For a short period (1657-1667), the Cimento Academy based at the court of Galileo’s patron Prince Leopold of Tuscany, was a pioneer in the experimental method in science. There has been a revival of interest in the Academy in recent years, but this attention has if anything increased contention over the nature and purpose of the Cimento’s activities. Historians of science have taken contradictory stances, thus illustrating the problematic of the experimental philosophy, which took on ‘a hybrid existence between labour and leisure’. This paper focuses on a series of experiments with guns carried out by the Academy in 1662 and included in its only publication, the Saggi di naturali esperienze. These experiments serve as a vehicle to investigate the dymamic between the working engineer, the experimenter and the theoretician that became an integral part of the Medici state enterprise in this period.