Ping-Pong vacuum cannons, potato guns, and compressed air cannons are popular and dramatic demonstrations for lecture and lab. Students enjoy them for the spectacle, but they can also be used effectively to teach physics. Recently we have used a student-built compressed air cannon as a laboratory activity to investigate impulse, conservation of momentum, and kinematics. It is possible to use the cannon, along with the output from an electronic force plate, as the basis for many other experiments in the laboratory. In this paper, we will discuss the recoil experiment done by our students in the lab and also mention a few other possibilities that this apparatus could be used for.