BTW Bruce, here is a story that has been floating on the web for some time now, but reminds me of you.
About 2 weeks ago, I was looking around the Web for the BIGGEST sky rocket that I could get
shipped to me via common carrier. I located a fireworks importer in Wisconsin who had this mondo sky rocket–biggest thing I had ever seen–called a skyDragon. These things are 48 inches tall and are mounted on a 1/2-inch wooden dowel.
Pure aerospace engineering.
I plopped down a bunch of money and had him send me two cases of these things. They arrived at
the freight dock a few days go and I had to drive the van over to pick them up. Two boxes each
2 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet in size containing 80 rockets each. The ‘Class 4 Explosives’
sticker on the side of each box was a real bonus. I am gonna have to save them for the
scrapbook.
That night, me and the kiddos had a gen-u-ine rocket launch ceremony. I placed one of these
beauties in a liter-size glass bottle and the bottle fell over. Hmmmm- this thing was waaay
too big. I looked around the shop for a pipe to set it in, but realized that the only
dirt I could drive the pipe into was in plain sight of my neighbor’s house. I knew he was a
cool guy, but I didn’t want him to call the cops. You see-‘projectile-type’ fireworks are
totally illegal in this county. I was surprised that the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t waiting for me at the loading dock when I picked these things up. Anyhow, I finally rigged a launch pad by prying up one of the driveway drain grates with a crowbar and sitting the stick into the deep pit. Looked sorta like an ICBM silo with its hardened lid slid aside.
I asked which of my three kids wanted to light the fuse, but all took a few steps back and
politely declined. Chickens. Kids just aren’t made the same nowadays. They fulfill their danger quotient by shooting bad guys in video games. About as far from real danger as you can
get, if you ask me.
I told the little weenies to stand back as I bent to light the device with a Bic lighter. The
lady at the fireworks importer promised me that these things would NOT make any noise. I told
her that they HAD to be relatively quiet so I could shoot them off in my neighborhood without
causing ‘undue alarm’. She said I wouldn’t have any problem. I emphasized the particular legal
problems I would have if there were any type of loud report at apogee. I emphasized the fact
that I lived right next to a National Park and that any type of firework that was discharged
or assumed to be discharged on that property would get me sent before a FEDERAL judge right
before I got sent to the COUNTY judge. She again assured me I would have no problem.
That lying bitch.
That rocket engine had a burn time about as long as any I had EVER seen, and the ascent echoed
off the surrounding trees. Diamond shock pattern extended from the back end. It kept going and
going and going.
When it hit apogee at about 1000 feet, the rocket disintegrated into a huge shower of silent
red sparks. Pretty cool, I thought…until the shower of sparks burned out and suddenly
transformed into a cloud of extremely bright and loud explosions. The kids scrambled into the
back door ‘Three Stooges’ style (ie: where all three try to get through the same closed door
at once) and left me standing in the smoking haze waiting for the cops to arrive. The dogs
that live along our street were all barking their heads off at the apparition they had just
witnessed in the night sky.
That ended the fireworks test for the night.
The next day, my oldest son Doug and I decided we were gonna ‘neuter’ one of the rockets so it
wouldn’t make any noise. I took him into the closet where I store the gardening tools and he
saw these two huge cases of fireworks standing there. The kid went nuts. He wanted to open
BOTH boxes so he could see what all 159 rockets looked like lined up next to each other. This
kid has promise. I told him: “Since mom only thinks I have a few of these things lying around,
maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.” He mulled that over for a few seconds, then gave me a
real big smile in agreement.
We pulled one of the rockets out of the box and re-locked the closet door. He and I both sat
down on the driveway and proceeded to take it apart. It was a standard issue large Chinese
sky rocket. I bet they used these to kill people 500 years ago. As I sat there taking layer
after layer of paper off, his brain was filling with the details of construction.
Tissue, cardboard, plastic, fuses…etc. Realizing that he was mentally storing the design for
some future project sorta made me shudder. All I was thinking was the fact that this thing was
probably put together by a political prisoner in a hellhole somewhere who is probably gonna
get ‘executed’ so they can sell his internal organs on the transplant market.
Probably not too far from the facts, but I managed to do a bit of explaining to him from the
standpoint of aerospace engineering regarding how the thing worked. Doug is probably the only
4th grader in the U.S. who can now describe the principle of thrust using a control volume
model.
The rocket was pretty simple. It had a very large booster engine topped with a warhead that
contained the red sparkly things that exploded. Removing the warhead was as simple as giving a
quick twist, and I assumed the neutered rocket would fly higher without the payload. I was
correct. Doug and I did a daylight ‘stealth’ test and were able to add about 50% to the
altitude attained the previous night. We decided to modify four more rockets and put them
aside in the closet for easy access. When this was done, Doug had a jar full of stuff that
came out of the warheads including: 12 fuses about 3-inches long each, some paper, 4 plastic
nosecones and a big handfull of these little black balls about the size of 12-gauge buckshot
that turned out to be the ‘red sparkly popper things’. It appeared that the outer layer was a
simple gunpowder coating designed to quickly burn off as red shower of sparks. I surmised that
the inner core had some kind of magnesium thermite that gave off an intense white light and a
loud bang. Pretty cool if you ask me. Lots of energy packed into one teeny little ball.
I didn’t want to see the popper thingies go to waste, so I told Doug we were gonna put them in
a hole in the ground and set them off. He gave me another big smile. It’s amazing how kids
think alike…even when separated by 30 years.
As I was digging a shallow hole with my hand, Doug asked if it would be alright to put an army
man next to these things so that “When they go off, it would look like he was getting shot
with a maching gun”.
Dang…exactly what I was thinking. I agreed and he ran off to his room to dig something out
of the mess. He returned in about 3 seconds, out of breath and holding a cheap plastic
imitation of Robert E. Lee on horseback and a Civil War cannon. I pointed out that they didn’t
have true machine guns in the Civil War, but we would overlook this for the purpose of the
demonstration. He handed me the action figure and I placed it and the cannon next to a rather
large pile of black beads from which a few of the fuses extended.
I figured that three inches of fuse would take 2 seconds to burn, so I had at least that
amount of time to stand up and take a few steps back. I neglected to recount the night
before…when the warhead ignited IMMEDIATELY upon reaching apogee. Tricky Chinese. They had
installed extremely fast-burning fuse in these things and that fact totally escaped me.
I squatted next to Robert Lee and gave a short eulogy. Doug laughed. I took the trusty Bic
lighter and placed it next to the fuse. One flick got the lighter going and THIS IMAGE IS ONE
I WILL REMEMBER FOR A LONG TIME.
My hand holding a lighter next to a pile of explosives.
There is usually a short but noticeable mental pause that occurs immediately before something
bad or really stupid happens. It is where that little voice in your head says: “You dumbass.”
The fuse burn time was in the 1/1000ths of a second range. The pile of little popper thingy’s
immediately ignited into a tremendously brilliant ball of fire. All I could think
was…“…th…th…thermite…”
Unfortunately, when they are viewed at ground level, these little popper thingies become
REALLY BIG POPPER THINGIES and have a tendency to jump up to 15-feet in every direction from
their point of ignition. I instantaneously became engulfed in a ball of fire that sounded a
lot like being in a half-done bag of Orville Reddenbacher’s popcorn.
It was all over about as fast as I could snap my fingers. After the smoke cleared, Doug
started laughing his butt off. That meant I was still in one piece. Doug does not laugh at
dismembered limbs. He said I jumped about 10-feet, an action that I do not remember. I checked
my clothes for burn marks, and found none. He checked my back to make sure it
was not on fire. No combustion there. The driveway was peppered with black holes where the
concrete had been scarred from these things.
A close one. Another REAL close one. My mind ran the tapes again to re-hash what it had seen.
All I remembered was being inside something akin to a 30-foot diameter…flaming
dandelion. Whew.
We examined Ol’ Robert E. at ground-zero. Instead of a machine-gun peppering, he got nuked. He
and the horse he rode in on…and his cannon too. One side was untouched, but the other
side was arc-welded. Real warfare. Doug examined it real quiet-like and then started laughing
again.
I assume he will remember the finer points of the lesson as he grows older. When I now speak
of ‘almost being burned beyond recognition’ he will have a slightly better understanding of
what I mean. I hope that this vivid image tempers the knowledge he now has regarding rocket
construction.
Oh well. After all, if your dad isn’t gonna teach you how to get your ****** blown off, who will?