Dan's Cannons Limited is a new business providing unique Science Education and Outdoor Entertainment services. Keep watching this space, it will happen!
Company registered in the UK, Public Liability Insured, CRB checked and Activity Risk Assessment in force. The primary tools of the trade are the air powered cannons which come in a range of sizes, can be tailored for a wide variety of situations and are absolutely 100% guaranteed to be a lot of fun for all ages. This is not the end of it though, there are many other crazy inventions and ideas in the pipeline for the years to come.
13/05/2026
Photos of Bournville Radio Sailing and Model Boat Club Submarine Day shared from their page for your interest. I have a number of photos which I will sort into a small album post later on. Jolly good show and another ice cream in the sunshine, you chaps! 👍
26/04/2026
Hurrah for Maltby Community Hub Cic! They certainly ticked all the boxes for this first outdoor event. Thank you for inviting me to help 😃
26/04/2026
It was a great pleasure to help this wonderful community event in Maltby this weekend as part of their St George's Day celebration. I always say I would like a dry day to wear armour in public and have a display - the wish was surely granted with a fair scorcher for late April! It was just pure simple fun with a happy family atmosphere in the ideal fashion. Great stuff Maltby - let's do another one soon 🌞👍
18/03/2026
Royal Armouries Leeds. History Hobby Overload today! A most enjoyable day for the full 10am to 5pm opening hours and spring sunshine to complement the mood of excitement to and from. Whilst my focus is upon the medieval, there is such a wealth of objects from all around the world at a wide range of timelines, further visits will be required to appreciate the collections. Among countless details of interest, I am frequently struck by how small some of the helmets are in reality as they would never fit on my head even closely. There are plenty of larger examples that would be fine so it isn't necessarily the case that 'everyone was just smaller back then'. As I and many others who study this far more will point out, the crushingly tiny number of preserved specimens we have today compared to the quantities that must have been, represent such a snapshot survey that conclusive certainties will almost never be achieved. Best guess then with a list of caveats! Royal Armouries
29/11/2025
What's so special about 29th November? No, not the 18 hours of sunlight! Instead, a memorable day on the Dan's Cannons calendar as it was exactly a year ago at the farm when an unplanned discussion on cannon operation and safety provoked good old pal Mike here on the left, to put forward the idea of how to breech load the tennis ball cannons, taking away the need for the general public to muzzle load and thus be temporarily exposed to danger in that vicinity. He is holding the famous piece of pipe used to quickly demonstrate the principle of a rotating sleeve (sleeve is bottom left).
I remember having a puzzled expression on my face when being shown this, as if it was just too obvious a solution to have been missed. The answer to the puzzlement was found later on at home amongst piles of 'stuff' when the unopened delivery of some lengths of high pressure pipe, with an internal diameter to fit tightly over the standard cannon barrel pipe material was discovered, along with an odd piece of cannon barrel with a ball sized hole perpendicular in the side! The delivery note on the larger high pressure pipe was July 2016! Clearly I'd had a faint recollection of starting to look at this solution all those years ago but the many, many distractions since then had just blown it away.
Goodness me, I am so thankful to Mike for enthusiastically throwing this innovation back in my face and waking up a long forgotten hidden gem. As many of you will have seen, the result of this has been developed into the autoloader mechanism which transforms cannon performance to the next level with the new Scorpion Cannon and unlocked the viability of the Battleship Turret which can have its three guns linked together for simultaneous repeat salvo reloading in one reciprocal action.
I thought it was worth a quick photo on the anniversary of this important moment with the subject partner in crime at the end of a windswept and stormy day at the farm yesterday evening! Cheers Mike G! 👍🏆💡
I hope you enjoy this latest video creation. They take long enough to fiddle with in order to get what you want! I know it's the same for everyone who tries to do this sort of thing really. If you trusted in some clever-clogs (not really clever in the original creative invention sense) to produce an edited video for you it would never be up to requirement and likely full of superficial effects unrelated to the true content which should stand on its own merit. 🌋Rather carried away there - presumably I've been up all through the night again!
Ok, calm down Dan and tell the nice people what is presented here!
Yes, this is the recent Battleship Turret testing performed with optimised tennis ball mass ammunition. It is a legitimate question as to why I haven't properly investigated this matter regarding tennis balls years ago, as had been done for the optimised darts used on Wolf and Dragon Cannons to extract best performance.
Perhaps we were always generally happy with the standard tennis balls in stock as people could get them out to 60 metres or so and that was good enough for the general public. The school science classes did go over the principle of the ball mass versus air friction, energy and gravity, but that was more to look at the extremes for comparison purposes. Often it would be the case that the venue simply couldn't accommodate long range shooting anyway, so keeping it all damped down a bit was preferable.
The later Viper Cannon suddenly had the performance that could make the most of a more scientific projectile but that would mean managing a separate class of ammunition that would need continual separation from the other standard type of tennis ball during a full on shooting event when it's complicated enough to keep running smoothly and safely.
Now we have the focus on an entirely new multi-barrel cannon in the Battleship Turret, which is intended as a stand alone attraction in its own right, packed with technology and interest, the question of addressing sub-standard performance cannot be dismissed anymore! Achieving the ability to land a salvo of projectiles on to a target 100 metres distant, with some likelihood of accuracy and repeatability upon successive salvos is an attractive feat to demonstrate. Please tell me if it's not!
It has a further knock-on effect in that the realistic next improvement step to the Viper Cannons (there are actually two in existence you may remember) can be justified with the new heavier ammunition, autoloader mechanism and a list of refinements to create the 'Ultra Viper' - with shocking ballistic performance. Even more remarkable is that the closely supervised public visitor will be able to safely operate such a device.
Well that's enough for now. I should perhaps point out a slight downside which is the task of filling quite a number of the new TB110 tennis balls with the additional mass. Hmmm, it is indeed a task that needs to be kicked off well in advance I reckon. Better go to bed first though, after a cup of tea! Finally a great appreciation given to the existence of Fordhall Organic Farm and the symbiotic relationship many of us have with it and its people. What would we do without them? Presumably not as much as we do with them! See you all later. 👍☕
21/02/2025