Stupid Shit I've Done With Fireworks

[MT Predator 2,294]

My Grandfather who was a WWII Combat Veteran was a huge fan of fireworks and was born on the 4th of July. Of all of his "War Stories", one that stuck with me was when he was in training somewhere. He was on the second floor of those traditional WWII style barracks, lit and flushed an old school Cherry Bomb down the toilet, flooded the guys downstairs! After he passed away, it became a tradition to light off fireworks on his grave on the 4th, his birthday. My Grandma produced an arsenal of real Cherry Bombs and M80s Grandpa had stashed! I'm pretty sure my Dad still has some of this stuff and lights one or two off each year along with other stuff. I remember my Grandpa every Fourth as he was a big influence in my life and a true Hero from a generation of Heros which we may never see again.

[Sim_Player 1,939]

As a JUVENILE I knew SOMEONE who....

 

loaded a model rocket payload with a home-made CO2-Type Device.

 

It was overloaded, lifting into the air (so slowly that it appeared suspended) before finally exploding 20 ft up. Being 10PM in a neighborhood, it was very loud and bright!!!!

 

There were no injuries or property damage.

Edited July 6, 2013 by Sim_Player

[Spacehog 2,218]

I grew up in CA and GA spending every weekend in an RV at one ATA Trap club or another. Both my mom and her second husband shot competitively. Hence I grew up shooting trap and helping reloading. After they divorced mom and I moved to GA, and I still had several boxes of shells for my 20 guage Stevens. Screwing around one day, I decided I wanted to attempt to make my own M80 since you couldn't buy them anymore. I can't remember how many shells I used, but it was enough powder to fill up ( compressed) a Push pop Ice cream tube. Wrapped the thing with lots of duct tape for compression and made a fuse with rolled scotch tape with a little powder sprinkled on the sticky side.

 

I didn't light it for about a month. When I did it was in the neighborhood in the woods after school one day. Still to this day, I have never heard anything louder. Scared the crap out of me, and every cop in the city was patroling the neighborhood for two days. Knowing what I know now, I am lucky I still have appendages on both hands. This was probaby the second most stupid thing I did. The most stupid thing I ever did involved gasoline, matches and a swift running creek...you can guess the rest.

[Capt Nemo 882]

The statute of limitations is 7 years for ATF related rules.

 

Bottle rocket and roman candle wars, and saturn missile batteries to break them up. We had improvised guns for bottle rockets. My favorite was an old broken plastic tommy gun reciever with the barrel and stock missing. It fit a roman candle perfect, and when the candle was done, I used it for bottle rockets. Shot one whistler out of it that curved up and around the tree I was under. Impact detonated right on the back of my neck where it made a goose egg size area of raw skin. Bottle rockets were better back then. They'd go a good 50 yds or more before exploding unlike the ones today that can't get out of the bottle.

 

Had also built a RPG launcher for skyrockets. 1 1/4" seamless water pipe about 3' long. Clamped a wooden grip to it, and also added a screen to it to protect the eyes when fired. The back was half taped off to prevent the rocket from falling out the back. Light the rocket, shove it in the back, and take aim! 1 oz rockets worked best but never gave much report/stars.

 

And the magazine under my bed isn't Penthouse!

[psl sniper 963]

The most stupid thing I ever did involved gasoline, matches and a swift running creek...you can guess the rest.

Have a nice scar on the back of my hand. 3rd degree burn from a gasoline related "incident".

[siminov 164]

When I first moved to Florida I bought some of the golfball sized mortars and for some dumb reason thought you could launch em like Roman candles. I lit the first one and stood there like an idiot, holding the tube in my hand. The tube blew outta my instantly numbed hand and luckily hit my shin (I say "luckily" cause it could have hit me "somewhere else"). With the tube going the opposite direction the mortar didn't go more than 20ft before going off. Best way I can describe it is like walking into a trailer ball while welding over yer head.

[blkgunlvr 31]

I've kind of "grown out of" fireworks now that I'm over sixty- but I used to LOVE cherry bombs and really mourned their banishment. I discovered that a cherry bomb and my Wham-O plywood slingshot was the best damn combination ever! First attempt, I pulled the bomb all the way back and had my buddy light it. Of course, I let it go immediately, but didn't count on the long fuse burn time. It was mid-afternoon in my back yard, and we lived on a 2-lane 40 mph highway. The cherry bomb arced up and over the house, we ran to the side fence to see it come down and burst just over the hood of a passing car that slammed on the brakes. We hauled ass over the adjoining fences and no-blood, no-foul. But I honed my launch timing technique to get some very nice peak of launch nighttime aerial bursts that made a beautiful white ball of fire with the accompanying thunderclap. In the closely-packed suburban neighborhood, I could also send one three or four houses in either direction to explode 10 feet off the ground in a backyard at 2AM on a summer "sleep out." Ah! I miss those days.

[gunfun 3,931]

We did a 55 gallon trash bag full of Oxygen/Acetylene and dragged it with a long stringline to a board we lit on fire. It left a small crater! Done some off the wall shit with Military pyros and explosives but I won't get into details.

 

I met a guy once in alaska who had been doing that with ballons. Except he would just light the string and release the balloon. His Acetylene tank was in the middle of his shop building ~100'x100'. He had filled 3-4 ballons and was holding them by standing on the strings while he filled the 5th. The balloons rubbed together and made static. It knocked all the sheet metal loose from the building, blew out the windows. Oh and it pushed him out the side window, from aproximately the center of the shop. He broke most of his bones in the process and had severe burns over his whole body. He had scar tissue every where and limited range of motion. From what he said, he had kind of been a body builder before, but was fairly scrawny now because he had lost so much muscle mass while healing, and was unable to do the exercise to rebuild.

 

Anyway, it left an impression on my young mind.

[gunfun 3,931]

As a JUVENILE I knew SOMEONE who....

 

loaded a model rocket payload with a home-made CO2-Type Device.

 

It was overloaded, lifting into the air (so slowly that it appeared suspended) before finally exploding 20 ft up. Being 10PM in a neighborhood, it was very loud and bright!!!!

 

There were no injuries or property damage.

 

I also know 'someone' who participated in a similar thing with a High Velocity brand rocket with extra stick for stability and 3 Seal bombs combined into one. It moved at about 1 FPS, and couldn't really fly. It hovered about 4' above deck creeping sideways. The stick was about 15* off of vertical as it hovered. It needed the ground effect. It eventually cleared the side rail and then hovered above water and went off about 4" from the sleeping area of a Rawson type boat. All people involved were quickly on the only boat in which all the crew were "sleeping."

[kevinfreel 215]

When I was a kid me and a buddy use to attach what I remember being m90s to the nose of a bottle rocket and linking the fuses together and launching them out of a PVC pipe as a shoulder fired rocket. He had a swamp/marsh area in his backyard and they would make a mess when launched into the muck from his deck. Cheap model rockets were fun to if you removed the parachute and added the contents of an extra motor instead. They made a pretty good flash and a decent cloud of smoke 500 feet up

[Capt Nemo 882]

I've also done a radio controlled model rocket and a laser guided one as well. The RC system is nasty if someone gets on the controls while the motor's burning. We had a few go out of control during boost when someone hit one of the controls. They can come right back at you!

 

The lazer guided was tube launched from an old LAW tube and really gunked up the rear aluminium tube. I have never gotten that gunk off the aluminium. They were two stage, and were accurate to within 5' at 500 yards. As I now know, those rockets were DD's at liftoff due to the amount of powder used, but as HS kids, who knew.

 

Loved the senior prank when I was a freshman. They took one of those big rolls of firecrackers and set them in the hallway right outside of the history class rooms. We were watching a film on WW I at the time. When the shooting started on the film, the firecrackers started. Amazingly great audio for a film!!! That is, until the film cut away to scene of diplomats or something, and the booming continued. The hallway was filled with paper casing about 4" deep. Suprizingly, there were only a few small burn marks on the carpet from all that.

 

And then there's the newbie chem teacher! He filled a 6' weather ballon with hydrogen and torched it off in the classroom! Blew out the windows, smashed all the glassware in the next room, knocked out all the false ceiling tiles, set off the sprinklers, and sent 2 kids home to change their shorts.

[6500rpm 670]

I'm not going to go into specifics, but now that I'm older it's hard to believe what I was able to get my hands on as a kid in the early 80's. Mil issue pop (slap) flares, calcium carbide, railway torpedos, blasting caps, the shit just seemed to find me as a teenager. I can only look back and wonder why it was so easy to get back then and be thankful that I had the sense to be cautious.

After learning about tannerite it makes me wonder if that was the railway torpedos were made of,the damn things were stupid loud. If anyone knows, please share as I've always wondered.

 

And oh yeah, wtf are these numb nuts strapping to the hammers...thank god they're wearing their safety bandana!

Edited July 8, 2013 by 6500rpm

[cguiro 29]

Used to light and throw mortars on a frozen lake... there was a dent in the side of my old truck from one that shot at us

[gunfun 3,931]

I'm not going to go into specifics, but now that I'm older it's hard to believe what I was able to get my hands on as a kid in the early 80's. Mil issue pop (slap) flares, calcium carbide, railway torpedos, blasting caps, the shit just seemed to find me as a teenager. I can only look back and wonder why it was so easy to get back then and be thankful that I had the sense to be cautious.

After learning about tannerite it makes me wonder if that was the railway torpedos were made of,the damn things were stupid loud. If anyone knows, please share as I've always wondered.

 

And oh yeah, wtf are these numb nuts strapping to the hammers...thank god they're wearing their safety bandana!

 

I've been told that is very common in Africa and India, and other 3rd world countries by some well traveled friends. They can make the fireworks without needing components like fuses they cannot afford. These guys are doing it in an abnormally dumb way though.

[Voltia 375]

I used to unpack ground fountain style fireworks and stick them in model rockets made for the purpose.

 

They would go off at the apogee and keep going the whole way down.

[Remek 771]

Nothing too crazy here. Roman candle fights, and lit a firecracker with a short fuse (heard ringing for a day). Anything else will remain non-public.

[Shandlanos 1,470]

I've always enjoyed taping two of those ground-blooming flowers together (the tube type that has a jet that causes it to spin) with the jets pointed outward on either end. If you line it up just right, and light the fuses at the same time, the two jets will cause the firework to spin up about 8-10 feet into the air before exploding.

[MT Predator 2,294]

 

We did a 55 gallon trash bag full of Oxygen/Acetylene and dragged it with a long stringline to a board we lit on fire. It left a small crater! Done some off the wall shit with Military pyros and explosives but I won't get into details.

 

I met a guy once in alaska who had been doing that with ballons. Except he would just light the string and release the balloon. His Acetylene tank was in the middle of his shop building ~100'x100'. He had filled 3-4 ballons and was holding them by standing on the strings while he filled the 5th. The balloons rubbed together and made static. It knocked all the sheet metal loose from the building, blew out the windows. Oh and it pushed him out the side window, from aproximately the center of the shop. He broke most of his bones in the process and had severe burns over his whole body. He had scar tissue every where and limited range of motion. From what he said, he had kind of been a body builder before, but was fairly scrawny now because he had lost so much muscle mass while healing, and was unable to do the exercise to rebuild.

 

Anyway, it left an impression on my young mind.

We quit doing it when a trash bag ignited from static electricity while filling. The exploding bag shredded with so much force, it tore through a guy's BDU pants and lacerated his legs.