The latest in t-shirt launching technology: the T-Shirt Gatling Gun

Here's a fun article from the Washington City Paper about the T-Shirt Gatling Gun, a new tool to launch t-shirts at sporting events. The gun was developed by FX In Motion, a Wisconsin-based company that's supplied the launcher to about 16 teams so far. (via GameOps.com)

The gadget can shoot a dozen shirts 12 stories high in a matter of seconds, machine-gun style. Each shirt launch comes with a big whoosh followed by a puff of vapor from one of the rotating barrels...

“The first time we used [the Gatling Gun], the tape that was holding the shirts together was getting blown off, it’s so powerful,” laughs Marc Goldman, who has MC’d the timeout entertainment at Hoyas home games for several years. “Everybody loves it. We used to just have cheerleaders out there throwing T-shirts, and though everybody would still go nuts for the shirts, they’d only be able to hit people in the lower deck. But now every seat in the building is really within range.”

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Scheel says his assemblage of PVC pipe, two CO² tanks, a car battery, and steel bars on wheels—which he leases to teams for as much as $3,500 a season—grew out of other products his company has been hawking to pro and college teams.

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“Some people are just wrapping hot dogs in a paper towel and stuffing it in a T-shirt cannon,” says Scheel with obvious disdain. “You can’t just shoot that out. By the time somebody gets it, they just end up with a smashed hot dog. I’ve told people, ‘I’m not eating that.’”

But the multishot hot dog cannon that Scheel developed in the back room of his shop utilized plastic capsules—“like the ones at a drive-in teller, sort of”—to protect the integrity of the foodstuffs and allow storage of a napkin and condiments. And, again, it shoots a dozen dogs into the stratosphere in the time it would take to scream, “Let’s go, Hoyas!”

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