When I was Younger (1977) My neighbor droped a black cat (fire cracker)down a man hole cover,the lid blew from the methain gas and landed on a car down the road (cost my mom 250 bucks):and we boath lost our eye lashes and brows.I was grounded for one month and had to take a fire safty course That later in life came in handy.Thanks to the fire fighters in Haltom city.

Umm, we used to blow up frogs with them...

For one of my father's birthdays, we baked a cake and before we took him his piece, we stuck a black cat in it and lit it...Just as he was putting his fork into the cake, it blew up...Hilarious...

We used to throw small artillery shells under the bunks at deer camp to wake the late risers up...Was all fun and games until we caught the curtains on fire.

when u throw a artillery into pond it looks like a torpedo hit a submarine. ah....good times.......

I'd have worn out four pairs of tennis shoes to avoid the fate I would have suffered! What a memory, though.

I had an uncle who was only five years older than me. We went out in the desert one night, drank about two cases of beer, and proceeded to shoot at each other with bottle rockets at about 25 yards apart. Could have ended with disaster, but was great fun. Those little bottle rockets can hit pretty hard!

We used to have Roman Candle and Bottle Rocket fights..

That was until a Roman Candle back fired and sent half the flaming projectiles up my buddy's T shirt sleeve.. burnt his armpit and shoulder pretty bad.

We got some trouble for Bombing Cattle with Black Cats taped to rocks.. shot them out of a Wrist Rocket. Takes one to light the firecracker and the other to shoot the sling shot.

Made Mortars using a Coke Can and Coffee Can... shot them all over the neighborhood from the back yard.

Now all you can have in the City is Sparklers and Snakes??

Bazz

I make my own fireworks and can't really tell you on here what I have done......I will say that I can knock the leaves off of trees without much effort.

A bit scary. A think you just went on a gov. list

We would pack mud around a black cat & drop in a deep hole in the creekit was cool when it sunk then blew up till i had one go off in my hand.In the boy scouts we were on a hike out by grapevine lake we put a black cat in a spent shotgun shell we found burnt up about 10 acres of field we stopped it just before it reached the woods.about 1hr later a buds coat caught on fire from a smoldering cow chip in his pocket from beating out the fire.

When does the statue of limitations run out on mailboxes? I'm just asking for a friend.

Bottle rockets were a blast.

I was about 9 and the oldest kid and we were doing spaklers, black cats ect. Running around through the yard with a sparkler I tripped and dropped the sparkler in a box that everyone was putting thier firewors in for the night show. About 20 adults sitting around drinking beer in the shade. I went to pick it up and saw that was not going to be good and yelled run.

Everyone split and we had a big show at 4:00 in the afternoon. Nobody got hurt but I thought I was better off dead.

Once the dust cleard I don't think the men minded that much cause they all got to go back to town without the wives and buy more beer and fireworks.

Ended up to be a good night but I don't mess with them anymore.

My folks sold fireworks when i was a kid. Of course i blew up everything thinkable and fought many fires. The coolest would have to be the time i took a whole box of "stuff that didnt sell" and pitched a match in it. Words cant describe it. There were things happening in that box that would have made some china man real happy.

Yea, I was on that list a while back. It started with this one..... .
Here is a short video... flight
This is the last one I built.

And you fish to? Put that on the back of your boat. I want to see you blow down Hubbard doing 300MPH.

any one ever flush a "cherry bomb" down the toilet drain in high school..

me either

Wow! THAT was super-cool!! How high did that rocket go? Awesome!!!!!

One year when my uncle and I were kids, we went and bought some fireworks which we brought back to my grandfather's John Deere dealership, where we sat on a window ledge out front popping firecrackers. One of the local guys, who was prone to pranks, reached around the corner through a doorway into my uncle's sack of fireworks and extracted a Texas Twister. He lit the thing under my uncle's feet, and when my uncle saw what was happening, he ran out into the middle of the highway trying to get away from it. I swear, that thing went everywhere my uncle did, and it blew up right under his feet. I don't know how he stayed airborne as much as he did, because it looked like his feet were touching the ground about every fifth or sixth step. The entire episode might have lasted six or eight seconds, but it was the funniest eight second stretch I ever saw! We were all absolutely ROLLING on the sidewalk!! Except my uncle, of course.

That one went just a touch over 12K feet. The bigger one had a projected altitude of 26K feet but suffered a catostrophic motor failure and impacted the ground at over 700 MPH.

Sorry for the temporary high jack of the post. It was mixing the chemicals and building my own rocket motors that got me into making some of my own fireworks.

This has been quite entertaining. If I see you on the lake I am going to give you plenty of space

Note to self: Not pi$$ off Keeb because he knows how to make stuff go BANG!!!!

Years ago as a kid, the family tradition had us gathering at Aunt Mae and Uncle Roy's house in the West Texas countryside on the 4th. Always plenty of firecrackers for the kids. Cousin and I discovered how much fun it was to tie a firecracker to a jumbo sized grasshopper and let them fly. Fuse lit of course.

All was well UNTIL Aunt Mae's pet duck unexpectedly entered the scene. And was hungry.

Know anything about this?

shot several bottle rockets out of my mouth
thought i was cool
didn't realize i had a gunpowder ring all the way around my mouth

I grew up in Hobbs, New Mexico where there is no such thing as entertainment unless you invent it yourself. Well, one sunny afternoon we were flying kites and using our fishing poles for the string and winder-upper hoojitt thingy....when we spotted a lizard nearby that was just begging to do the astronaut thing. We obliged him after a rather lengthy chase. Brought the kite low enough for him to get attached to the kite tail and sent him off into the wild blue yonder. That wasn't good enough for us, though. Brought him back down, attached a couple of Black Cats to his "Safety Harness" /kite tail, and lit the fuse and sent him on his way again. At about..oh, 100 ft up, it went bang. No more lizard....


Lord forgive me for all the harm I done to this lizard.

yep but it wasn't anything that was an organized launch. All flights are restricted by FAA notifcation (waivers) along with NOTAM's. All launches have to be scheduled to clear airspace ahead of time. I know the guy that runs the Houston area launches and there were none scheduled for that weekend. As you can see from my pics, it takes a fair amount of ground support to launch big projects. To get one up that high wasn't just something that someone carried out to a field to fly.

We used to take 3/4 inch PVC sticks along with a 90 degree elbow and make "guns" for the old black cat type bottle rockets and have used to shoot them at each other.

lets see....not me "but" my buddys neighbor
they were enjoying the livations in the backyard ,just after dark ,with the ocasional firecracker or rocket.
we heard a collective burst of laughter.
One of the guests decided to host the bottlerocket with his cheeks. first one OK ,second not OK, he squeezed alittle to hard I guess. needless to say he went to screaming and running around. we died laughing.

We used to squat over bottle rockets...

We would always have bottle rocket and roman candle wars. I was the first in my family to invent the roman candle Gatling gun. I would bundle about 6 to 8 roman candles with tape then light just one. The flames from the first one eventually light up all of them. Talk about a barrage! I could light up a lot of cousins with this rig.

We had the normal roman candle and bottle rocket wars. Someone decided to step it up a notch one year and we started using artillery shells. Good times.

we did the same thing. and we had some longer pieces we used like RPGs. Good times good times, and no one went to the hospital, thats called a success!!

ummm.....nevermind thats too easy!

Learned at a young age not to mess with'em. Friend's big brother got some M-80's from Wisconsin, got to watch him blow three finger's completely off his right hand. Never touched one since.

dad has a similar story. Him and his friend were lightin up black cats. they both lit theirs at the same time and my dad threw his on the gound but his buddy covered his ears but still had the black cat in his hand. It exploded and needless to say it killed him.

WOW...I can't even imagine...

The statute of limitations has not expired so ask me next year.

I have filled one of those plastic easter eggs half full of the powder from firecrackers, put a fuse through the top of the egg and taped them together with duct tape. I put it in one of the cheap round bbq grills, lit it and put the lid on it and ran back a good distance. When it went off it sounded like a shotgun and the lid flew straight up about 15ft in the air with smoke pourin gout of it.

I don't blame you for deleting that, Butch.

Most fun we had was the bottle rocket wars.....me on the ground, my buddy on the top level of the firewatch tower.....until one of mine bounced into his coffee can full of "ammo"......never seen someone dance around so much on 3 square feet of platform before in my life.....

I don't recall the last time they were available---maybe they still are, but those evil little devices you hook up to a car's ignition under the hood can be a hoot. Someone did that to one of my other uncles (yeah, I know---I have lotsa uncles), and when he got in his pickup and cranked it and that thing went off, he looked like a great big kernel of popcorn bouncing around inside there. Another ROTFLMAO moment for sure!

Took an M 80 and stuck the fuse through a ciggy, lit it, and then put it in a locker my senior year in HS. It went off about 15 minutes into my English class. We had old wooden lockers. It blew the locker door open and obviously made a he11uva racket. Took 3 weeks but finally got snitched on and bought myself 3 days off. This was back in the early 70's and a very small country school. If this had happened nowadays I would be out of school and have to register with Homeland Security and maybe felony charges.


We also used to have car to car bottlerocket/roman candle wars. Crazy azz country boys with too much time on their hands.

When I was a teenager, we would have wars with them. Shooting bottle rockets and roman candles at each other. I got in the habit of retrieving bottle rockets thrown at us too early that hit the ground before going off. I would run up, grab them and fling them back at the opposing side just when they would go off thereby using their own weapons against them. I picked one up one time and it went off in my hand buring a hole in the meaty part of my palm just below the thumb. I lost feeling in that thumb for about 10 years before it started slowly coming back. There is still a faint black spot under the skin there. Another time a buddy and I were in his old early 50's model Ford pickup and we and some other buddies in a car behind us were racing through the old dirt country roads around where we grew up. I was hanging out the passenger window shooting bottle rockets and roman candles at them, and they were shooting at us. Somehow a spark went into the grocery bag full of fireworks I had in the floor. They started going off and that truck came to a screeching hault and both doors flung open at the same time. We bailed out and ran behind the truck. It was at night and the whole cab lit up with blue and green and orange light as the roman candles went off. Roman candle balls and bottle rockets were going off and bouncing around in the cab and flying out of the doors. We all laughed so hard, I thought I would die. Our buddies behind us said it was the funniest thing they ever saw. They said all of sudden they saw the cab light up with colored light and the brake lights come on as both doors flung wide open at the same time before the truck ever came to a hault. It is amazing we ever survived to make adulthood with some of the things we did. I thought that truck would burn to the ground.

I like that one!

I was gonna post about copper pipe, black powder, and canon fuse, but maybe better not.

not trying to hijack, but have you ever gone to wayside for the rocket show, absolutely amazing

After we found out that my buddy's dad had a bunch of reloading stuff, we made our own firecrackers by stuffing 12 gauge shells with gunpowder. They never really popped loud, but when stuck in a piece of 3/4" conduit they really smoked a bunch and launched up pretty high.

Our best pyrotechnic trick though was to spray the inside walls of a popcorn tin with right guard deodorant and drop in a match. The boom it made was enough to slam the door shut on my bedroom from 10 ft away. I still can't explain why we decided that my bedroom was the best place to test that...

That was almost as stupid as throwing a 100 rd box of .22 shells in the campfire one night. Talk about duck and run.

I remember a couple more. We use to make pipe bombs and throw em in Lake Lewisville. Sure can't do that anymore. Another time a friend that lived in Dallas would come out to stay with his grandparents in Shady Shores during the summer, which is where I lived. Anyway, this guy was always coming up with high tech ways of doing stuff. His grandparents lived on a corner and they had a basement that was a bedroom/gameroom. It had some small basement type windows just above ground level. We would put a bottle rocket in a coke bottle and prop it up on a rock and aim it at the road. We split the end of an extension cord and used little single pieces of tiny wire that we had pulled from braided wire that we had cut off the end of the extension cord for a lighter. We ran the extension cord out there and tied the little wire to both exposed wires and looped it around the fuse on the bottle rocket. We then would lay and wait watching out the little window in the basement. When a car came along we would plug the cord in the wall socket and then unplug it. That is all it took to light the fuse as the little wire got red hot and melted in two. The bottle rocket would take off and strike the car in the front or on the windshield and we were no where to be found because we were inside the house.

This is the same guy that started taking pot shots at me with a pellet rifle one day when we were out goofing around. I had a CO2 pistol and started shooting back. Then I saw his leg poke out from behind a tree as he pumped his pellet rifle. I took aim and popped him in the leg. We did all kinds of stupid stuff.

+1

Every year for as long as I can remember,the parking lot at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock fills with high school and college kids.The bottle rocket, roman candle etc. war that ensues is monumental.Usually the saturday before 4th of July.