Much-namechecked mate Steve Laws tells me that as children, he and his brother once dismantled all their fireworks to create a movie-style gunpowder trail.
They lit the end of it, and... phfft. Instead of the combustion burning its way steadily and dramatically down the trail, the entire line of powder went up in the same instant.
I'm told that shooting dynamite in midair doesn't make it explode, either.
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
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7 comments:
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
How can you, I repeat, HOW can you shatter my illusions like this?
Well, if it's any consolation, apparently there are two types of dynamite and the kind based on nitroglycerine can be detonated by impact.
So sez Wikipedia, which of course is never wrong.
Next, you'll be telling me that Mr T never actually made any of those contraptions out of old junk lying around...
More importantly, once it was lit, did they run away in slow motion?
I'm sure they must have, with a dive to the ground as it went up behind them.
As a sort of reverse, when I was a school-boy we used to fire small rockets through lengths of scaffold pipe as a makeshift bazooka. I wouldn't recommend it to kids now (and I'm really quite horrified that we used to do this)but at the time it did resemble the sort of effect you'd see in war films...
On the other hand Gelignite can be safely left on a fire or dropped. My Dad saw this proved while working on a bypass. If it's 'sweating', though... less good!
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