As he stood in his yard, Ray Carr admired his handiwork, a 750-pound .cannon modeled after an 1862 Mountain Howitzer.

A car passing by slowed with the window rolled down.

“You should sell it on eBay,” the driver called out.

Carr has been trying to sell the cannon. It has been sitting outside his house on the corner of Sixth Street and Polk Avenue with a $4750 price tag.

“It’s a lot of money,” Carr said. “It’s definitely a limited market.”

He said despite the price he has received a tremendous amount of interest.

“Most of them say, ‘I’d love to have it, but the wife wouldn’t let me,’” Carr said.

This would not be the first cannon Carr has sold or built. He said he has made around 40 of them as well as a variety of pistols and rifles he has constructed from scratch.

“I build them, sell them, shoot them and show them,” he said.

Carr said he first became interested in cannons when he was 8 and attended a Civil War centennial reenactment.

“(The cannons) were big and powerful and a lot of fun and make a lot of noise,” He said. “Everybody jumped and ooh’d and ahh’d.”

Though the cannon on Carr’s front lawn is modeled off of a Civil War-era weapon, he said he built it without any plans. Carr said the entire construction of the cannon took him 220-240 hours over a six-month period.

As far as he knows, Carr said he is the only person in Charleston who makes cannons.

While he’s fired cannons several times, he said the one he is currently selling has only been fired once.

“It’s only been shot for the proof, to make sure it wouldn’t blow up,” Carr said. “It’s just fun. It’s fun to fire a cannon.”

He said having a cannon is like any other firearm and that the owner has to be responsible and have a safe area to shoot it.

“Safety is the most important thing when you shoot,” Carr said. “You have to make sure you don’t harm someone unintentionally.”

Carr also makes and sells ammunition for the cannon. Normally the cannon ball would be a three-pound sphere made of steel with a two-and-a-quarter inch diameter.

Carr said he makes his cannon balls out of concrete poured into glass Christmas ornaments. These are lighter and shatter on impact rather than potentially ricocheting back at those firing the cannon.

“Wouldn’t it suck to get hit by that thing?” Carr said. “It would eviscerate you.”

He said firing the cannon is a form of performance art and there are often cannons at his family gatherings.

“It creates a real spectacular fireball,” Carr said. “It’s a real crowd pleaser.”

A regular shot from the cannon creates a throaty boom, Carr said, but it does not create much light.

For the cannon to create flame, Carr said they add coffee creamer.

“Calories is calories,” he said.

Even when firing a blank, Carr said the cannon gives people an idea of how terrible war is and a connection to battles of the past.

“Men ran up to these things, except there wasn’t cardboard and smoke coming out; there was steel,” Carr said. “It’s a devastating thing, and then you realize that men, just flesh and blood men with wool uniforms, ran into that hell. And they still do.”

An electrician, Carr said he has always been good with his hands and he grew up building things with his father, who was a carpenter, and his grandfather, who had a blacksmith workshop.

Carr builds his cannons and works on various other projects in a workshop at his house. He also built the workshop.

“I’m welding at night. My neighbors think it’s Frankenstein’s castle with the arc light coming out of the windows,” He said.

Also a painter and photographer, Carr said he gets a lot of joy out of the creative process, and he prefers art that is simple and elegant. He said he considers the cannon to be part of his art.

“That gun out there is a piece of sculpture,” Carr said.

Carr has a Firearm Owner Identification card issued by Illinois, other than that he said there is no additional permits required for him or anyone else to own or operate the cannon.

According to the Gun Control Act of 1968, cannon’s usually fall under the category of destructive devices, as they fire a missile with an explosive or incendiary charge of more than a quarter ounce. However, this does not include antique firearms, which includes anything constructed or modeled after something constructed before 1898.

Because Carr’s cannon is a replica of an 1862 model weapon, it falls into the antique firearms category.

Carr said most of the guns he builds are copies or reproductions of weapons from before 1898 because there are fewer restrictions on them. He said there are large fees for building and selling weapons after 1898 and owning a destructive device often requires a rigorous background check.

He said the best thing about owning a cannon is that it would easily clear the street of a zombie attack.

Seth Schroeder can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].