was, “Oh, look, some tourist photographed a cannon in a park somewhere and tagged it for our pool. How odd.”

Reading the fine print, however, explains that the cannon is in fact a life-size model constructed by New Yorker Eric Hart as a prop for a Shakespeare production in Central Park. The subject is a French 75mm field gun of the WWI era, and Eric has published a really nice two-part phototutorial (1, 2) on the construction and finishing of the replica. Fooled me for sure! [Thanks, Eric!]