October Awesome Fellowship: The Cotton Candy Cannon

October 6, 2009

This mean-looking badboy is the brainchild of Josh Gordonson, close to a decade in the making. It is, indeed, the first working prototype of a rugged cannon that deploys an entirely new kind of ammunition. One that is likely to change the face of battlefields and fairgrounds forever.

Specifically, it shoots cotton candy.

This is huge, people. Absolutely huge.

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is proud to announce today that Josh is the winner of this month’s Fellowship. Specifically, we’re funding the production of a handheld blaster that will be able to, quote, “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes” (that’s verbatim, from the grant) and will feature “Three buttons [that] will dispense food coloring into the sugar just before it’s extruded. Color mixing should be possible, giving the artist machine-gunner a full palate of tooth-decaying paint.”

And best of all, the plans will be made available, online, at Instructables. We’re also planning a public debut of this project, once it’s all ready to start shooting.

SET PHASERS TO AWESOME!

We’ll have more details about the awards ceremony, coming up ASAP. Stay tuned, kids.

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More about Josh (from the man himself):

Josh Gordonson is a homegrown maker from the suburbs of New York.  As a child, his parental units introduced him to the world of DIY by raising him directly above a subterranean PHS (personal hacker space) and growing the highly inquisitive mammal (HIM) on an incredibly widespread informational growth medium. Once of age, Josh pursued his interests in making things via the shop below him, with the help of his equally interested cousin Ari and motivation from nearly all of those that surrounded him. Josh has since interned at Instructables and has been deeply immersed in the incredible DIY community.  He’s the first to document a functional high-output homemade cotton candy machine on the internet, a goal sevenish years in the making, and is now pursuing… well… bigger things.  Nowadays Josh spends his hours learning the inner secrets of analogue electronics at the Massachvsetts Institivte of Technology, but still scrounges for time to make everything he dreams up in his sleep.