Our
excursion into the field of “explosives engineering” began as I have related
with a few firecrackers and some purloined gun powder. But not being smart enough to cut our losses,
we kept at it from there.
Often
in life I have looked back on this and wondered how we got out alive, or at
least with all our fingers and toes. Not
to say that there weren’t a few close calls such as the time where for most of
a week Barry couldn’t feel the fingers on his right hand or hear much from his
right ear. Jeff always claimed it was a “fast
fuse”. I think Barry always figured it
was a slow “it’s lit” instead. And of
course no one was impaled by the flying cannon, or any of the numerous intentional
projectiles either, but remove those and a few other temporary difficulties,
and we all came out of the “Bang Phase” biologically intact amazingly enough.
One
of the first lessons that we learned was that highly volatile reactions may create
lots of smoke and some flame but, unless there was a force working to contain
them, they just really weren’t all that impressive. In a gun, the burning powder has the shell,
the brass case, and the bullet to resist its expansion; in a bomb, there is the
metal casing; and even in a firecracker, there is the tightly wrapped layers of
paper. Yep, without a counter-acting
force, gun powder (or any other fairly simple man-made mixture) just burns
really fast. No bang. No shockwave, no damage; still pleasing to
smell to young men such as we were, but no “blood-racing” wow factor.
Minimal
metal working tools and fewer pennies to spend meant that custom fabricated metal
casings were mostly out for us. Sure, we
could pool our savings and buy a few selected metal containers, but that would
leave no funds for powder to fill them with.
And somehow, using glass (other than for “underwater” devices) seemed
too risky. Not that a piece of metal
shrapnel flying through the air was any safer than glass, but the imagination
does what the imagination does and seldom bases its conclusions on fact.
Truth
be told, while my brothers and I liked to make things go bang, we really had no
desire to damage anything. In fact, you
can apply that to a great deal of our youthful foolishness; it was seldom at
the intent of harm. Pain and damage were
just our constant unconsidered companions.
Over
time, we hit on an ideal solution. File
folders. Yep, standard manila file
folders, carefully cut to fold up into small little boxes. Then, filled with our “powder de jour, we
would stick in a fuse, and wrap the cubes tightly with fiberglass strapping
tape. Now at some point, we ran out of
gun powder and while we were starting to reload our own ammunition by then, an
explosive with a “little more bang” was what we wanted for our little boxes.
It
turned out that Barry knew a guy in high school who was farther ahead of us on
the experimenting curve, but perhaps further behind us in caution. And so, when one day he was rushing and
didn’t carefully clean out the grinding equipment between component chemicals,
he touched off a batch of powder that was significant enough to put him out of
action for a while, run up some doctor and home repair bills for his father,
and put him out of the business of making and supplying explosive powders
permanently.
Like
a shark on blood spore, Barry recognized the opportunity when he saw it and
offered to buy up the guy’s “back up” tools and materials. The Vandermolen Powder works had come into it’s
own.
Back
in the day, you could send off and get chemicals mail delivered. No,
really. The back few pages of most boy focused
magazines had colorful ads for everything from aircraft plans to x-ray
glasses. And somewhere in there was a
chemistry supply house just drooling to pair energetic boys with energetic
chemicals.
All
we had to do was make sure we were hanging around on Saturdays during mail
delivery time if we had an incoming shipment so that Mom or Dad didn’t get the
mail and wonder what was in the package from ACME Explosives (or some other
graphically named supply source). Heck,
we even bought underwater fuse by the foot and it arrived coiled up in an envelope.
And
if for some reason the mail wasn’t safe enough (I know, that is probably an
oxymoron), we could stop by the local army surplus store and like as not the
important things we needed could be bought there as well.
Because
over the years I gained a few bruises and scars at the hands of un-named senior
members of my familial generation, I won’t go into details as to what makes a
good fast burning powder. That and of
course the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
Firearms and Explosives, the FBI, CIA, and various other law enforcement agencies
would prefer I don’t share for fear that some religious or political malcontent
will be inspired to lodge a high decibel complaint with their local government
office.
Suffice
it to say that we came to the skills and materials needed to fill little boxes
and thus have a nearly unlimited supply of things that go bang.
Now,
my father was always fond of quoting that a little bit of knowledge was a
dangerous thing, and for some reason, my brothers and I seemed to feel that we
needed to underscore that point once in a while.
So
after making and blowing off innumerable ½” x ½” x ½” cubes, with truly wonderful
bangs and resultant smoke clouds, we decided to build one slightly larger. Exercising “our little bit of knowledge” we
promptly decided to make a device that was 4 times “bigger”. The results were a little bit like when NASA
made the original mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope. Things just naturally turned out a little bit
fuzzy.
I
would like to in clear conscience blame the failure on Jeff, or Barry, but I
really can’t tell you who screwed up. In
any case, while 2 inches may be 4 times bigger than ½”, a 2” x 2” x 2” box is
not 4 times bigger than a ½” box. For
those of you struggling with the math in your head…..it is actually 64 times
bigger physically.
The
“wonderful bang and resultant smoke cloud” of that ½” cube unknowingly was
going to grow in dramatic proportion. As
to the resultant multiplication of force….I must admit that I discontinued my
studies after surviving this one and thus have never figured it out.
Luckily
after making the powder to fill that cube, fitting a very long fuse, and using
a full roll of tape, we decided to head out to the far edge of town for the
test instead of a simple quick trip to the football field. Running right through the middle of town
(east and west) was the local train tracks.
Those came close to our house, and ran right past the charred remains of
Barber’s cycle shop and feed store.
Baseball
sized cube in hand we headed out the tracks east of town where the rail bed had
been cut through a bit of a ridge.
Although only about 6 feet of bank existed, it allowed us to burrow a
hole back into the dirt a couple of feet, push the cube to the back of the
hole, trailing the fuse out and pack the hole with dirt again. That repacking of dirt added to that “resistive
force” I was mentioning earlier.
I
recall some discussion as to how close we could safely stand (to get a good
view), and surprisingly enough the natural skeptics in the crowd actually won
out in that discussion. I can’t recall which
one lit the fuse, though I am sure it wasn’t me. Not that Barry or Jeff would have minded too
much, but they knew I was at that “gangling puppy” phase and they figured they
didn’t want to have to explain anything about this to Mom and Dad.
I
used to know how long it took to burn an inch of fuse, and certainly we had done
the math back then but you might want to refer to the ½ inch to 2 inch
discussion above before you decide there was any security in that. We had, however, vacated the immediate area
and doubled back up above the embankment and backed off most of 50 yards or
so. I remember watching the fuse smoke
over the embankment and then what seemed like forever before the ground literally
shook.
A
huge, no I mean HUGE fountain of dirt and rocks leapt skyward accompanied by a
tremendous lung crushing explosion.
Now,
most evidence to the contrary, my momma didn’t raise no dummies and so, before the
smoke had even risen from the resultant crater we boys were legging it back
towards town as fast as our paperboy strengthened legs would carry us. There was no doubt in our ringing ears and
befuddled minds that explosion had been heard.
Next town over likely, and we knew that the local authorities were going
to put down their coffee cups and doughnuts and come see what was up.
Fast
as we were, the cops were faster.
We
were running down a two-track crossing the dirt and grass fields when we heard
the first of the sirens about to round into the field at the far end. Panic set in.
While we didn’t have a hope in heck of beating the cops, we spun around
and started running back towards the settling dust cloud.
A
few seconds later a police cruiser came careening down the lane behind us,
bottoming and scrapping as a city car will do in a hardscrabble field, plume of
dust in its wake.
Sliding
to a stop the cop hollered out the window; “Boys, what are you doing out here”.
I
can’t say as I have a clue what Jeff would have said, and I know that my
eyeglass frames were still singing like a tuning fork from that detonation, but
at least Barry was still firing on all cylinders, cause he ups with “Wow, we
heard this really big bang out this way and are going to see what caused it”.
As
I recall the cop didn’t look too convinced, but after taking our names down on
a “field interrogation” 3 x 5 card, he told us to go back the other way and
then he raced on towards the smoking crater.
©
Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved
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