Oh man, putting natural gas into garbage bags sounds sooo cool. Wish I would have thought of something like that when I was a kid. When I was a kid in the 50s, we lived in the country and didn't have natural gas. What I did was make pounds and pounds of gun powder. Boy did I have fun with that. It is a wonder I have all my arms and eye sight. Once I set off 4oz of powder under a 5 gallon paint can. You know the heavy steel ones. When it exploded, the can went about
100 feet into the air. The can was all domed. What fun. I hear a knocking at the front door now. Probably the ATF. What fun. Gene Is there anyone else a crazy as I was? Oh, I forgot, I almost set our house on fire too.
Sounds like a good idea! I once built a tissue paper hot air balloon that got a little close to its heat source and caught fire. Pretty spectacular! You might try an accelerant of some type on the tissue to make it burn a little faster...
I worked in an auto repair shop years ago. The owner used to take soda cans and fill them with a mixture of oxygen and acetylene and ignite them with the torch he used to fill them. The oxygen/acetylene mixture would launch a soda can a hundred feet or so. He used to have great fun doing this but it all came to a screeching halt when the oxygen/acetylene mixture exceeded the strength of the soda can. Luckily, we only had to pull one piece of aluminum pop can out of his fore head, he was trying REAL hard to be a Darwin winner.
I used to tie M-80's to a rock, light 'em and drop into a 30 gallon trash can filled with water. First couple were great! About 20 gallons shot straight up! Third one blew out the seam:-( Needless to say, I bought mom a new trash can.
My brother & I tied a load of string to a Co2 cartridge, poured lighter fluid on it & lit it. Wow, it shot about 75 or so yards away, went through a neighbors window, screen, inner window, and imbedded into her kitchen cabinet! That one cost us big time! Least nobody got hurt. --
Jim L.
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Using - Virtual Access(OLR), ZAP 4.0, & WinXP Pro w/SP1
That one sounds like fun. If I were to do it I would build a stabilizing body for the cartridge to attach to. Probably something with fins on the end so it could shoot up like a rocket. I wonder how high it would go. I wonder if there is any guarantee where it would split...
A friend of mine found a .45 bullet but had no gun to shoot it from. So he did the next best thing. He put it on the end of his BB gun and wrapped a piece of duct tape around the end of the barrel and the shell casing to hold it in place. Then he turned his head away, pointed it in the air and shot a BB to hit the end of the shell. Sure enough, it fired. He never found the bullet, but he got a piece of shrapnel from the shell embedded in his thigh. He didn't want to tell his mother because he would get in trouble, so he got a lot of ice to numb the area and tried to perform surgery on himself with an X-Acto knife to remove the fragment. I think it ended up staying in there because he couldn't make himself cut into his own leg.
I grew up in south Texas right next to the Mexican border. We used to be able to get giant firecrackers in Mexico. These were made from folded newspaper and were triangular, like the little paper footballs that schoolboys play with in study hall. The major difference is that the firecrackers came in several sizes ranging from large (about 5 inches long) to enormous (about 24 inches long). They had long fuses protruding from the long edge. Believe me, you don't want one of these things with a short fuse! We had a concrete block (the kind with two large holes, for building walls) lying on its side in a field, with the holes pointing up. We put a medium firecracker in the hole and put an old hubcap on top of it. This thing blew up with a boom that sounded like a large bomb going off. The hubcap flew about a hundred feet high, but then we noticed that the concrete block was in several pieces. Another entertaining feature of these firecrackers is the large cloud of shredded paper that results from the explosion.
When I moved to Missouri in 1996 I brought a few of these Mexican firecrackers with me. We went out to my uncle's farm in Kansas for the
4th of July. My uncle was about 75 years old at the time, a country boy from the Great Depression era. As a preacher he used to take the church youth group places riding in the back of his pickup truck, back when nobody thought twice about those things. He also told me about a sausage breakfast they once had as a church youth fundraiser back in the good old days. He procured a hog, shot it in the head, and the kids turned it into sausage. If you did that today you would probably get sued. Anyway, his farm was just the place for a giant Mexican firecracker. We put it in an old defunct beehive and even got the explosion on video. It rained chunks of wood for several seconds. Actually the best part of the video is where you see my nephew running for his life after he lights the fuse.
That's a good one! I never did this kind of stuff because I didn't live in town. We made homemade gunpowder instead. We never got it to explode, though. It would mostly just fizzle. We used to roll it in paper with clumps of dog hair, about the size of a cigarette, and light one end to make a really nasty smoke/stink bomb. My brother threw one out the school bus window, but it landed right at the feet of the teacher on patrol duty, so he got suspended. Another favorite thing to do out in the country was to put a bottle rocket head-down in a fresh cow pie. It would have about a quarter inch sticking in, and the rest sticking up. Then we would call a town-dwelling friend over to watch the spectacle, and light the fuse. Back in those days the bottle rockets actually had some oomph to them and were powerful enough to create quite a substantial cow pie blast all the way up to face height on a 12 year old.
As a young kid ( I'm still a kid, just not young anymore ), my friends and I would pull the man hole covers off the sewer in the middle of the street at night. We would pour maybe a quart of gasoline into the man hole, splashing it onto the sides, not into the water at the bottom. Then we would put the cover back in place and go play for half an hour or so. We'd come back and one of us would light a match and drop it into a hole in the cover. I seem to remember the neighborhood record for blowing man hole covers was about
If you want to shoot video that looks like the real thing, make a flammable body filled with helium. Hydrogen burns with an invisible flame, so you couldn't see it in the Hindenburg film anyway. Play the video back at low speed to make the small blimp look like the full sized fire.
Anybody ever burn a ping pong ball? That's pretty spectacular. Maybe the Hindenburg model should be made of whatever those are made of. Wow, I wonder what it would look like if a ping pong ball factory had a fire...
I did something similar, except with calcium carbide. I'd put a piece of the calcium carbide in the can, with a little bit of water. I'd put the plastic cap back on, but with a small pin hole in the top. Then I'd take a long stick with a lighter attached to the end and dangle it over the lid. KABOOM. :)
Sounds like my homemade rocket. I had a left over Model Rocket engine. Rather than buying a new rocket, I glued carbord fins to it. Well it went straight up for about 10 ft, and then it changed directions and went horizontal right through the neighbor's window.
On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:21:29 -0500, Robbie and Laura Reynolds wrote:
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Robbie, boy does this bring back memories. I'll bet I know why your black powder would not explode. I mixed mine with water and cooked it until it was dry. Let me tell you how I almost set our house on fire. I use to experiment with all sorts of formulas for gun powder. To test the power of the batch, I would take a small pinch of the powder, put it on the basement floor and set it alight with a match. I could tell how powerful it was by the way it went off and the residue it left. Any way, I had set the can of dry new powder on the basement floor and took a pinch and (like a dummy) put it on the floor next to the open can of new gun powder and set it off. As you know, it sparks and smokes like crazy. As I set it off, a spark went into the open can of powder and it went up like the biggest roman candle you have ever seen. I am talking about a whole pound of black gun powder. The powder flame went up to the ceiling and clear across the basement. With in seconds the powder can was red hot so I couldn't take it outside. (We had an outside door to the basement) I was terrified. I knew it wouldn't explode because it wasn't contained but the whole basement (it seemed to me) was full of flames and smoke. But thank goodness it didn't catch anything on fire. I think it took only about ten or fifteen seconds to burn the whole pound. (Good batch) To this day I can still hear my Mom calling down to the basement and ask if I was burning anything. The basement was so full of powder smoke I could hardly see. Good thing she didn't come down to the basement or I would have lost my driving rights for life. The dumb things we do as kid. These are the things I did when I wasn't flying my rubber powered planes.
Gee thanks Dan, if safety wasn't my main concern I wouldn't be worried. :) The LX90 scope will allow me to make it go much higher then the naked eye can see. -- I believe this scope is the equivelent of a 2000 mm camera lense -- I'm also using ham radio frequencies, which theoretically, should give me grater range. I need to check legalities yet and see if I can get away with having someone who has a license to do fireworks shows would meet legal requirements. Concern 1) Safety, Concern 2) legalities, Concern 3) Safety.
73 de AB***
Courtney
And yes, I got my extra class the hard way when the code requirement was 20 wpm.
We did an experiment in our science class once, using hyrdrolisis, we separated water into hydrogen and oxygen and filled them into balloons. They both exploded with a pretty good bang, I can't remember which one was louder. When we filled a balloon with 50 percent hydrogen and 50 percent oxygen the explosion shattered a window in the room, and caused the teachers from other classrooms to come running in to find out if everybody was OK.
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