Supersonic Skittles (4 comments)
A few months ago, Mel and I were talking about easter celebrations and she got an idea:
"Could we shoot Peeps with M&M's?"
I thought about it and talked it over with my dad. Yesterday, we tried it. We weren't sure that M&M's would survive the trip from the shell to the Peeps, so we substituted Skittles and cinnamon imperials. Soon enough, the candies had made their way to the reloading bench:
As it turns out, a 12 gauge shotgun shell can only hold three Skittles:
We ended up loading four shells with Skittles, seven with the cinnamon imperials, and two with normal lead bird shot. You know, for a control sample.
Once the ammo was ready, we needed to prepare the Peeps. I suggested that we blindfold them and tested the idea with the strip of paper from a Hershey Kiss:
It turned out that blindfolding a Peep that way was a lot of work, so Mel and my mom set to using strips of masking tape, which proved much more efficient:
With the Peeps blindfolded, it was finally time to stack them and shoot them. We started with the Skittles since they were hypothesized to be the lease effective ammo.
As we'd expected, Skittles don't fly in a straight line, so only a few of them ended up connecting with a Peep. Those that did made nice holes, though.
We were more hopeful about the cinnamon imperials. Due to their size and more uniform shape, we figured that the significantly higher number of them inside the shell would fly better.
Disappointingly, the cinnamon imperials appeared to shatter on their trip from the shell to the Peeps. The result was that a large number of Peeps were pushed off the execution platform by a spray of microscopic cinnamon shards.
The disappointment didn't last long, though. Next up was the control sample, a standard skeet load using lead shot:
It turns out that lead shot is much more effective than candy. Huh.
Julia showed up late, but at least she was wearing her best church boots:
Mel picked up the victims and separated them; those shot with bird shot are on the left, and those shot with candy are on the right:
All in all, we learned that:
- Supersonic Skittles don't fly straight.
- Cinnamon imperials are too brittle to be a practical shotgun load.
- Bird shot is superior to candy when it comes to making holes in birds.
I had far more fun that I should have, and we're already planning for next year.
