And the rockets red glare

I love fire, no I mean I really REALLY love fire, and explosions too. As such the 4th of July is the greatest holiday ever, it’s warm, you’re encouraged to drink, and blow shit up! How great is that!

My family tradition is to go out to my Mom’s house for the day (she lives on a lake) and essentially spend all day outside shooting off fireworks and getting wasted. Pretty much every year I light something on fire or blow a hole in something, myself included of course. I’ve never done any permanent bodily harm to myself aside from a few scars here and there and it’s generally a good time.

My favorite thing to shoot off are 1 inch mortar shells. I usually buy a case or so of them and fire them off the back sidewalk behind Mom’s. It’s a nice pretty show and they are fun and easy to fire off.

Couple years back I was having a REALLY good time (read very drunk) and thought I’d get clever. I normally get inventive with ways to blow things up and set them on fire, and yes I’ve made my own homemade napalm before ;)

At some point in the night I got the great idea to light a mortar and set a plastic bucket over the top of it. I thought I’d see how high it would blast the sucker up in the air or if it would just blow the hell out of the bucket. Seemed like a fun thing to do…

First attempt I get the mortar light and go to drop the bucket over top of it. Keep in mind I’ve been drinking all day so the attempt doesn’t quite go as planned and I knock the mortar tube over. This fires the round of down the sidewalk luckily not hitting anyone but does make one hell of an explosion and got more than a few people’s attention.

Second attempt (of course I tried again) I manage to get it lit and get the bucket placed squarely over top no problem. Mortar goes off and the bucket pops about two feet off the ground the punches a hole in the top of the bucket and explodes about 4 feet off the ground. AWESOME! Huge shower of sparks about 30 feet across and loud as hell WOOT! I was of course in the blast radius but no real harm few singed hairs etc. but everyone else was back far enough.

So being the genius that I am I decide to take it one step further. Let’s try to ride the bucket this time J Examining the bucket after the last shot I can see where the round shot through the bucket with really very little effort. It slowed it down some sure but it had no problem going right on through. Given that I would be standing on top of said bucket I had no real desire to have a mortar pop me in my junk so had to come up with something to help re-enforce the top.

Aha! That scrap of 2x10 looks good enough! I had a pretty good plan so I thought my only real worry was being fast enough to get the board over top of the bucket and then jump on without falling off. Simple enough in theory but again I’m not exactly the most coordinated guy and after a day of drinking even less so.

Tossing caution to the wind I spark off the mortar, bucket is placed, board is down, and I hop on. Amazingly I pull all this off and get upright without falling down or knocking anything over, Yay me!

Mortar goes off and I have to admit I was a little disappointed; it only managed to launch me about 5 feet in the air. Great ride to be sure and when it exploded that was a nice little boost at the end. The sparks and effects were lessened a great deal since it basically exploded inside the bucket but it was still a pretty sweet ride J

Needless to say I was told that I was NOT allowed to do that again…..ah well there’s always next year. I’ve been working on a shoulder mounted launcher tube too…..