What happened to all the bonfires?

[old'un]

1 hour ago, Dougy said:

You could put a thread on scaffold poles and get a screw on end cap. 

Not going into too much detail but, it was very naughty what we made with them. 

Yep, the scaffold cannon down the woods with a gang of kids waiting for it to go off, mine you it took about 10 penny bangers to fill the bloody thing but it certainly went off with a boom, did you ever tape a two inch nail to a rocket and fire them out of a copper tube? There was a derelict farm not far from home and we would fire them at the old barn doors, some bounced off but some went in a quarter of an inch.

When I think back we did some bloody dangerous things when we were kids.

[amateur]

I taped a piece of copper tube to the barrel end of my Diana airgun and loaded the gun and hid behind the garden shed.

Tuppenny banger in and lit, count to 3 and lobbed it in the direction of my unsuspecting younger brother.

A very satisfying airburst, followed by another before be cottoned on to where it was coming from.

Tuppenny bangers were thicker and more explosive than penny bangers.

[Old farrier]

6 hours ago, old'un said:

The Development of the Banger Gun

yep, that's what we did to start with but then I had a eureka moment ...... so the end of the copper pipe was flatted and folded over, then a hole was drilled to take the fuse, the black powder was poured down the pipe followed by a bit of paper then a small amount of fishing shot and another piece of paper to hold the shot in, the pipe was bond to a piece of wood (the stock) and the fuse lit, this worked but it took to long for the gun to go off, anything you were aiming at was long gone, soooo...how to make it an almost instant firing gun .... that's where the match heads come in, so instead of drilling a hole for the fuse I used a centre punch to sink a deepish indent into the copper pipe which would hold the match head, a small hole was drilled at the bottom of the indent to allow it to ignite the powder, a very crude hammer was fashioned and an elastic band was used to pull the hammer forward after it was pulled back and released with your thumb (I still have all my fingers) this all worked very well and as you have seen in my previous post it was refined using steel pressure gauge pipe.

Just to say with the earlier copper pipe guns I did have a couple of copper pipes split open on firing.

This is extremely dangerous so don't try this at home kids

You are such a spoil sport 😂😂😂😂

im just going to make one for the grandkids 😱😂😂😊

6 hours ago, 30-6 said:

That sounds genius thinking. All we done was fashion a bit of copper pipe and drop the firework in backwards after lighting.

Didn’t you ever drop one in your mates bike handlebars 🤔😊

[bottletopbill]

Chucked  a banger in front of mates bike on the front wheel.

Blew the front wheel  

[amateur]

The other stupidity that my brother and I used to do was put an Airbomb in a long tube and fire it over the shoulder like a bazooka.

Really stupid.

[Dougy]

9 hours ago, old'un said:

When I think back we did some bloody dangerous things when we were kids.

The most dangerous thing i did was to attend chemistry lessons at school, and add that to a mind that's extremely inquisitive and does the opposite to being told what not to do. 

Another interesting thing we used to make was hydrogen by dissolving zinc in sulphuric acid.

[amateur]

52 minutes ago, Dougy said:

The most dangerous thing i did was to attend chemistry lessons at school, and add that to a mind that's extremely inquisitive and does the opposite to being told what not to do. 

Another interesting thing we used to make was hydrogen by dissolving zinc in sulphuric acid.

I found the trinitration of organic compounds to be very interesting.

[ditchman]

gun cotton was fun

[amateur]

22 minutes ago, ditchman said:

gun cotton was fun

It certainly was

[Minky]

10 hours ago, amateur said:

The other stupidity that my brother and I used to do was put an Airbomb in a long tube and fire it over the shoulder like a bazooka.

Really stupid.

Great minds Or lunatics think alike.  When I was about 12..13  I came up with this great idea of fireing firework rockets ĺaunched from a bazooka. I was very creative when it came  to creating stuff when it came to blowing anything up etc? I got a section of plastic downpipe and attached à pistol grip and a flailed extention. I took my invention to the local town bonfire and got my brother to put a rocket into the pipe and light the blue touch paperback. The rocket did launch but I and the people around me got covered in back blast. Luckily I wasn't hurt by this luncy and the homemade bazooka experiment was discarded. Several people thought that it was a good idea though. Luckily no one got hurt.

[London Best]

Lots of idiots were badly burned, scarred or worse in those halcyon days.

[old'un]

1 hour ago, London Best said:

Lots of idiots were badly burned, scarred or worse in those halcyon days.

True, but lots of people also had a lot of fun on bonfire night.

[amateur]

2 hours ago, Minky said:

Great minds Or lunatics think alike.  When I was about 12..13  I came up with this great idea of fireing firework rockets ĺaunched from a bazooka. I was very creative when it came  to creating stuff when it came to blowing anything up etc? I got a section of plastic downpipe and attached à pistol grip and a flailed extention. I took my invention to the local town bonfire and got my brother to put a rocket into the pipe and light the blue touch paperback. The rocket did launch but I and the people around me got covered in back blast. Luckily I wasn't hurt by this luncy and the homemade bazooka experiment was discarded. Several people thought that it was a good idea though. Luckily no one got hurt.

The advantage with the Airbomb was that all the sparks etc went forward, however gloves were essential.

 

2 hours ago, London Best said:

Lots of idiots were badly burned, scarred or worse in those halcyon days.

Ah!, "but it'll never happen to me"

🤕

[marsh man]

It's a wonder a lot of the above lunatics are still here it let us know how they passed there free time leading up the 5th November , they made our antics look pretty tame and apart from the odd youngster having the end of there finger parting company with the rest of the finger by trying bangers together and the odd eye lash going missing we more or less got away scot free , seriously I wonder what the kids of today write about there childhood in 50 odd years time 

[Minky]

1 hour ago, marsh man said:

It's a wonder a lot of the above lunatics are still here it let us know how they passed there free time leading up the 5th November , they made our antics look pretty tame and apart from the odd youngster having the end of there finger parting company with the rest of the finger by trying bangers together and the odd eye lash going missing we more or less got away scot free , seriously I wonder what the kids of today write about there childhood in 50 odd years time 

😃😃😁🤣🤠  I  was always experimenting with stuff.  Weed killer powder mixed with sugar and filled into glass Shiphams paste pots, loads of white candy floss smoke and brilliant white flame which melted the glass pot. Taking the coloured star bits out of rockets and loading them along with black powder into a small cast  iron cannon... badly burnt mums new lino in the kitchen. That experiment didn't go down very well. To ... I had seen a submarine war film where they were depth charging a sub..... .Around the back of our house there was a heavy duty steel barrel that collected rainwater from the gutter which father used to water the runner beans etc.  I thought that I could use this as my own depth charge experiment testing tank. So I  tied a banger to a metal meat skewer and a lenth of string for retrieval. , lit the blue touch paper and as soon as the fuse started to fizz I dropped it into the tank.  There was a muffled thud and it had a sort of Barnes Wallace effect on the barrel. It split the seam open and the barrel resembled what it was like on the inside of one of those subs when they got hit by a depth charge and the Hull seems sprung and water jetted everywhere.  I  quickly retrieved the string,  the spent firework and the skewer and made off.  No one ever suspected my naval bombing experiment and they sourced another steel barrel from somewhere. It's a wonder that I wasn’t maimed for life with some of the things that we did.  A other one was making airfix ship models and  putting a shotgun cartridge on or in the Hull and then shooting at the Primer with my Original 35 22 air rifle which blew the model boat to bits.  Putting 6 Inch nails onto the rails at the level crossing to make knife blades which were flogged at school to other prototype terrorists and lunatics.   The list is long.

Edited October 23, 2023 by Minky

[marsh man]

Minky ... You would have made very good reading in the Beano or Dandy at the time with your experiments in trying to help the war office out , the nearest we got to blowing a air fix plane up was putting a live cartridge that fitted snugly in a gate post and hit the prima with our B S A Airsporter or Webley Mk 3 which were very similar , mind you in comparison to your antics we were little angels that still had a lot to learn 

[amateur]

Oh yes! Sodium chlorate, which burned with a bright yellow flame.

Mixed with sulphur and sugar, loaded into a screw-top thick glass lemonade bottle. Detonator made a bicycle lamp bulb with the glass carefully filed off and wired to a bike dynamo. Detonator carefully inserted into the pop bottle and covered with explosive mix, wires fed through a small hole drilled in the composite cap. Bottle stuffed down a rabbit hole and tamped down with soil, wires taken to behind a tree and attached to the dynamo. Quick twist of the dynamo and a satisfying demolition. 

I think that I was about 10, then.

Thanks to Vogel's Organic Chemistry, required reading for A level chemistry, I moved on to making blocks of guncotton with a picric acid detonator.

Yes, I still have all my limbs, surprisingly, because I moved on to motorcycles next.

Edited October 23, 2023 by amateur

[marsh man]

57 minutes ago, amateur said:

Oh yes! Sodium chlorate, which burned with a bright yellow flame.

Mixed with sulphur and sugar, loaded into a screw-top thick glass lemonade bottle. Detonator made a bicycle lamp bulb with the glass carefully filed off and wired to a bike dynamo. Detonator carefully inserted into the pop bottle and covered with explosive mix, wires fed through a small hole drilled in the composite cap. Bottle stuffed down a rabbit hole and tamped down with soil, wires taken to behind a tree and attached to the dynamo. Quick twist of the dynamo and a satisfying demolition. 

I think that I was about 10, then.

Thanks to Vogel's Organic Chemistry, required reading for A level chemistry, I moved on to making blocks of guncotton with a picric acid detonator.

Yes, I still have all my limbs, surprisingly, because I moved on to motorcycles next.

Bloody good job you didn't live down my road in the late 50s and help some of the ole punt gunners out with various loads, the loads they used were bad enough without getting some outside help from the rough ole lot from the Kent area. 

[amateur]

39 minutes ago, marsh man said:

Bloody good job you didn't live down my road in the late 50s and help some of the ole punt gunners out with various loads, the loads they used were bad enough without getting some outside help from the rough ole lot from the Kent area. 

It was a Midlands rabbit hole that was demolished. We moved around a bit with my dad's job.

However, I do concede that the Kent marshes were disturbed by the block of guncotton.

[Minky]

Years ago Father bought some.... carbide.??  (Calcium carbide.)   A white powder. He used this to kill wasp nests.  He hated wasps and  would watch their flight lines as they went back home to the nest.  When He found the nest he would Mark it with a long stick. Later after dark he would go armed with a torch. A teaspoon tied onto a garden cane and a pot of the powder. A teaspoon of the powder did for the nest.  This powder when in contact with moisture / water produced acetylene gas which is very explosive.  I found that if a small amount of water was put into a 25ltr plastic drum and a teaspoon of powder created a pretty powerful explosion.  It was all for fun. There was no evil intent to do damage or hurt anyone.  Except wasps.  Mother had a virulent wasp nest at the end of the raspberry canes and I used the carbide trick on the nest.  A out 7pm when the wasps were back in the nest I  found a long bean pole and tied a bit of rag soaked in paraffin onto the end I lit it and put it over the hole expecting a bang, but nothing happened.   I removed the pole and noticed a small candle like flame.  As I walked away there was a big bang. Next day there were only a few wasps around the hole.  A few days later there were none.  I  dug the nest out and where the nest had been there was a hole the size of a football which had been wallpapered with wasps.

Edited October 23, 2023 by Minky

[nobbyathome]

My old man was an alcoholic and he came home sozzled as usual and we said what can we put on the bonfire on the local green quick as a flash he said the sofa needless to say bonfire night we all took our tatty sofa outside as many of us kids sitting on it as it went rolling down the hill we lobbed it on the fire and that was that.                                    Until he came home ratarsed where’s the sofa 😂 I got a good hiding for that and went without a sofa for months 😂😂😂

[shaun4860]

Best bangers I ever got was when I lived in Germany as a forces brat,

You bought them in boxes of 50, all padded in cotton wool in a round cardboard box the size of a 500 pellet tin.

About 3/4 of an inch long with a fuse string about the same length, about 3/16 in diameter, red cardboard.

They looked like 🧨 but the noise they made 😲

Another adaptation of the 2 bolts and a nut was to carefully take the sulphur  off 3 or 4 matches, carefully rub it in you fingers to grind it down the add it similar to using caps then drop it, as others have said how we all still have all our fingers is a mystery 

[30-6]

I've mentioned this before years ago.

I wanted to start collecting bullet cases and the bullet, together with some fired bullets to compare them. So had a .22 lr pulled the bullet, emptied the powder out and wondered about the live primer in the rim. So I bent a 90 degrees bit on the end of a stiff wire and proceeded to scrape out the primer.

One bang and black fingers later, realized that was not a good idea.

But, they say, ' if you don't make mistakes you'll never learn '. I learnt something that day.

[bottletopbill]

nobbyathome sounds like your dad drunk around the cray area and the type of bonfire we had in the crays 60s-70s.

All the local woods got cut up.

Edited October 24, 2023 by bottletopbill

[nobbyathome]

20 minutes ago, bottletopbill said:

nobbyathome sounds like your dad drunk around the cray area and the type of bonfire we had in the crays 60s-70s.

All the local woods got cut up.

My old man drunk all the time in the cray bill   Got slung out of most of them fighting as well 😂we had great bonfires when we were kids good old days