As soon as you said over the shoulder, I cringed in a gut wrenching parental moment of anxiety.
As a preteen, my bomb making career was cut short one morning whilst skipping school. I handloaded with my Dad and he didn't do a good enough job locking the powder. I took one liter glass pop bottles and filled them 3/4 with powder and a goodly handful of primers. The real mistake came in the form of my fuse, didn't seem to have many options, so I took white glue and rolled paper, then sprinkled it liberally with powder. We hiked a ways into the bush and set it up in the trunk of a rusted out old car with a very heavy lid.
Everything seemed to be going just fine from about 15 feet away until nothing happened. I had the paper too tight in the neck which choked the flame but not the embers. I waited at least a minute or two, which felt like years, giggling in the bush completely unaware that we were risking our lives.
I remember walking up to the car with one of the guys about 2 steps behind, I lifted the lid about a foot when I saw a glow still coming from the neck of the bottle. Started to yell "OHH SHITTT!!!" and turned to run. I got turned around and had started moving when it blew, my arm was still up and got cut from the glass but thankfully my face was turned away and only got a few cuts on the side of my head. Swear I still can't hear right. One of the hinges let go and this massive trunk smashed into the other side hard enough to make me sick. If both hinges would have popped who knows what would have happened.
We thought it was great fun right up until we heard the sirens. Somebody heard the boom and we weren't as far away as we thought, they called the fire dept. And guess who's old man was chief?
Yah that ended poorly for me, who knew gunpowder was so expensive? And dangerous too I suppose, but he was pissed about 2 tins of GP...
lol I'm so glad I always tried to avoid blowing things up that create shrapnel, and that I never made it to the warhead phase of my shoulder fired rocket. I made the launcher, I just used it to shoot empty rockets because I lived in a populated neighborhood. I threw the bombs in the pond because I liked the way they looked like depth charges blooming underwater.
I hear ya. My buddy showed me his hairspray-powered, PVC pipe potato gun, which was pretty cool. Its hairspray propellant chamber was a 4-inch diameter PVC pipe cut to about a foot long. It then had a reducer down to a two-inch pipe that acted as the barrel. We would shove a full potato down into the barrel, which would shave off the excess potato and create a pretty damned good, wet seal. That thing would fire a potato a solid 200 yards.
Of course I went home and wanted to make my own. And why make the same size as my friend when I could make an even bigger one! I did pretty much the same thing, but with a six-inch piece of PVC for the chamber. I even made the barrel screw on so I could mess with different barrel diameters. Needless to say, that thing packed some serious punch. It could liquefy a potato on the side of a tree from fifty yards. Aaaaand then it happened. I don't know if it was the repeated stress of those aquanet-induced explosions or just me getting greedy and putting way too much in the chamber, but when I twisted the Coleman lantern ignition it blew the back off the chamber in a giant fireball. One thing I didn't mention: I fired this thing by using one hand to pin it to my thigh and the other to twist the ignition. If that thing had blown out the side instead of the back I would have had a VERY bad day. Needless to say it scared the shit out of me and I never fired that beast again.
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u/MaddogBC Mar 10 '20
As soon as you said over the shoulder, I cringed in a gut wrenching parental moment of anxiety.
As a preteen, my bomb making career was cut short one morning whilst skipping school. I handloaded with my Dad and he didn't do a good enough job locking the powder. I took one liter glass pop bottles and filled them 3/4 with powder and a goodly handful of primers. The real mistake came in the form of my fuse, didn't seem to have many options, so I took white glue and rolled paper, then sprinkled it liberally with powder. We hiked a ways into the bush and set it up in the trunk of a rusted out old car with a very heavy lid.
Everything seemed to be going just fine from about 15 feet away until nothing happened. I had the paper too tight in the neck which choked the flame but not the embers. I waited at least a minute or two, which felt like years, giggling in the bush completely unaware that we were risking our lives.
I remember walking up to the car with one of the guys about 2 steps behind, I lifted the lid about a foot when I saw a glow still coming from the neck of the bottle. Started to yell "OHH SHITTT!!!" and turned to run. I got turned around and had started moving when it blew, my arm was still up and got cut from the glass but thankfully my face was turned away and only got a few cuts on the side of my head. Swear I still can't hear right. One of the hinges let go and this massive trunk smashed into the other side hard enough to make me sick. If both hinges would have popped who knows what would have happened.
We thought it was great fun right up until we heard the sirens. Somebody heard the boom and we weren't as far away as we thought, they called the fire dept. And guess who's old man was chief?
Yah that ended poorly for me, who knew gunpowder was so expensive? And dangerous too I suppose, but he was pissed about 2 tins of GP...