http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHPbS2vkTCc&NR=1
Would have been interesting to see his reaction had the fuse caught his shirt on fire.
Maybe his partner in hazardous hobbies would have displayed enough common sense to smother the fire; but I wonder what expression his face would have had if the pipe had fragmented on the kid's shoulder?
After you watch Rambo, Click the next one, "Homemade Fireworks & M80 Comparison". The space cadet corroborates what I said in a previous post, i.e. the m-80 uses "Flash Powder", not black powder or smokeless.
Richard, as far as I know, one of the few valid things a "space cadet" could demonstrably corroborate, would be the fact that he or she did indeed deserve the title of "space cadet."
In the other thread that referred to M-80s, I didn't mean to imply that the original devices weren't loaded with flash powder, to the contrary, I know that they were. What I did mean to say was that the 1976 ATF law was intended to regulate the amount (50 miligrams) of flash powder a commercial explosive device like these salutes could legally contain.
Anyone that has been in the near vicinity of a real M-80 going off will be able to attest to the fact that what this kid lit in his backyard was nothing more than a "souped-up" firecracker. In the vid he states that this (illegal, bought from a reservation) M-80 was loaded with 1.4 grams of what he thought was flash powder, while the original M-80s were loaded with about 3 grams of genuine flash powder. We used to get larger (around 2¼'' long) firecrackers named red, white, and blues that to my recollection, were just as loud as the two salutes this kid blew off in his yard.
To convey the idea of just how powerful M-80s really were, when I was a kid we played two games that I'll relate here. In Chicago, the city Dept. of Sanitation provided 55 gallon steel drums with steel lids to residential homes, to be used as garbage cans, and one of the sports we loved to play was lighting an M-80, dropping it in the drum, putting the lid on as tightly and quickly as we could, and then running like hell. I remember some of these lids coming down from about 30' or so, and at times landing pretty close to some of the bodies on the ground, but luckily none of us ever got tagged. The other involved lighting the "bomb," throwing it into the can, putting the lid on tight, then jumping up on the lid, and standing there as the salute "saluted." This last adventure would result in the steel drum literally splitting all the way up its side. I'll stick by what I originally said; in this instance I'm glad the Fed's stepped in with a law to outlaw these "salutes." These fireworks are just too brutal for kids to be playing with, and just as it was as easy as pie for us to buy them (every year when the "Fourth" came near) a block or two away from our homes, from a guy selling them out of the trunk of his car; the same thing would be a frequent occurence today, if it weren't for the stiff fines, and threat of possible prison time these bottom feeders now face. Now I know that there are those people that would then turn this around to infer that the same implications would hold true concerning a discussion of guns, but I personally don't buy into that argument, I think they're two totally separate subjects.
I sure do love our board, and the fascinating and inexhaustible subject of pre-1899 black powder ordnance that we discuss here.
