Childhood Memories of Our First Home made Firecrackers

[painter777]

Any of you make home made firecrackers when you were young?
I mean to young to be allowed to have them per mom and dad.
Do you believe it may have contributed to you building bigger and bigger home made explosive devices as you aged?
What is it about something that goes boom that we love to see, feel and hear?

A phone call last night with my brother got us to reminiscing about making our first fire crackers when we were younger.
Anyone remember the kids cap guns that used a roll of caps?
Well my brother and I think we stumbled on to how or why we started making them.

Well one hot muggy day, too hot to be running around capping each other, we were sitting under a shade tree popping off a cap at a time. Being young country boys more at home running up and down the river banks with our wrist rocket sling shots in hand and pockets full of nice hard not quite ripe crab apples, we always managed to find something we weren't suppose to be doing. One day after a major crab apple battle we'd seen the neighbor across the roads driveway was covered with them. Paid it no mind but later when he got home and had pulled in he'd crushed them thus stained his driveway . He was a particular one with perfect grass and manicured bushes. Well he threw such a fit even though we denied it was us....... until he pointed out we had the only crab apple tree on the street. Well, we found ourselves grounded to the yard once again.

So while sitting under that very tree I started to pull a roll of caps and without tearing them off the roll would fold one over the other until you had a stack of caps. We grabbed a sewing needle and would push the point from the center bottom up through the center of the caps until it popped up through the top of the stack. Now to bind it, we found using masking tape worked best to wrap it tight but leaving the top with the needles point open. We had it figured out, very proud of ourselves. Leaving the top open would allow us to stick the head of the match there for our fuse, but only after pulling out the needle. We learned the hard way at how slowly you'd have to pull that needle out..... too quick and boom, you'd have to start all over. The needle was how you pierced the center of the caps powder load and kept it lined up as you folding each cap zig zag style back and forth. Finally we caught on how to extract the needle without setting it off. Our first try, by placing a match head on the top and lighting the end was a success much bigger boom than we could have ever expected. Problem was you couldn't light and throw because it would blow out the match. Later after finding a rather large longer needle, I believe it was for leather work we were able to stack up to 3 cap rolls on. This blast nearly equaled the smaller cherry bombs we could buy when out of state on trips. We managed to blow up that neighbors mail box, but still got busted. We proudly served our time, while making bigger and better home made fire crackers.

Of course over the years after many birthdays we progressed to much larger ka-booms now having access to black powder..... etc. Information that maybe I shouldn't share.

Just a memory from long ago I thought I'd share.
Funny how many gun enthusiast have similar experiences.

Regards and Never Convicted
Charlie-Painter777

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