Second Tree Blog » marshmallow

Another Saturday Night in the Driveway

Tim — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:11:06 +0000

The weather was too perfect to not have a fire in our driveway last Saturday. It was a small group — only three families — but it was a fun evening.

The classic image of the evening was of four girls aged 5 and under all simultaneously roasting marshmallows:

That led to some gooey mess with one of the girls (Sadie):

Which led to a very attentive Molly:

Meanwhile, the boys were playing with their Go-Gos — using some oversized Janga blocks to build structures for them (these structures were later destroyed by Girl No. 3 in the first picture in this post — younger sister of the two non-Wilson boys in this picture):

So, where was Benton with all these young kids running around? Asleep on his bed, face down and fully clothed. He’d been at a sleepover the night before and had stayed up until 4:30 AM! The sad thing was that he was the one who suggested the fire in the first place, and he was the one who helped collect and cut up the firewood! Nevertheless, the next day, Sunday, he was up for more firewood collecting with Carson in preparation for the fire we’ll have on Halloween (or, at least on the night that trick-or-treating happens, which isn’t Halloween, which is just odd):

PVC + Mini Marshmallows + Hair Spray + Spark

Tim — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:34:44 +0000

Benton and I have made a couple of spud guns — the hairspray-combustion style — over the past few years. While out in West Virginia and shooting one last month, Benton came up with the idea that we should try to make a mini-marshmallow shooter of the same design.

We made a run to the hardware store, bought a bunch of parts, guessed at dimensions, and put one together. We made the barrel intentionally long (we actually made the barrel by sliding a piece of CVPC into a 3/4″ piece of PVC in order to get the inner diameter right) so we could cut it shorter. Our assumption was that it would take us several full prototypes to get a working model.

Our first attempt didn’t work — the marshmallow didn’t make it out of the overly long barrel. I trotted down to the basement, whacked off a chunk of the barrel, and returned to the backyard. The result? Voila! Mini-marshmallows flying 40-50′!

If I wasn’t so far behind on blogging, I’d write down the specific instructions for making one. If you hit this page and have a keen interest, and you don’t want to just take some guesses from the photo, leave a comment and I’ll try to update the post at some point.