Feeling as though he just couldn’t compete with the unbound youthful energy of his kids, Mark Rober built a fully automatic snowball launcher to even the playing field.
He and his brother worked together to make this piece of frigid artillery out of a standard leaf blower. The construction is fairly simple. The leaf blower itself is left unmodified, but they needed a way to insert the perfectly fitted snowballs into the path of the air. To do that, they added an extension to the leaf blower that has a port on the side. Into this port they attach a “magazine” of snowballs. Essentially the magazine is another tube with a plunger that allows you to shove the snowballs into the barrel at whatever rate you choose.
At first glance, after seeing Rober shoot the entirety of his ammunition in a few seconds, I wondered how he would manage to refill before a surprise ambush. Then, he revealed an entire bag full of ammunition ready to reload in an instant. While it may take some time to fill all that ammunition, we always had a 10 minute snowball stockpile period before our snowball wars as a kid — surely Rober’s family follows similar conventions.
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