The BIG BANG
I may have mentioned that I used to live in Holland. I was in a wee village with a population of about 50 people and 2 horses.

At the time I was about ten years old and used to hang about with the local Dr's son. His parents took a very laissez-faire approach to parenting and basically allowed their 4 sons to grow up as highly intelligent yet feral children.

Anyway, my mate was the youngest and arguably daftest of the brothers. He and I decided one day we were going to build a rocket. Not knowing much about aerodynamics, thrust, or ballistics we just decided to put a lot of burney stuff in a tube.

In his bedroom (which was MASSIVE) he had a full sized work bench and an Adidas Bag full of rusty tools. We set to work cutting open 5 boxes of these guys ( nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strijker_(vuurwerk) ) to harvest the powder. We "cut" it with 100 crushed sparklers. There was no scientific thinking behind it. We just looked at the sparklers and thought "hey, that shit burns. We can add it in". But almost as soon as we had mixed it we regretted it. Our limited knowledge of chemistry told us (belatedly) that the slower burn of a sparkler does not equate to a lot of air time.

We needed something. Something to balance out the sparklers. Something potent. Something with a lot of bang. Stephen has a lightbulb moment and runs out the room. He returns carrying a box. He quietly tells me it is stacked to the brim with his dad's shotgun cartridges. Awesome says I. We quickly set about them with our Stanley blades and before long we had a large mound of what looked like small flakes. I had expected wile e. coyote ACME style black powder but we figured this stuff would do.

Now, we mixed it all together and used a clamp and a makeshift metal tamper to compact this stuff into 4 copper tubes. One end had been hammered shut and once it the other end had been rammed full of our home brew we sealed it with blu tac and a sparkler fuse (yes, the design was both poor AND dangerous).

A few quick cardboard nose cones and we were in business.

We quickly set out to try our amazing flying machine. It was lit and then propped up in a glass bottle.

Holy Christ! It was like the end of the fucking world.

We had expected a sheet of flame and smoke as our copper arrow soared towards the sky.

Instead we had made a fucking grenade and then encased it in a heavy glass container. There was a massive fucking explosion followed by the tinkling of glass and a car alarm. We took out a neighbours window, a couple of panels on a Mercedes and most tragically, a neighbours cat.

The dutch don't have the BBFC making things difficult for them so a steady stream of 80's action movies told me that a young boy like me would soon be on the receiving end of a thousand million moustachioed men on the inside. I ran like a Kenyan on speed. Back at the docs house I picked up my other tube and went home.

Mum found it in my room a week later. She carefully explained that she used to work for ICI making detonators and how i should really be dead. I never got it back.

Stephen took the hit for the cat and the window and the car and my parents never breathed a word to anybody.

All's well that ends well unless you are a cat.
(OTT, Thu 9 Aug 2012, 21:47, 3 replies)

Bloody hell... there's a few of us wannabe rocketeers about, int'us?
pretty much the same method of tube-crimping I used.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 9 Aug 2012, 23:09, closed)

Yeah
I think we should organise a b3ta pyro bash.

BYOB (Bring Your Own Butane)
(OTT, Thu 9 Aug 2012, 23:45, closed)

I can see the headlines now
"Amateur firework fans meet: some survivors found"
(Carpe Cyprinidae, Fri 10 Aug 2012, 20:39, closed)