What with all the July 4th fireworks going off, I'm reminded of fireworks from the good old days. And a related Austin story.
Back circa 1972, the summer I first got the Austin on the road (see my earlier posts) we had some fun with contraband M80s bought outside NY state. This was back when M80s had some real kick. In our farm shop, we made a cannon out of a piece of schedule 40 steel pipe, having a threaded pipe cap and fuse hole at one end, and 2 inch chunks of bandsaw-cut Sprite axle as projectiles. Turns out that Sprite axle slugs fit in Sch 40 steel pipe with probably just a few thou of clearance. Perfect with the bore lubed with waste motor oil. We fired the cannon through a number of big broad targets incluing our hay barn, a couple of field cars, and an abandoned dump truck box in the farm junkyard. None of them stopped the slugs. But around the dozenth firing, the breech at the pipe cap blew out, sending pipe shrapnel about. We always had the foresight to get back a good 40 feet or so after lighting the fuse, so no casualties.
These M80s would also have blown off of its support post the mailbox of a local mean old curmudgeon who one night backhoed a trench in the abandoned railroad bed near his property, upon which we often rode our dirt bikes, hoping we would crash when we hit it on the next ride. Of course, this is a hypothesis. We did not blow up his mailbox in the dead of night, sending both the door and the back end hither and yon, and rendering the sheet metal body as a flap hanging on the post. This is merely a hypothesis of what would have happened if we blew up his mailbox which we did not do, as such an action was and is a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. Section 1705.
So with that as a prelude, on to the Austin M80 fun. My buddy Mike (the guy who let go the guided scrap tire) were cruising in the Austin around our little village on a Saturday night, and came upon a public works construction site where they were putting in new sewer and water. In our headlights (it was about 11pm) we could see there were a lot of materials around, including a section of 2 ft diameter concrete pipe about 20 feet long. It was aimed at the nearby housing, making it a nice speaker. So we shut the lights off and drove back in past it and doubled around on the other side of it. Mike lit his M80 and tossed it into the opening of the pipe, and it went off with quite a report. We took off, still lights out of course. In just a couple feet we slammed into something with a big crunch in the front end, but I kept my foot in it, trying to run over whatever it was. No dice.
I backed up a few feet and we hopped out and walked up in front of the Austin, feeling our way in the dark, still lights out, to see what we had hit. We found that it was some big chunk of metal, too big to easily move out of the way. So we backed up a little more, pulled around it, and got out of there. Back at his Dad's garage, we assessed the damage. The Austin hood was bashed in below the grille, with the hood latch and my license plate both creamed. We were able to mostly pound out the big dent, and flatten the 90 degree bend out of the license plate. The next day, we drove our farm pickup truck back to the construction site, to see what we had hit. It was a 6 inch high cast iron sewer pipe cover about two feet in diameter. The Austin had drove it about six feet off the buried sewer pipe it was covering until it dug in so hard it became immovable. We could also see our footprints in the fresh dirt near the now open vertical pipe. Both of us had just missed falling into it while groping around in the dark to see what we had hit, having no idea it was there.
Of course I kept the license plate with its big crease, now displayed in my garage and shown nearby.
M80's were not available to scool children when I was in class so we never got to blow up any toilets. But there were rumors. As for pipe guns, I never saw anything on that scale and it sounds quite scary. Closest I ever came was with ladyfingers (Black Cat). Probably the closest thing we ever did was when one boring summer day while sitting around looking for something to do, we juxtaposed the presence of a 55 gallon oil drum (empty with sealed ends and a bung) and a pound of pyrodex which we had no immediate need of. I think we'd been going to use it for shotgun shells or something maybe. It's basically black powder so maybe it was just to experiment with so experiment we did. What do you suppose would happen if a pound of pyrodex went off in a 55 gallon drum?
Not being complete idiots, we scared up about a foot and a half of cannon fuse. We then drilled a small hole in the bung, poured the pyrodex into a paper bag and with electrical tape shaped it into a long sausage with the fuse in one end and stuffed it through the bung hole and capped it, leaving most of the fuse hanging out.
There was a mound of fresh dirt on the back side of the barn so we propped the barrel at an angle on that, sort of like you would a mortar, with the fuse at the top, lit the fuse and ran into the barn where we felt we could watch in safety. As it turned out there was nothing about this that was safe.
In due time it went off with a bang and a roar and a big cloud of dust. The barrel flew about 50 ft into the air and came down out in the field with the bottom bulged out like those Carribean drums you see that are beaten in with all the little indentations around the rim and we never did find the lid. That had separated cleanly from the drum itself and gone into orbit. Nary a trace of it was ever found anywhere on the farm or the surrounding area.
This all happened so fast that there was no time to even trace the trajectory of the barrel so we were just lucky it was the top and not the bottom that blew out. Otherwise I expect a fair bit of shrapnel would have come our way. So lessons learned and all that. It was perhaps not the stupidest thing we ever did, but as a more or less responsible adult now, I'd say it ranks right up there.
Jim
Jim, great story. We must have the same ancestors, maybe not all that far back. 23 and me might confirm that. So just to continue the thread, opening to the broader topic of explosives generally, here's another one. It's long but I think you'll find entertaining.
Our dairy farm was in upstate NY, and in 1972, we got hit hard by Hurricane Agnes. Our bottom land got flooded when the bank of the Canaseraga creek gave way. So after the flood receded, the creek bank needed to be restored. It ran tight along the valley floor, separating our bottom land from our hillside cow pastures. What was needed was to bulldoze large amounts of dirt from the hill side of the creek over to the bottom land side. But to do that, first a large stand of big box elder trees on the hill side needed to be cut down. And then the stumps removed so the dirt could be moved. So here's where the fun starts.
We needed some dynamite. Back in 1972, no problem. You just went to your county clerk and got a dynamite transport permit good for a few days and you're good. Just a side detail here. We had a hired man (he went by the nickname Sambo) working for us on the farm, a great worker. But he had a youthful indiscretion, got into a car with some guys who stopped to pick him up. Turned out that car was stolen, and they got caught. He did a year in prison for it, got out stayed on the straight and narrow and went to work on our farm. Fact is though, he was a convicted felon. Dad didn't give that a second thought, and sent him to county to get the dynamite transport permit. Apparently neither did county. He showed his drivers license and got his permit.
So off Sambo went north to the city of Rochester to the regional dynamite store with our farm pickup truck to get the load of dynamite. He came back with several boxes of dynamite in the back, and a big coffee can of blasting caps in the front. (Another sidebar - remember all those PSA's in the mid-60s warning kids not to touch any blasting caps they might find along the side of the road? They had us thinking that blasting cap litter was as common as church keyed Topper beer cans, and that just touching one would set it off. Turned out not so.)
We had about 20 stumps to blast, and calculated 9 sticks/stump, so we had about 180 sticks on hand. The objective was just to blast enough dirt out from under them to loosen them up so the bulldozer would make short work of them. So Dad borrowed a dynamite drill from other farmer, just a gas motor with a four foot auger, and the method was to drill three holes around a stump. Each hole took two sticks gently tamped down in with a broom handle. Each stick was about a foot long by 1.5 inches in diameter, with a thick paper jacket. You could tell it was gelatin inside by the feel of it. The top stick got a blasting cap put in it, which then went down the hole. Same for the other two holes. The three blasting caps all got wired in parallel to a supply wire, which was run about 50 feet away in the field where a spare car battery sat. So touch the + and - wires to the battery and boom. No push down thing like in the road runner cartoons.
So we started blasting stumps. It went well. I thought it was pretty cool, and there were opportunities to experiment. So I went to the nearby farm junkyard and came back with an off-rim worn out car tire. I'd gently lay the tire on top of a charge, and when it went off, the tire would be blown about 50 feet into the air, flipping like a coin. I was 16 at the time, but even then I had a bit of an engineering mind. I thought what if instead of laying the tire down, I stood it straight up, leaning gently against the stump. I knew that if you pressed radially on an unmounted tire, it form a cup shape, which I thought might more effectively catch the blast.
Before I tested my hypothesis, I went back to the farmhouse and got my Dad's Polaroid land camera. You know, the one where you pulled the sheet out of the camera and it self developed over a few minutes. I set the tire in place upright and took a position up the hillside pasture where my vantage point was about even with the tops of a stand of stately cottonwood trees across the creek and about 80 feet high. I waited looking through the view finder, and when I saw the charge go off, I clicked the shutter. Then I lowered the camera and looked out for the tire for a couple of seconds and saw nothing. Then I looked almost straight up, saw the tire as a speck in the sky still going up. It must have gone up another hundred feet after that. It took a long time to come down. In the nearby picture, you can see it as a speck already above the cottonwoods, probably 100 feet high. From that point, I had time to look out and not see it, look up and spot it, and then see it go up another hundred feet. I'd say it went up at least 400-500 feet. And it came down within about 50 feet from the blast point. And my hypothesis was right. The tire was irreversibly deformed into this big cup that caught the blast. The tire was damn near turned inside out if you can picture that.
So that's my fun with dynamite story. In closing, in this era of helicopter parenting and homeland security, consider the incongruities of 1972 vs. today's world:
- You could get a dynamite permit just by showing up at the county clerks office with your drivers license.
- You could get a dynamite permit notwithstanding being a convicted felon.
- You could just go to a local dynamite store, show your permit, and with cash or check, get a load of dynamite.
- You could drive a pickup truck with 180 sticks of dynamite in back and 60 blasting caps up front on public highways.
- Kids playing with dynamite and learning basic physics was ok.
Man we grew up in the best of times.