The Life and Death of the Darth Cannon

A little over a month ago my ward had a dumb activity in which I didn't want to participate. So, instead of going to the activity, Tyler and I built a gun.
My friend Ryan and I had built a potato gun in high school, and I think Tyler had done the same, so we both knew the basic operations and what we needed. At the hardware store, we discovered that this is not only a very common practice, but that they don't necessarily like helping with this, so they don't readily sell the parts that we needed. We ended up compromising and making due with what they had, but in the process, we developed a new kind of potato cannon.
The Darth Cannon ^TM had a fail-safe. In the event that the pressure in the chamber was too high, instead of breaking the combustion chamber, it would blow-off the barrel to relieve the pressure. We were invincible. We couldn't hurt ourselves with this.
So, as any good college students who had built a gun, Tyler and I did science experiments on it. (I bet you thought we were going to use it to break things, huh?) We took it to the baseball field and measured the distances it traveled with different fuel-filling styles, until we'd figured out how to best use the Darth Cannon.
Unfortunately, the Darth Cannon met its end this weekend. We'd gone up the canyon to sit around a bonfire, and I'd gotten bored. So, naturally, I pulled the Darth Cannon out of my trunk (where everyone keeps their home-made guns) and loaded it up. I readjusted the barrel because it had gotten a little crooked in my trunk, but I guess I didn't tighten it up enough afterwards. When I shot it, instead of the potato flying out, the barrel itself shot off. This was good, of course, because it proved that my fail-safe would work, but in all of the excitement, I kind of broke off the trigger ignition that we'd put on it.