I used to paint models as a kid. So I had lots of empty Testor's paint bottles lying around.

So I got some of my dad's black powder (btw, he showed me how to do this) and filled up the bottle. Take a nail, punch a hole in the cap and stick in some cannon fuse. Voila! Instant grenade.

Well, one weekend my parents were out of town and my grandmother was watching me. I lit the grenade and throw it. First was the bang followed quickly by the shattering of a sliding glass door. It seems that only the top blew off and turned the bottle into a projectile.

The real scary part was that I'd thrown the bottle about 20 yards <-- that way and the glass door was about 40 yards --> that way. Which means the bottle went past me. Between the eyes and I'd been dead.

PS, my grandmother, who was about 6 feet to the side of the window reading in a chair was not amused.

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It is not enough to fight for natural land and the west; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends...Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound men with their hearts in a safe-deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

- Edward Abbey

Pyrotechnics were always fun.

One of our most poweful experiments was acetylene bombs. They were indeed real bombs - the boom was heard some miles...

A friend and I brought some oil drums to a place in the forest, far away from people and houses. We also brought some calcium carbide and sparklers.

To make the whole thing work, we filled about a gallon of water into the oil drum, bored a little hole, where we attached the sparkler with some padding, dropped some pieces of carbide into the water, put om the cap of the drum, fired the end of the sparkler and run f-a-s-t behind a big stone block. And that was a boom!!! We didn�t dare to make it with the other drum...

Another funny play was to gather old spray cans and put them into a fire. Nice booms, but not as powerful as our acetylene bomb.

When I recently was at the iron monger�s, I saw a tin with calcium carbide. Perhaps I should buy one, get a oil drum and some sparklers. I think that it still would be fun...

Fritz

Any of you guys ever throw live 22 ammo into a fire just like they did on the 3 stooges.

Me either!

great reading!!!
takes me back to my youth, stupidty being my middle name at the time had me welding a bmw exhaust in the workshop, after carefully marking it on the car to the correct position i transferred it to the workshop for welding,after propping it up with several cans I cracked up the arc welder the corresponding flash was not the arc welder but a full tin of nobel 80 sparking into life that i had accidentaly used to get the exhaust in the right position.It singed every hair on my head.it also incinerated all the spiders within a 15ft radius. needless to say dont use powder tins to prop up your exhaust while you weld IT!!
great laugh at my expense was had by all!

Griff

Man I really missed out on an exciting childhood! Lots of good suggestions though.
I was too scared to try anything wierd after hearing about Dad's rocket powered johnboats and homemade ICBM's.
My uncle once attempted to make some gunpowder, preliminary tests worked good in a muzzleloader, but my aunt put an end to research after the garage blew up from an above mentioned ICBM test.

All,

OK, when I was an employee at a local gun shop and old enough to know better the owners kid and I decided to have some fun after we closed the place down. We stuck some adhesive exploding targes onto a can of black powder, put it about 25 yards down range and commenced firing our pistols at it. After a couple of misses . . . BOOM. The explosion blew out the range lights. The next hour or so was spent sweeping up glass and replacing the bulbs so his Dad wouldn't find out what had gone on.

ssleefl,

I was at a Boy Scout camp when I was a kid when someone did that. MAN I have never seen ten kids scatter faster in my life! There is surprisingly little explosive power to this type of incident as there is no chamber to direct the pressure and projectile.

JohnTheGreek

My friends father owned a sporting goods store. We took a bunch of arrows that were repairs that no one picked up. Depending on the size of the arrows one will fit snugly inside another. We cut a smaller arrow to about 18 inches and acraglassed in an aluminum plug. We then filled that shaft with black powder, aluminum powder and some other powder pilfered from our chem class. Glassed that arrow inside a good arrow. We then ground all but the last 2 threads off of a blunt head and shortened the portion by about a quarter inch. We razored off the tips of strike anywhere matches and stuck them in the arrow insert. Carefully we fitted the tip and gave it a wrap of tape. Then my friend shot it at the garage. He unknowingly did this as his father was driving by. When the arrow hit it exploded with a tremedous bang knocking a rather large whole in the wall. His father caught us and whipped or butts with extreme prejudice.

Dutch-
Yes, I think everyone in Pemberton knows at least one Van Loon! They are a pretty big family here.

Have you ever visited here? How are you related?

I forgot to mention bringing .22's to school and throwing rocks at them...Barely got away without the police being called!

Me and my cousin had lots of project when i was kid. The best were to take old diesel or gas barrels wich only had a little left in the bottom, fill them with some more gas or diesel and roll them in to a large bonfire and enjoy the blast.

I also "helped" the forest owners cutting treas with pentylcord and dynamite. The pines took of like missiles. I had good acess to explosives since my old man was an officer and had dynamite at home for construction purposes. My cousine got hold of a thank mine and fired it in his fathers forest, there were not many trees left at that spot. The blast was enormous, which the entire village could confirm.

I also used to blow up wasp nests with dynamite, wasps flew everywhere in small parts. Exposives are good fun to play with.

Not that it is dangerous, but throwing a 22Lr hard at a rock will make them go off most times.

I think I'll confine my stories to that one.

Johan, you bring back memories!!

In North Carolina the pine forests have thick needle beds with soft loam type dirt beneath. Just right for ground wasps. Raising hogs on the land was rough as you never knew if you would step into a nest. BAD NEWS. My dad would take a 1/2 gallon can of gas, burn the nest, then toss a stick of the DuPont 50/50 nitroglycerin based dynamite on the nest to open the hole.

We raised hogs commercially so we had at times as many as 5,000 on the property. This means at least two hogs per month died from unknown cuases and had to be buried. A real chore as the ground is sand and water table only four feet down. One day we found a hog dead, around 60 pounds, been dead couple of days in August heat so it was bloated. Dad was feeling lazy so he put ten sticks (5 pounds)of dynamite under it.
I am sure everyone here knows what a dead rotten animal smells like. Have you ever breathed vaporized rotten pork? After a huge BOOOP, a cloud of stinking, vaporized dead pig wafted through the pens and caught us. Not pretty. Last time we did that. Took a week or so before goblets of matter stopped dripping from trees in that area. Live and learn huh?

Every Fourth of July dad would have guests over. We would cook out on the grill in the yard. While he was "lubricating" the guests I would run down to the woods and get a few sticks of dynamite out of the magazine and bring them into the garage. My dad would sneak in and cut them into 3 pieces, not enough to break windows but damn they were loud. He would crimp a 6 inch fuse into the cap and stick the thing into his back pocket. For several years no-one picked up on this! He would be talking to some people, reach back and pull out the little piece of dynamite and stick the fuse into the charcoal, as soon as it lit he'd toss it over the garage into the garden. BOOOOM!! Man I loved the Fourth of July.

Oh, we lived in the sticks, our nearest neighbor about half a mile away.
Man I would have loved to have seen that mine go off.

Blowing up a dead pig? Sounds unkosher to me! But, reminds of something which the Swiss farmers were doing until recently: when a wandering cow would die 'way up in the mountains where retrieval was too hard and expensive to accomplish, the farmers would stuff the cow with dynamite and redistribute the problem. Eventually, the legislators got wind of the practice and their sense of order was offended. Last I remember, they were legislating against it. Wonder if they remembered to appropriate the funds the farmers needed to haul out their dead cows...
Paladin

Age 15, Improvised shot for shotshells. Got some #14 shot, from runner's ankle weights. It worksed well, broke clay birds and killed black birds very well. It also leaked out of poor crimps. That makes for bloopers. Well my partner at crime was shooting our ankle weight reloads in an ideal grade LC Smith. A real nice 95% gun too. Had a "dud" and put another one in behind the wad now stick in the barrel. Yep, burst the barrel. Cut his arm with the flying bits of barrel, scared him half to death. It went something like, boom!, scream!!!, drop shotgun, look confused.

Whoa, does this ever bring back memories.

About reloading, when my dad first got his 7mm Rem mag, he and his brother loaded up some real hot loads with IMR4831. When the went to load the second batch the got some H4831 not knowing it was different. They also decided to load a little hotter. I was standing behind dad when he shot the first one. It made an extra loud boom and a huge muzzle flash. Dad got his first scope bite. Case head seperation. Had to use a hammer to open the bolt.

Now for stupid things I did as a kid: My cousin and I regularly poured gasoline down groundhog holes and covered them with wet feed sacks. They would run out and we'd kill them with sticks. There were a whole maze of holes in a large rockpile in a sinkhole. We had poured maybe 20 gallons in a dozen or so holes and covered them. Nothing was coming out. We found some more holes and poured in another 5 gallons. I turned around in time to see my little brother striking a match over a hole. The explosion was tremendous! It rained rocks for at least 30 seconds! How in the world none of us were hurt is beyond me.

When I was about 16 I made a huge pipe bomb out of a foot long piece of well casing. I threaded both ends and drilled a hole in one cap, filled it full of a mixture of smokeless powder, black powder, laundry detergent, and amonium nitrate fertilizer. I stole a blasting cap out of my uncles shed. I knew the explosion would be huge and very dangerous, so I waited until my parents were gone and I took a tractor and posthole digger way down in the woods on the neighbors property and bored a hole about 4 feet deep. I put the bomb in the hole and ran the wire about 100 yards up the hill and got behind a huge oak tree. When I set that thing off, it blew down trees and rained rocks for ever. It took a big chunk out of the tree I was behind. The crater was about 6 feet deep and 15 feet in diameter. Scared me half to death and the last time I played with bombs. A year or two later dad went looking for a cow that had got out. When he came back all he asked is if I knew anything about a pond down there. He had to have known just about all of his gunpowder was gone.
It is a wonder my brothers and 6 or 7 of our cousins and I ever lived through our childhood.

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To be old and wise.....first you have to be young and stupid!

great stories guys! lot's of interesting experimentation happens during childhood!
When I started this thread, I was thinking of stupid reloading stuff, but the explosives stories are great. Wish I had thought of them whe I was a kid.
One last explosive story though, I remember my dad and his brother, who owned a small farm, dropping a cherry bomb into the gas tank of a junked 50 something oldsmobile...
flipped that sucker over.
I not only wonder how we survived childhood, but how many of our fathers survived long enough to reproduce!!!

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Don't tread on me!
Pennsylvania Frank

You realize that any of this will get us arrested on terrorism carges.
When I was in college you could still buy dynamite by signing for it at country general stores. There was one at a place called Marvin--but I'll leave that alone. It was for "blowing stumps" if anybody needed to know. The Viet Nam war ended all that.
When I was in high school our chemistry teacher taught us to make NHI3 by mixing Iodine and ammonium hydroxide. When it's liquid it's safe but when poured on steps and dried to crystals it will make you think the sole has blown off your shoe. Got suspended over that.
All the cannon and Acetylene stories brought back lots of memories. The Western Auto store had all the carbide we needed.

[This message has been edited by Dr. Duc (edited 10-26-2001).]

This is the neatest and most fun threads I've seen in YEARS! I'd almost forgotten some of the stuff, and am dang lucky I didn't have access to some others!

I shot the choke out of my old shotgun with those "super special" BB loads, and did some of the explosive things. I think some of these stories show CLEARLY why kids and fireworks are DANGEROUS! Heck, even just a fuse gives us ideas! Maybe surviving some of these things contributed to our "ten feet tall, bulletproof and immortal" self images/illusions?

The scariest thing ever, though, was a buddy of mine (the one who blew up his neighbor's work shed one day, but acted mystified as to the cause when queried after the incident) who decided to build a "model rocket" for his science project. He went scrounging, and found various tubings of different diameters and lengths, and being the sensible type, collected them all for decision making later.
Naturally, he took some that was WAY too large, but just looked like it ought to reside at his house rather than the dump.
After getting it all together, he began perusing his collection of potential parts for this "science project." Well, those big pipes just kept speaking to him in that tongue that only kids can hear, and slowly, the rationale began to form. "Why if a little one is good, then a big one ought to be better," right? Of COURSE! Why EVERYONE knows THAT!

Sooooooooooo, he confidently and brimming with smiles, smirks, grins and slowly growing mania, selected the TWO biggest pieces of tubing he had. THIS was NOW to be a TWO-STAGE rocket!

This was starting to get really INTERESTING!
Now, he had to go to the library and read all the stuff he could find on rockets, and how they can be "staged" and such. He got blueprints for the nozzles, and the neighbor (the one who later lost the shed) was a machinist, and given the plans, he built the nozzles VERY precisely. They HAD to be precise just to work.

Long story short (at the expense of a LOT of "interesting" tidbits here & there), he got the fins on, and straight. Got the nozzles in and square. Got the staging worked out.
NOW, it was time to order the propellant.

Back to the library. A selection was made, and calls made to scientific supply houses.
WOW! THAT was a LOT of MONEY to make enough for both stages!

Trip to Dad. A more pious-looking lad was never to beseech his Father, and though his Dad KNEW better, he must have hoped against hope that this experiment's being under the auspices and direction of the science teacher would keep him from having to have to go to Mom and make another kid to replace the one standing before him. My buddy got the O.K. and the $$$$$.

Dr. Frankenstein must have looked tame next to my buddy as he mixed up those chemicals in small batches "just to be safe." The well prepared and mixed chemicals were installed in the rocket. The ignition had already been worked out, using a car battery. A stabilizing rod of sufficient length and diameter was found and the Day of Fame and Fortune approached.

Now this rocket was nearly 8 feet tall and nearly 8 inches in diameter, and this was back in the mid sixties - and the Cold War.

The science teacher got his first look at the rocket when my buddy brought it to school.
"Geeeeez!" I'm sure he thought, "You don't reckon.........." Well, he decided THIS project might just merit some professional examination, so he called the Air Force. A couple of AF folks came to the school to view this "science project." After only a glance, and subsequent cursory inspection, they decreed that under NO circumstances was THIS rocket to be fired off! Radar, Early Warning Systems and what not being what they are, they were DEFINITELY sure THIS rocket just MIGHT set off WWIII, and spoil all the good fun of the "science project." The rocket was disabled there on the spot! I guess they'd heard about my buddy's reputation for "obeying" directions of adults and "authority figures?"

For a couple of weeks, my buddy continued to beseech the AF to let him just fire the top, smaller section of the rocket. Finally, they relented, and let him fire just that part.
It may well be "space trash" to this date for all any of us knows. After he saw what just the top part did, he himself emptied the rocket fuel, and destroyed the rocket himself. It just wouldn't have been fitting for anyone else to do it.

Well, folks, if any of you have a smart, stong willed child, and he EVER comes to you looking pious, and requesting $$$ to buy rocket fuel, for God's sake DON'T DO IT!!!!!
One close call is ENOUGH!!!!!

Oh! The remaining rocket fuel did NOT go to waste, and as fortune would have it, noone got blown up ........ that we know of, anyway.

quote:

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Originally posted by Wstrnhuntr:
We had yet another version of the tennis ball cannon. We would take 4 or 5 tin cans and cut out the tops and bottoms except for the last one, punch some holes in the top of it and a touch hole in the side, duct tape them all together, add a little gasoline and wing it around a bit to turn the gas to vapor, toss in a ball, throw down a match and you may or may not see that ball again.

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Yep, I remember that one! Our college gunners got so accurate that we could hurl that tennis ball from our eight floor dormitory in an open window of the womens dorm next door!

My best friend had a black powder pistol (I don't remember what caliber). He liked to let friends shoot it thusly. He would fill the barrel completely with powder, plug the end with a patched ball, and tell the shooter to kneel so as to sit on their right heel, left knee forward. Most of the flames went straight up, the pistol propelling the shooter into half back summersault.

Hasn't everyone made a tennis ball cannon? My friends and I made all kinds till one day when we found a 6 foot piece of old steam pipe that was just the right size to jam a tennis ball down. We welded a piece of steel on the bottom, since we knew steam pipe could take alot of pressure, we knew it had the capacity for a pound of ffg. Luckily I was smart enuff to make the suggestion that we bury the pipe atleast 5 feet straight down into the ground, a pit more welding and a drill we had a copper tube attached to the side and a piece of wick that fed into the hole.
It took us a cople hours to dig the hole, and pack the pipe in nice and snug. We filled the sucker up, rammed the tennis ball down with a broom and dropped a match down the copper tube. After about 5 seconds after hiding behind some hastely made shield we still heard nothing, when we all looked... BOOM.

After the smoke cleared we looked around to see a crater the size of a swimming pool and each other brown with dirt. It took us about 10 times longer to fill the whole back in. Of course we wheren't allowed to talk during this task, as our asses where in deep enough trouble.

Current calculations place that old tennis ball on a wide eliptical orbit around Pluto.

I'm sitting here laughing my ass off! Before I begin a botanical tidbit must be thrown in. Locust is a very dense hard wood that grows wild in Appalachia and it good for only one thing...fence posts. It takes a chainsaw with carbide tipped blades to cut it almost and a millenia for it to rot.!

An acquaintance of mine's brother and his friend duct taped 9 sticks of dynamite around a locust fence post and sent that sucker in orbit on one 4th of July around midnight. The concussion shattered windows for a square mile!

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BH1

"Did you use excessive force?---I HIT IT WITH EVERYTHING I HAD!

Ok, a little older but still stupid. Couple of guys working graveyards (the shift) with too much time on there hands. Pigeons in the shop are getting annoying. Let's see, scrap steel pipe, some plate, a magneto, drill a few holes, add a valve and a switch. Connect to acetylene tank (portable of course), and start hunting pigeons. Got a little more bang for the buck then we figured, and the peripheral damage made us decide that cutting it into small pieces and putting it in the scrap bin was the wisest move. They never did figure out how the big time clock under the eaves ended up dead. Oops. - Dan

When I was an 8th grader, I got the bright idea to make myself a home made bomb. So I took several packs of fire crackers and cut each fire cracker open and dumped the powder into a large cup. After working for the better part of a day, I had a pretty good sized pile of powder. I then put all the powder in a small Gatorade jar. I used a nail to punch a hole in the cover so I could insert a fuse. I took the bottle over to my friends house an we lit it on his parents gravel driveway and backed up about 20 feet. Unfortunately we were not far enough away. When it blew up, we were both sprayed with rocks and glass and I still have a scar on my left hand from the shrapnel.

A few months later we started taking the cardboard tubes from the center of toilet paper rolls to use as explosives. We would fold one end over and duct tape it shut and fill the rest of the tube with powder, insert a fuse and tape the whole works really tight with a lot of duct tape. When these blew, it would make a small crater in the back yard. My dad always thought that the dog was digging those holes in the back yard! :^)

[This message has been edited by Al Smith (edited 12-24-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Al Smith (edited 12-24-2001).]

I have to get in on this, I wish I had thought of a lot of this stuff myself. My buddy and I used to take a section of 3/4 in pipe, threaded on one end and capped. We drilled a 1/16 hole in the cap. We clamped the pipe in a vice and carried our "cannon" to my farm pond. We were about 12 or 13, I think. Anyway, we would pour a little black powder in our pipe, pack in some news paper, and then load it with anything we could find, nuts bolts, fish sinkers, etc. We would line up on a frog in the water, put a firecracker fuse in the hole, light it and run behind a big tree. We blew the hell out of a few frogs until we ran out of firecracker fuses. My buddy decided to roll up a piece of newspaper real small with a little gunpowder sprinkled inside. I told him that I didn't think he would have time to light it and get away, but he tried it anyway. He stuck the paper in the hole in the cap, put a match to it. WOOOSH BOOM!! It went off in about 1/20 of a sec. My buddy still had his face down there sighting down the pipe when it went off. He was not hurt to bad. His folks had to take him to the doc, to get about 20-40 little specks of black powder removed from his face, that had blew back out that fuse hole. I laughed my ass off when it happened, my buddy was not amused. We played with black powder for years after that, but we were more selective with our fuses. All this was about 40 years ago.

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Razorbacker

What really makes this one hilarious is that I was about 28yrs. old (old enough to know better?) when I pulled this stunt! I was squirrel hunting with a sweet little Thompson Center .36 "Seneca". Things were slow and I was getting bored soooooo---- I tried a little "experiment". I took a stick and made a hole in the dirt. I poured a healthy charge of 3f into the hole, trickling a trail of powder about a foot or so away from it to act as a fuse. You remember how ol' Dan'l Boone did that don't ya? He'd touch of the trail of powder, and it would slooooooowly fizzle and burn whilst ever one would run for cover right? Riiiiiight! Well any way I'm sitting there in the fence row trying to light off the powder with my cigarette. I wasn't having any luck so I leaned over and gently blew on the now glowing end of the cigarette. I mean I have my face about 18" away from about 200grs. of 3f blowing on this cigarette right? Riiiiight! Well needless to say, the trail of powder shorrrrrre didn't "fizzle" like ol' Dan'l's did Luckily I was wearing glasses, and my eyebrows did grow back in a few weeks.

[This message has been edited by wildcat junkie (edited 12-25-2001).]

[This message has been edited by wildcat junkie (edited 12-25-2001).]

One of the funniest things I've ever seen was some years ago when a friend and I were waiting in ambush for Bambi. Friend was sitting across a wide ravine, Bambi was nowhere to be seen. Hours passed, boredom set in. I was idly watching in Friend's direction, when I noticed a goodly little mushroom-shaped cloud rising from near him. Shortly, I heard an agitated chittering and chipping from a chipmunk over near the site. This noise continued for almost an hour, non-stop. Quite irritating after a while.

Eventually, I ambled over to see how Friend was doing and to roust him so we could leave. I found him weak with silent laughter.

Turned out that he had become bored, too. He noticed a chipmunk den nearby, so he dumped a goodly amount of black powder from his powder horn into the den, laid an ignition-trail, and lit it. Worked just like in the movies: zipped up to the den, entered, and blew up inside, rearranging the den quite a bit. The resident of the den was unbelievably "pissed" and sat just out of reach nearby, cussing and venting a steady stream of chipmunk invective at my friend until finally going to hide when I showed up.

Wish my Friend had been able to video the situation. I do not think I've ever heard so small an animal so bent out of shape for so long.

OK, stupid stuff

1.) 1984: Showed my new girlfriend (now my wife) a rocket made from some old H-570 and a propane cylinder with a drilled out valve taped to a stick, lit with a home made fuse (KNO3 and rolled paper towel). Lit the fuse and ran. It fired the powder through a 3/4 pine board, flew about 200 feet in the air SO QUICKLY I NEVER SAW IT MOVE!! and exploded with a hefty boom. At the time I was running across the field trying to both look and run at the same time.

2.) Sheared the pin from my reloader Jr. press in about 1974 while (at age 11) trying to cram more bullseye into an 'o6 case with a cast bulled expander die. It took 2 of us to push hard enough, near the top of the stroke. Making rocket engines. (they didn't work very well...)

3.) 1978: Made a rocket from paper towel tube, with an estes "D" engine and a couple of crimped over 'o6 cases full of black powder. The ejection charge from the engine lights them through the primer hole. Brought my sister and my niece (age 3) out to see. Rocket flew crooked, hit the ground, fizzled around, took back off, flew RIGHT IN FRONT OF US, landed in the top of a fir tree, fizzled around, flew back down, hit the ground at about 30 yards and expolded. She was not impressed.

1972: Age 9, found 3 cases of blasting caps and fuse upstairs in our farm shed. It was supposed to be gone with the dynamite, but was not. Taped them 3 at a time to wooden arrows, placed a 1 INCH fuse (5 seconds), drew back while someone else lit the fuse (BALL OF CAPS IN FRONT OF MY FACE AND TOUCHING MY LEFT HAND) COUNTED TO THREE (so the arrow would be highest when it exploded) and released. Man, that one still gives me the creeps, must have done it 3 dozen times if I did it once.

Many, many other tales, maybe later I'll write them down. I was a lucky kid, can still see and write.

Wes

You guys are giving me some grate ideas, thanks!! (I rilly don't need 2 eyes.. do i?)

Well one veerystupid thing was my duct tape 12ga. I came up with this idea that making a shotgun from duct tape would be the altimit test of that wundurfull product. So I maid a 10" barel by roling tape around a wad with the sticky side out, then tape it on the outside. I made several sections like this then atached them. I made a chamber as part of this, and then got to work on the ignition. I tryed to use a nail and a close-pin a the hammer. I tryed this and it didn't have enuff power to start the primer, so i ripped this off of the "gun".
I disied that the next best way to fire it was to shoot the primer with my Daisy. I got behind a rock, so that i could just see the back of the shell. I think it is worth menching that there was nothing holding the shell it exeped for the fact that the chamber was tite and sticky and I was going to use a shell i had removed half the powder and half of the shot form, but insed disided to for for the rem feild load. So i shot the back of the shell with BB's. I was 6-7 feet away so i didn't hit it the first shot (i think it was the 4th or 5th).
I sounded like any shot gun. I could hear the shot hiting trees some distens off. The wad was sideways in the beral, it had gut stuck on some imprfetions in the beral. Other than that the thing was fine! The shell i relized later was probly going faster that the shot, its litter and not held by anything, and that was pointing allmost right at me. I never did find the shell but I'm quite shore i would have been killed if it hit me in the head.

The vary next weekend i dised that I had to try agen. this time no bird shot but a stack of dimes and a lot of powder, I wanted to see this thing blow up! So i put some pine bords 3 feet infront of it and shot at the primer. I shot the primer and it didn't go off. I was somewat P.Oed but at least i didn't kill my self. I gess somethin must have killed the primer when i added some power to the load.

I have tryed to make some muzzle loaders with pens and smokless powder using spaklers as fuses but with not sucsess. I have allso made wooden guns but havent tessed them... yet

I allso made exploding pellets way back when i was a kid (last week, I'm 16)I pushed some powder, form roles of caps for cap guns, into the head of a lead pellet. I filled the back with epoxy or white out and shot it at something. SNAP!! and a little flash. Next I tryed adding some smokless powder . I shot it at a magazen. There was a notisible char mark. I was exprimenthing with ways to keep the powder in, i used a peace of #8 bird shot cover with epoxy or whit out in the back of the skert with sucsess. I then tryed to solder the bird shot in (with the SLess and cap powder allredy in it) Just at the seod i disided that i sould get some safty glasses i got a drip of soder to fall on top of the shot. The shot flew just a few inches, but the liquid salder went flying a few inches to the right of my face and it was going fast.

One favoret past time is blowing-up disposible lighters. I found that you could get them for 3 for a buck at the dollor store. so i got 3 or 4 bucks worth. between me and three of my friends we must have had 30. We mest with the ajustment thing so a 10" flame came out when you lit it, then when they ran low we would make a small fire and put the lighter on top. It would make a nice burst of flame or shoot like a roket is a random diretion (a little danger makes things intoresting) I was able to set one off with one tishew.
Another time (4th of july) i was on a beach as the sun was sting and had a butane lighter and a few bits of paper. I tryed to set it off but insted it started to leak form both ends and it made 2 balls of fire for about 45sec. the were each about 2' in diamiter. Neer the end one went out so i just walked up to it and sparked it back up with my other lighter (probly dumb)

the next dumb thing was with a 2leater botle and a blow torch. I stuck the torch in it for about 8 sec. and then hit the sparker. It works like a rocket with hot gas going out the back and flames, but it only slides across to ground for a few feet (not to exiting).

then there are allways lighter trikes (I'm shore many of you have tryed this). Make your hand into a fist with your indexfinger on top and leave a opening about 1/2"-1" between your indexfinger and your hand. Hold yoru hand as if you were going to poor water into this opening and hold it. Take a lighter and hold down the butten with out sparking it for about 10sec. then light it just abouve the opening. this should light the gas in your hand. If you hold it like that it will keep burning and burn you. So open you hand and there is a berst of flame. this will remove allmost all the hair form your hand (in my mined its worth it) you can open your hand neer a friends face to scare the crap out of them and ... oh ya this is dumb so don't do it.

when i was about 8 I have a little pistle crossbow that used a big red rubberband. A fun little project that my dad helped me biuld. It even had a working triger made out of plexy glass. Me and my cusin filled a spend .22 shell with cap gun caps and put it on the end of a chop stick I had taken form a Chines restront. wee shot it at a rock and it made a amazinly loud nose. Grate fun at the time. I tryed to reperduse this one time when i had a friend over. we made a few. One didn't go off so i pulled the sell off with my teeth. The thing shot a big flame out just as the chop stick got removed. I didn't see much of the flame but from my frieds reaching it must have looked prity cool. I burnd my tung and i'm lucky it didn't shoot down my throght.

I had a big ant hill it a small field neer my house and i had a extra can of hair spray from my spud gun. So i ducg a 10in hole in the ant hill stuck in the hairsptay can and surouded that with paper. I lit the paper and ran for the woods. the thing blew up and the bottom of the can flew about 60 yards and from the sound landed less then 15yards form me (i never found it).

I'll think of more ,or do more, stupid things and add them later.

The sad part is now days young ones would end up in jail if they were caught.

That paper he keeps lighting must be from his spelling book

1. If you lay a W-W 81/2-120 primer (pilfered from your Uncle's reloading equipment) on a rock and hit it with a hammer, it will try to embed the claws of said hammer into your skull. Fortunately, the claws were the curved kind, not the straight ones.

2. Do not have cherry bomb/slingshot (one person pulls the slingshot to full draw, another lights the cherry bomb) battles with others, or:
A. The opponent's cherry bomb might land in your stash of cherry bombs and explode (boy was that loud);
B. The rubber band might break after your partner has lit the fuse leaving you confused and disoriented, especially if you forget to drop everything and run;

3. My uncle once was going to throw a "silver tube" (remember them - similar to an M-80 in violence) at a stray dog that had been barking every night for the past week. At 3 AM, being sleep deprived, he forgot that he'd lit the thing (the dog ran around the corner when he stepped out on the porch, and he was waiting for it to come back) and it blew up a few fingers.

4. A friend who was into black powder hunting once carelessly lit a match near an opened, mostly full one pound can of black powder. He said he could see, like one of those slow motion movie scenes, a burning chunk of the match fly right into the top of the can. The resultant explosion blew out all the windows in his basement.

5. Rich, one of the guys who works with me, has a goofy neighbor kid who's always doing things similar to what have been mentioned in the earlier posts. This past July 4th, he filled a bunch of balloons with acetylene. He put the balloons into a big plastic garbage bag and stopped by Rich's garage to see if he had any material to use for fuses. When he set the garbage bag down on the concrete floor, they exploded (static electricity, I guess). It didn't kill anybody, but, it sure messed up the garage.

R-WEST

Back in the late 60's my friend found a plan to build a home made cannon in a Mechanics Illustrated magazine.Being without cash we improvised some of the major components and ended up with what you would now call a pipe bomb.The pipe being of 3/4" construction was plugged on one end with piece of well fitted wooden dowling and a hole for the fuse was drilled just forward of that.Since as I said our finances were limited we pulled shot from 12ga. shotgun shells for the powder and small nuts,ballbearing, etc. for our projectile.First in order was to get enough powder in the "cannon" to get the best bang for the buck,which would be about the total cost of the project.I was amazing how much powder one could forcefully "JAM" down the barrel.Well the time arrived to test our now completed project,(without cost overuns).We stuck the fuse in the ignition hole and lit the match....nothing...again...nothing.Having used all of the 3" of fuse we confiscated from our last an M-80, I decided that with all my infinite wisdom (and at that age I knew everything anyway) that I would light it directly without a fuse,well the gods were with me that day as it would not light yet another time.Now it was my friends turn (not so lucky) as you woud guess, the last thing any of us saw was the bright flash, the humongus blast, and four teenagers (two were spectators) wandering around deaf and stunned.My friends "ignition finger" had been split down the middle (still has the memorable scar)and the wooden dowl had launch back toward where I was observing and had fragmented into several pieces lodging in both of my legs and the rest exited through my dads outer garage wall and into his 56' F-100.Also my legs looked as if they were seasoned with fresh ground pepper.All any of us could do was stagger around with the same loud ringing in our ears.The county sheriff had arrived and just so happens this was my friends dad.The questioning began which turned out to be a shouting match since all of us were about deaf anyway.Suffice to say you can imagine the fallout from this great adventure.....OH THE MEMORIES.......

[This message has been edited by Hutt (edited 01-01-2002).]

One fourth of July (about '72 or so) I filled a quart mason jar with with about a pint of blue dot and dropped in a lit punk (I was also a lit punk). It shot a 20 ft pillar of fire. Quite spectacular!! Then there was pulling the shot out of 12 ga shells, Tape a BB to the primer, tossing them in the air and watching them go bang.

One time I made a muzzle loader out of a peace of a tree i had cut down. It was abouut 3" in dia. and disided that a 5" sechon would be a great barrel. I drilled a .5" hole all the way thew it. then i made the breach end lager with other drill bits. The chamber cone that i made was about 1" in dim. at back and taperd to the barrel size over about 2". I screwd a peace of wood to cover the breach. I then filled it with a cocktale of shotgun powders i had taked for shells, and a few match heads for the hell of it. I meshed the powder using a spent 30/06. It took 3 sell fulls to fill it to the point I wanted. then i added a small newspaper wad and put a 45HP on top of that.
My mom said she was going to town later that day so i pland to set it off then, but she disided not to go. This gave me time to think about this project. I thoought better of this wooded pipe bomb and disismbled it. The thing may not have worked becous the wood was so wet that the wad of paper was damp when i took it out. If it did work I'm shore some one would have called the cops or i would have injerd my self.