For Jake Burton, the annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin is an opportunity to add to the family legacy, as well as show off his own record-setting creation.

Burton, 22, has set chunk records in both the Youth Air Cannon and Adult Air divisions.

The latter he set with his cannon, Young Glory III, last year.

“We built Young Glory III in 2001 when I was 14,” Burton said.

“We started off in the youth division and we pretty much dominated that. This cannon won three first-place and we had six throughout the time we were in the youth division. We only lost twice and both times we took second.”

In 2003, Young Glory III set a youth division world record, shooting 3,945 feet. In 2005, Burton moved up to the adult division and gradually climbed the standings, finishing 10th in 2005, fourth in 2006 and second in 2007 before winning with a world-record shot of 4,483 feet in 2008.

While Young Glory III looks impressive, its components are surprisingly very simple.

“It sits on a big-wheel trailer. It’s got a 1,300-gallon tank, through a valve and then just 60 feet of a nine-inch gun. And that’s basically it,” Burton said.

He said he’s gradually improved Young Glory III over the years, building the original model in two months. Since then, he’s made modifications to the trailer and the lift. The parts needed to make the cannon come from a combination of online merchants for specialty items and local junkyards for scrap metal.

“It’s a never-ending process,” Burton said. “This year we didn’t really have to do much.”

Other than two stops at a pumpkin-hurling contest in New York, Burton said Young Glory III hasn’t traveled much outside of Delaware.

The pumpkins Burton uses come from Laurel and he said he likes to have solidly round pumpkins that can roll. Burton said he prefers the pumpkins to weigh about nine pounds.

“We don’t really use the weight as much as the size. If you have an oblong shape, like a football shape, if it got sideways and kind of lodged in there, the air would just blow right through the middle, because it’s going so fast, then you end up in pieces. So, we kind of make sure it rolls so that no matter what way that pumpkin rolls, it’s going to come out,” he said.

A graduate of Cape Henlopen High School, Burton is from Lewes and now lives in Cool Spring.

After briefly attending Delaware Tech, he is now enrolled at the University of Delaware. He also has experience as a carpenter, which he said has helped his career as both a chunker and a student.

Burton’s success last year only added to his family’s legacy at Punkin Chunkin. His father, Chuck, was one of the original chunkers who helped found the championship as part of the Old Glory cannon team.

“I’d beg him to take me out there with him when they were building it. They taught me how to weld when I was 9, when they first built Old Glory,” Burton said. “It got to the point where we built another cannon, Young Glory II, and it was limited.

“We never really got it right. We decided we had all the parts, so we went ahead and built this one. The tower that’s on this cannon [Young Glory III] is the tower I learned how to weld on. It’s the tower from the original Old Glory.”

Burton was confident of his chances going into the competition.

“I just want to win. It’s fun being out here and you know that you shot farther than every one of these machines and anybody ever. It feels good,” he said.

However, Young Glory III was unable to duplicate last year’s success, finishing seventh in the unofficial standings.

Burton’s longest shot was on day two, with a distance of 3,718 feet. Old Glory won the Adult Air division with a shot of 3,939 feet.