oh hell this is funny

[Irving]

I just nearly set myself on fire White Gas. I'd never used it before. It really isn't an exciting story.

Moral: Don't try to use White Gas in a home made penny can. You'll set everything on fire. Everything.

[theGinsue]

THanks for sharing that story wqith us cleaner. Funniest think I've read in a while - had me rolling!

[68Charger]

Thanks for the OP, Cleaner- really brought me back to my own youth...
it's either a bad sign or a good one when Pyrodex is soo familiar, yet you've never owned a black powder rifle...

My earliest recollection with "powder" would be when I was around 10 or 11, and my cousin and I decided to take apart some fireworks & dump the powder into a plastic model aircraft carrier (about 2' long, maybe)... we setup some jumping jacks on the deck, thinking it would be a nice after-effect... we had NO IDEA that all the powder would go up at once (apparently we didn't know why POW is the root word of powder)

we lit the fuse, a spark dropped, and the whole carrier blew up in our faces! "the daylight turned purple" sounds tame, since I didn't see anything for the next 1/2 hour or so... took a couple weeks for my eyelashes and eyebrows to start showing again... and for me to smell anything that didn't resemble sulfur.

Then there was my Molotov "phase"... started with small glass soda bottles.. then I found 2L Hansens glass bottles... throw one of those off a 30+ ft cliff in a gravel pit, and it makes a mushroom cloud you'll remember 30+ years later! I still feel the heat wave!!! I thought for sure we would be caught, but not even a siren...

Then the Pyrodex "phase"... we tried arrows loaded with pyrodex (using a .22LR "blank" as a primer, various other containment vessels... after limited success, we discovered the Anarchist cookbook, and "ANFO" (as it's now called) put a little bit in a "containment vessel" and a barely scary explosion becomes a "oh shit, we're going to jail for sure" kind of rush...

nobody died, and there was not (much) property damage... but I still remember the ringing... I would recommend hearing protection, and better cover... seriously...

more recently, I was bored a "few" years ago on 4th of July, and disappointed with the lack of fireworks... decided to fill a small balloon (maybe 10-12" diameter) with acetylene/oxygen mix from a cutting torch. set it off with a long (not nearly long enough) fireplace lighter.

I didn't hear anything significant from my right ear for 2-3 days... what was amazing was that I >swore< I heard the boom echo 3 or 4 times (must have been from my left ear, I thought I'd blown my right eardrum out) Each echo would have been from a specific ridge/range, and made sense as I recounted them...

[cleaner72]

its a damn miracle that we survived our youth, with all the stuff we used to do aint it?

[Byte Stryke]

sad part is, if any of our kids do anything like this today they will be shipped of to Guantanamo Bay as domestic terrorists never to be seen or heard from again.

[Ah Pook]

I remember at one point my mom had to give me CPR and Dad screaming "Bring him back to life so I can kill him again". Thanks Mom.

That right there is sig worthy.

[Sixgun]

Reminds me of my youth.

[Cman]

That the best laugh ive had in awhile.

[TFOGGER]

more recently, I was bored a "few" years ago on 4th of July, and disappointed with the lack of fireworks... decided to fill a small balloon (maybe 10-12" diameter) with acetylene/oxygen mix from a cutting torch. set it off with a long (not nearly long enough) fireplace lighter.

I didn't hear anything significant from my right ear for 2-3 days... what was amazing was that I >swore< I heard the boom echo 3 or 4 times (must have been from my left ear, I thought I'd blown my right eardrum out) Each echo would have been from a specific ridge/range, and made sense as I recounted them...

I was suspended for 3 days at Lakewood High for setting off one of those in the welding hood in the metal shop. These days, if a kid did that, they'd be at Gitmo so fast it would seem like teleportation.

Rumor has it that a 2 lb oxygen bottle loaded with a pound of FFF will pretty much erase a 15 foot long concrete foot bridge, about 30 years ago...

[def4pos8]

-- I can see the keyboard again!

Thank you so very much!

I sympathise with your dad. I would have called in a Broken Arrow to SAC.

Technically, dad screwed up. You're still breathin'. Thank God for small mistakes!!