celebratory gunfire

[Raider Bill]

Woke up to a hole in my roof and a bullet sitting on a table.
 

 

 
 

[Gary_C]

It would be near impossible for a bullet just falling by gravity to penetrate a roof. So you better watch out Bill, somebody is shooting at you. 

[sawguy21]

Rough neighborhood!

[Raider Bill]

It would be near impossible for a bullet just falling by gravity to penetrate a roof. So you better watch out Bill, somebody is shooting at you.

Same thing happened to my buddies house about 4 years ago. Went through the sunroom roof and partway in the top of a beer cooler.
Mine came in at a pretty steep angle so unless it came from a airplane it had to come from the ground.
About a mile or so away is da hood always shooting going in there but there are also a bunch of idiots that shouldn't own firearms that could have been closer. 
Odd thing to me is the red color of the slug. Anyone have insight to that? Make type?
Cops are coming for it. Said because it's red they are interested. Had it not been and nobody hurt they wouldn't be
Looks to be about a .38 or 9mm.

[florida]

My son just found one in his MILs 2nd floor roof. A perfectly round hole which means it can straight down. I found one in a customer's house once.

[coalsmok]

The red color is probably powder coat. Some reloaders are now powder coating lead slugs so they don’t have to lube them, also makes them purddyy.

[Old saw fixer]

I am glad no one was hurt or worse.  Firing in the air is criminally stupid.  The present cost and availability of ammo keeps me from plinking, let alone shooting at nothing. 

[WV Sawmiller]

  I was working in the Green Zone in Iraq in 2006 and one night I had to walk just forward of the first check point on the Tigris on the other side of the 14 July Bridge just a little after sunset to meet and escort in a local genset repair guy. Just as the guy pulled up in his blue Mercedes as promised it sounded like someone was firing the final protective fire with every automatic weapon in the city going off and tracer fire lighting up the sky. I thought I had really played hobb that time. I took the repair guy to the check point manned by the Wyoming or Montana Nat'l guard and walked him through the security process. I later found Iraq had beaten Australia in soccer in the Olympics and it was celebratory fire. I did notice that all the rounds seemed to be aimed such that they fell over in the Green Zone instead of the rest of the city. We had a number of rounds come down and punch holes in the thin hootches we lived in and the metal shelters used for protection from the rain and sun in our shop areas. It is one of those experiences I'd have passed on if I'd had the option.

[Ianab]

Terminal velocity of a falling 30 cal bullet is around 190 mph.  That's enough to do some damage....

[Raider Bill]

This is the most densely populated county in Florida. You can't spit without hitting someone.

We CSI'd the hole with a stick and it appears to have come from the direction of a pretty nice subdivision behind me and not the hood.

Wild Bill climbed up there and patched it for me.
Hope that is the only one and the shooters grouping was off as I have 6k sqft of roof.

[Patrick NC]

A guy down the road from me has a civil war era cannon that they shoot every New Year’s Eve and July 4th. They load it real heavy with powder and a wad and fire it across the field. (No projectile). Shakes the whole house and scares the crap out of the dogs, but no real damage. 

[mike_belben]

My grandparents did cannon shoots and parade float demos and such.  One of the funnest parts of my childhood.  Prepared me for tire ether.  



Around here the shooting starts at dark.  Except for deer season. 

[Southside]

Your boys round there got nothin on Anvil Shootin'    Imagine this coming through your roof!!  

[mike_belben]

We used to do that with tennis balls and M80s trying to catch them out of around pipe stand

[Walnut Beast]

Your boys round there got nothin on Anvil Shootin'   Imagine this coming through your roof!!  

They sure didn’t get very far away 😂

[olcowhand]

My grandparents did cannon shoots and parade float demos and such.  One of the funnest parts of my childhood.  Prepared me for tire ether.  



Around here the shooting starts at dark.  Except for deer season.

Mike,
Not many have earned the wisdom of "Tire Ether". My ex-FIL taught me that trick many years ago, and I will still employ it- to the astonishment of friends and family. It does make quite a BOOM!
Steve

[mike_belben]

BoomSauce©

[mike_belben]

I was probably 8 or so, employed for 5 or 10 cents each to make the "quick matches" for the association.  Dump black powder on the cafeteria tray, pick it up with a strip of scotch tape, hold that away from the tray so it doesnt potentially explode the whole pile from static charge when i snip it into two strips with scissors.  Then insert one piece each into a half length coffee stirrer straw with the edges sticking out.  



The charge was a pile of powder rammed in a tinfoil lined wooden form, looked like an old little debbie treat.  Pack that in the bore, then insert a projectile.  Poke an awl into the powder puck and stick the quickmatch in.  The projectiles were a funny tin juice can with the tops cut off, poured with concrete then topped with lead so they fly right.  And finally swedged through a home made hydraulic tube jig to smooth them.  We poured a LOT of lead.



There was shoots not too far from @BargeMonkey  back atleast into the 90s until FFL stuff made bulk powder hard to get. I remember armenia, westerloo and saratoga NY.. And maybe also somewhere around hunter mountain.  100, maybe 150yds or so yards into a berm at targets.  Many trees were mowed down.  Mortars too.  It was big fun for a little kid.  Throwin knives and tomahawks and such, campfires and smores with grandparents. 


If youre on the mass pike passing the mcdonalds at exit 7 in ludlow, look at the blue house across from mcdonalds for a red cannon in the backyard.  I spent half my life in that house.

[Ed_K]

 We used to scrape caps to get powder. Made up a 3/4 pipe nailed to the porch railing an shoot marbles at popple trees across the driveway. Got carried away one day and the pipe made a good dent in the cedar siding of the house .

[Runningalucas]

I'm up in North Idaho.....  The other night, well it was around 4:00pm, which in winter is after dark, I was napping on my couch.  A single gun shot sounding like it was from the Northwest went off, then what sounded like a pound of tannerrite a split second later really woke me.... Not 10 minutes later, up the mountain to the southeast, someone lit off with 30 rounds in succession. 

I swear the folks around here answer each others gun shots in turn.  After my 57' dumptruck windshield had a stray bullet hit it, along with another hitting a van, I'm seriously in the process of designing my home to be a little more 'bullet resistant'.... Just too many folks moving in, and excited they can shoot on their properties....

[mike_belben]

We used to scrape caps to get powder. Made up a 3/4 pipe nailed to the porch railing an shoot marbles at popple trees across the driveway. Got carried away one day and the pipe made a good dent in the cedar siding of the house .

My dad was big into M80s and M100s to pass the time back in those days after mom flew the coop.



There was that experiment with one inside a chevette on the rollback headed to scrapyard.  The windows do come out.



Then there was what if we put it in a beer can and toss it off the bridge into the 3ft deep chicopee river.  It blows a dry spot for a few second and send aluminum up in your face.




The tin wash bucket with a few rocks in it under the gutter with no downspout, for pre-washing mud covered boys and grease covered hands before being allowed in the house.  The rock shoots out the side of the tin and blasts a hole in the vinyl siding.



He's probably partly responsible for me being an idiot in the early half of my life, but we had a lot of fun and learned the good stuff first hand, before you could just ask siri and think you know. 

[Tacotodd]

Mike, all of that reminds me of the “teachings” that Dad schooled me about. I still remember the time that he sent an empty 55gal drum 30ft+ into the air! The funny but sad part about that, Dad said that he would never make any more “toys”.  Oh well. The bad part is that I had access to all of that “equipment” and I knew how to use it!

He never said a word about it other than: just don’t get hurt. I didn’t, and I still know how to do it! hehehe!

Now I’m just playing with the tannerite, 2lb at a time! You know, isn’t it amazing what the neighbors think!

I’ve never had the cops called but I attribute that to all of my neighbors knowing: eh, it’s just Todd!

[Texas Ranger]

Houston had two reported injuries from celebratory gun fire on new years eve.  Both were horizontal shots, many more through roofs, windshields and such.  Dumb.

I used to be the combat photographer for the local Sons of the Confederacy in their annual demonstration/reenactment.  Got to fire the cannons.  Some fun.  They had a bunch of powder loads made in aluminum foil about the size of a coke can.  One load and wadding made a spectacular sound and sight show.  However, at the end of the thing, if there were any loads left, they would load up one of the six pounders with three or four charges, that had recoil and shook the earth.  Black powder became harder to find, and the local powers that be thought "glorifying" the Civil War and violence was not their thing.  And there was ranker in the ranks, so it all came to an end.

They also had cavalry charges that I thought  were the cats meow, and certainly displayed history.

[mike_belben]

That is a huge amount of powder.  Seriously huge.  These charges were a coke can filled 1inch high and that propelleda 3" tall x about 2" diameter concrete bullet straight and flat for maybe 200yards.  Theyre big enough you could see them fly if watching target through the bipod binos.  They knocked the carriage back a foot every time.  



For 4th of july the city of springfield had them on the city hall steps probably 10 consecutive years for the 1812 overture played by the symphony orchestra while they/we/i on occasion blasted the cannon to the notes.. With a flour charge to put on a show.  Hollywood uses flour.  Real life its mostly flame.  Cool at night.

[Tom King]

We have an abandoned rock quarry, about a half mile from the house.  There were some yahoos down in there shooting off explosive devices built from tannerite.  There are some lake houses closer than ours, and some of them called the cops.  They took care of it, so I'm glad I didn't go in there to confront them.  They were highly intoxicated, so I was told, so fortunate no one was injured.  I'm pretty sure they won't be back.

[WV Sawmiller]

   You guys have brought back memories of 2006 when I was working the Oyu Tolgoi project - a gold and copper mine project - in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. I sat down one night at dinner and got to talking to one of our drill and blast foremen. This one was from Australia and was a hoot to talk with. He talked about the different blasting techniques such as time shots. Evidently before you blast an area you have to clear a space for the rock to fall into so they would first drill/excavate a clear area. With timed shots each shot cleared an area for the next section to fall so if any shot failed all subsequent shots would fail as no place for the debris to fall. This guy talked about using det cord to cut the ends off barrels. He said it would cut it off as clean as a knife. I remember the demo in my USMC training where they wrapped several loops of det cord around a 6" white oak and set it off. That WO jumped right off the stump. They told us they did that with a bunch of VC POWs in Viet Nam after they had already looped them together with det cord then did the demo for them. They sent them back with a walking wounded corporal holding the detonator and said the POWs never got out of step to Saigon. (They probably can't do that any more.)

Anyway I asked my Aussie friend where he learned to use explosives thinking he went to some high tech school or such. He told me as a teen he and his buddies would go down to the local dump and blow up old cars and such so that got him started. I knew Australia was a pretty laid back place in a lot of respects but that surprised me.

I remember he was telling me about the difference between High Explosive and Low Explosive which basically had to do a lot with the pressure of the blast. He said he laid a pipeline through solid rock in a town one time using LE and never broke a window. He was very enthusiastic about his job and a lot of fun to talk with.

[Texas Ranger]

I was a combat engineer in the army, I loved playing with wicked playdo,

[Don P]

This is the title page of Grandad's 1922 copy of Duponts dynamite manual. I wish you could still go down to the store and get some for stubborn rocks and stumps.


 
I have mixed feelings about the way we are nowadays, they would throw a kid under the jail for some of the stuff we pulled. Stuff did occasionally go over a roof or a tad worse but one of the guys that was really into it became a genuine rocket scientist.

I will admit I went out at midnight the other night and after a minute or two of listening decided it was probably safer to have a roof over my head. 

[Southside]

We used to make our own black powder in HS chemistry class, now the teacher didn't know that was what we were making, but we did.  Can you imagine today??  

Uncle Sam gave me a fairly decent education when it came to C4, Data Sheet, and other fun stuff, not a whole lot with sawdust and nitro rolled together in a cardboard tube, but hey - who needs to mess with the slow stuff anyway?  Well one day in my next adventure I was with a mentor who was "showing me the way" when it came to removing beaver dams and how they used dynamite to do so.  Well, we set the "charge" - and backed off to clap three times.  Boom goes off and it's raining debarked pointy sticks, popple stumps, mud, rocks, etc.  A bit more that was expected.  Yup the dam was gone, BUT - the two side by each retired RR tankers that were serving as culverts now had a nice vortex swirl between them and the water was quickly removing the gravel that covered the two.  Now for most folks this would be a significant problem - however, when your issued pickup is parked on the wrong side of said culvert - it becomes a disaster in the making!!     Ahh - the good old days!!  

[Mooseherder]

They're still celebrating here.  Been hearing some fireworks tonight still.  I suspect one of our neighbors shot live rounds New Years Eve.  I wasn't going to go out and verify.  South Florida is the melting pot of the world and seems New Years' is important in every culture.  

[Ricker]

We used to make oxygen/acetylene bombs.  Take a trash bag fill it with the gas put a fuse in the fill hole, light and run.  They make a Big Bang and if resting against a tree they would turn a 5-6 inch softwood tree trunk to splinters.  Needed to get all the static electricity out of the bag or it got real dangerous real fast.  Know a guy that lost hearing in one ear and two finger from a fill up explosion.  That was the end of that stupid chapter of our lives.

[sawguy21]

We made black powder in chemistry class too but got caught. My gf was startled by fireworks Thursday night but each time she got up and looked out the window there was nothing to see. She thinks they were in the schoolyard across the street behind the complex which would certainly draw unwanted attention. Back in my distant youth the local machine shop owner wondered why we kids were buying small amounts of calcium carbide, he kept it for the farmers who still had acetylene generators. Well, he soon found out and stopped it without a note from our parents. We punched a finishing nail hole in the bottom of a 48 oz jam can (remember those?) and put a pinch of powder in, spit on it, slapped the lid on and held a match to the hole. A firmly planted boot held the can in place. He told me a few years ago a teacher came in and raised holy heck, her students were putting it in the inkwells.

[Southside]

I found a recipe for "nitro" one time so naturally my chem partner and I - more likely just me - decided to give it a go during lab.  We were supposed to be boiling salt water or something like that.  Anyway at some point along the way the concoction boiled over onto the gas burner and a significant mushroom cloud erupted over my lab desk  .  Not being one to admit defeat or guilt for that matter, I looked right at my lab partner and told him to "shut up and don't say a word" - then ran up and down the isle shutting off other kids burners yelling "the experiment is bad - shut it down", "It's not safe!!".  Managed to divert enough attention from my yet boiling over partial beaker of almost nitro, to stop the chem teacher shy of my desk while she told me that for 30 years her students had been running this experiment and it had never gone "Boom" so there was nothing to fear, I needed to calm down.  Most of the other kids just looked at me and knew I had to be up to no good again, so they went about their business of measuring the temperature of boiling salt water or whatever boring experiment we were doing.  Never got in trouble for that either - but again - imagine today.....

[Mooseherder]

You guys were way more advanced than us.
Back when soda cans were a lil thicker gage we used to open the ends and tape together to make a bazooka.  (7 cans)
The can at the bottom we drilled a hole in, squirted lighter fluid into and lit.
It made a pretty big boom. We used to aim across the St. John River at Canada.
That wouldn't fly today.

[sawguy21]

Ah, an international terrorist. You were in danger of restarting the War of 1812.

[Southside]

Naa, MH was probably the soldier you never heard of in the Aroostook War.

[SwampDonkey]

I do know a good hot fire at the base of an old dead elm tree hollowed out, and the placement of a full can of Mr Clean in such fire makes for a good boom. But stay behind a tree, them cans have (had) a marble in them to fire. Nice fire to, up the inside of the elm trunk. Supersized Roman Candle!! The good old days.

[SwampDonkey]

For your entertainment.

[Don P]

Trebuchets are great fun;


 
I need to go pick it up some time, at it's last posting it was flinging watermelon "skeet"  

When we were in HS, Bobby, the rocket scientist, took a chemical equation he had cooked up to our chemistry teacher to check. Mr Hickman looked it over and said "this is a highly exothermic reaction". Kinda what we were hoping for  .

[Texas Ranger]

Back in the day I turned a "rocket" out of steel on our lathe, screw on funnel exhaust.  Filled it with some exotic concoction lost in time, applied a jetex fuse, stood it upright, and lit the fuse, and ran like the dickens.  There was a most excellent noise, and the rocket disappeared.  Much to our concern, to where we knew not.  We left in a hurry.

years later in college I discovered silver acetylide, a mostly fun thing.  We would lay a trail out on the stairs in the dorm late in the evening so it would dry over night.  The scuffling of a shoe would set it off.  New version of a hot foot.  My friends were not surprised when I joined the Combat Engineers.

[petefrom bearswamp]

In my early teens Jim Macgregor and I made our own BP from a recipe he found in a book.
WE mostly made firecrackers from razor blade boxes wrapped with the old fashioned friction tape. They worked good
we advanced to taking old pen tops  filling them, pinching the open end and putting them in a fire. Worked OK until one didnt go off and as I approached the fire it did and went between my legs.
Also made a marble cannon out of 1/2" pipe,but we didnt have a small enough drill for the touch hole.
The marble went about 10 feet.

[mike_belben]

Boy and here i thought a beer in a bonfire was a noble prank. 

[scsmith42]

Back in 8th grade me and three buddies were responsible for the school being evacuated one fine day.  

We were all honor roll students so the teacher let us have the run of the science lab during class (it was in a separate room off of the classroom).

We had been experimenting making gunpowder and then got into more advanced methods that called for crystalizing it during drying, and then regrinding the powder after crystalizing.

Somehow an entire beaker went up in the science lab and things got a little exciting....   Needless to say, it wasn't smokeless powder...


When I think of civilian's possessing dynamite, I always remember this video. It is literally one of the funniest things that I've ever heard.  There is a little bit of bad language, but nothing that isn't in modern movies.

[WV Sawmiller]

   One of my double first cousins blew up a batch of gunpowder or a similar substance in HS Chemistry and he got pretty badly burned. The teacher was evidently pretty excitable and wanted to expel or suspend him and was chastising him most severe till he told her to stuff a sock in it as he was going to the HS nurse or doctor for treatment and anything else she wanted to do could come later. I don't remember what else happened to him but he retired after a career as an officer in the USAF.

Here locally our HS used to do a pumpkin drop in physics class and time the fall to calculate the height of the bridge to the New River below. My son and his buddies realized it would be much more interesting to experiment using a flaming pumpkin so they filled theirs with gas and just before they dropped it they lit it. It was very interesting and educational. They also learned that flaming gasoline floats on the surface of the water and that flaming fuel on top of water during the Fall dry season is not a good combination. They nearly burned up the whole town but fortunately the fire department were successful in stopping it before the flames crossed the railroad tracks.

While was in the USMC I had the Ammo Supply/Storage point at USMCLB Albany GA at the Logistics Center there. I received an order from HQMC  to stock an assortment of several different explosives such as commercial dynamite, det cord, phosphates, nitrates, etc. to be used as training aids for a explosive dog that we were getting in the future. All of these classes of explosive were incompatible with each other so when I asked the Base Safety Officer what to do he handed 3-4 four inch binders and said "Its in there somewhere" so I dug around several days learning way more about explosive storage than I ever wanted and finally hit on a loophole for small amounts of total Net Explosive Weight (Less than 1000 lbs NEW). I sent a request to the CNO and got my waiver and a counter proposal on my storage plan which was easier all around. I got my explosives but neither I or my ammo tech knew anything about maintenance of the stuff so I told her to leave it alone. Wrong answer! When the dog and handler arrived 6 months later the first thing the handler wanted to do was inspect his training aids. He immediately identified that the wet spot under the commercial dynamite was a bad thing. We did not know you were supposed to rotate the stuff something like 1/4 turn a week to keep the nitro from leaking out of the waxed paper. So, per SOP, I called EOD at Ft Benning 90 miles away. They immediately put me on hold and never came back nor would they pick up on subsequent calls (And you wonder why Marines have no so little love for the Army?). I called Warner Robbins AFB EOD about 120 miles away and they immediately sent a 2 P/U team down, transported the dynamite to the Base landfill 1/4 mile away and remotely set it on fire and burned it with no explosion required.

[Southside]

I was going to add what to do if you find some old dynamite in that condition but yea - don't touch it, don't bang anything, and whatever you do - don't break the crystals - call the pros.  It's actually not bad to deal with if you do it right.  

[Don P]

A friend wanted me to help him remove a box from an old store some years ago. I let him know it was probably very unstable. "We can hook to it and pull it out with the tractor" "Uhhh, I think the store would outrun the tractor  "

[Tom King]

When I was an early teenager, here at the lake, I used to work at a campgrounds.  One of my jobs, before it opened for the Summer, was to put some rocks in an old sock, with the fuse of an M80 sticking through the side of the sock.  The job was to light it, and throw them under the docks, to run any snakes out.

The fuse would keep burning underwater. It would shoot a small column of water probably 20 feet in the air, straight up through a crack in the dock floor boards.

We first tried just lighting an M80, and throwing it in the water, but it would just spin in a circle, and shoot a column of water.

It was fun even if we only ever rolled out a couple of snakes, upside down.

[Corley5]

It's good that I sand bagged out of chemistry for general biology instead

[mike_belben]

This thread really brings back forgotten memories of what a change its been from then to now.  


I was probably 7 or 8, we could be on an empty bridge or coming up to an underpass with no one around and my dad would pull an M80 out of his pocket, hold it over to me in the front seat of that 78 malibu wagon and say 'light this.'  Then hed toss it out the window just so the kids could get a kick out of a splash or a boom.   There was a whole paper bag full of em just sitting ontop the fridge like mints or toothpics just incase ya needed one i guess.. And it was no big deal. We never got in any sort of trouble .. I dont even remember a desire to sneak off with any because it wasnt forbidden at all.  I wasnt even that interested.  We'd already blown up all the fun stuff with dad.




Now im supposed to panic if my boy has his plastic rambo knife in his backpack or forgets a mask and hand sanitizer?  Gets written up for an orange on the bus?  Give me a break, what are we even turning into anymore?


Boy do I miss the 80s. Golly.