About 2 weeks ago, I was
looking around the Web for the BIGGEST sky rocket
that I could get shipped
to me via common freight carrier. I
located a
fireworks importer in
Wisconsin who had this mondo sky rocket -- biggest
thing I had ever seen --
called a SkyDragon. These things are 48
inches
tall and are mounted on
a 1/2-inch wooden dowel. Pure aerospace engineering.
I plopped down a bunch
of money and had him send me two cases of these
things. They arrived at the freight dock a few days
ago and I had to
drive the van over to
pick them up. Two boxes each 2 feet by
2 feet by
4 feet in size
containing 80 rockets each. The 'Class
4 Explosives'
sticker on the side of
each box was a real bonus. I am gonna
have to save
them for the scrapbook.
That night, me and the
kiddos had a gen-u-ine rocket launch ceremony.
I
placed one of these
beauties in a liter-size glass bottle and the bottle
fell over. Hmmmm-- this thing was waaay too big. I looked around the
shop for a pipe to set
it in, but realized that the only dirt I could
drive the pipe into was
in plain sight of my neighbor's house.
I knew he
was a cool guy, but I
didn't want him to call the cops. You
see --
'projectile-type'
fireworks are totally illegal in this county.
I was
surprised that the
Buncombe County Sheriff Department wasn't waiting for
me at the loading dock
when I picked these things up. Anyhow,
I finally
rigged a launch pad by
prying up one of the driveway drain grates with a
crowbar and sitting the
stick into the deep pit. Looked sorta
like an
ICBM silo with its
hardened lid slid aside.
I asked which of my
three kids wanted to light the fuse, but all took a
few steps back and
politely declined. Chicken-shits. Kids just aren't
made the same
nowadays. They fulfill their danger
quotient by shooting
bad guys in video
games. About as far from real danger as
you can get,
if you ask me. I told the little weenies to stand back as I
bent to light
the device with a Bic
lighter. The lady at the fireworks
importer
promised me that these things would NOT make any noise. I told her that
they HAD to be
relatively quiet so I could shoot them off in my
neighborhood without
causing "undue alarm". She
said I wouldn't have any
problem. I emphasized the particular legal problems I
would have if there
were any type of loud
report at apogee. I emphasized the fact that I lived
right next to a National
Park and that any type of firework that was
discharged or assumed to
be discharged on that property would get me sent
before a FEDERAL judge
right before I got sent to the COUNTY judge.
She
again assured me I would
have no problem.
That lying bitch.
That rocket engine had a
burn time about as long as any I had EVER seen,
and the ascent echoed
off the surrounding trees. Diamond
shock pattern
extended from the back
end. It kept going and going and
going. When it
hit apogee at about 1000
feet, the rocket disintegrated into a huge shower
of silent red
sparks. Pretty cool, I thought ...
until the shower of
sparks burned out and
suddenly transformed into a cloud of EXTREMELY
bright and loud
explosions. The kids scrambled into the back door "Three
Stooges" style (ie:
where all three try to get through the same closed
door at once) and left
me standing in the smoking haze waiting for the
cops to arrive. The dogs
that live along our street were all barking their
heads off at the
apparition they had just witnessed in the night sky.
That ended the fireworks
test for the night.
The next day, my oldest
son Doug and I decided we were gonna "neuter" one
of the rockets so it
wouldn't make any noise. I took him
into the closet
where I store the
gardening tools and he saw these two huge cases of
fireworks standing
there. The kid went nuts. He wanted to open BOTH
boxes so he could see
what all 159 rockets looked like lined up next to
each other. This kid has promise. I told him: "Since mom only thinks I
have a few of these
things lying around, maybe that wasn't such a good
idea." He mulled
that over for a few seconds, then gave me a real big
smile in agreement. We pulled one of the rockets out of the box
and
re-locked the closet
door. He and I both sat down on the
driveway and
proceeded to take it
apart. It was a standard issue big-ass Chinese sky
rocket. I bet they used these to kill people 500
years ago. As I sat
there taking layer after
layer of paper off, his brain was filling with
the details of
construction. Tissue, cardboard, plastic, fuses...etc.
Realizing that he was
mentally storing the design for some future project
sorta made me
shudder. All I was thinking was the
fact that this thing
was probably put
together by a political prisoner in a hellhole somewhere
who is probably gonna
get "executed" so they can sell his internal organs
on the transplant
market. Probably not too far from the
facts, but I
managed to do a bit of
explaining to him from the standpoint of aerospace
engineering regarding
how the thing worked. Doug is probably
the only
4th grader in the U.S.
who can now describe the principle of thrust using
a control volume model.
The rocket was pretty
simple. It had a very large booster
engine topped
with a warhead that
contained the red sparkly things that exploded.
Removing the warhead was
as simple as giving a quick twist, and I assumed
the neutered rocket
would fly higher without the payload. I
was correct.
Doug and I did a
daylight "stealth" test and were able to add about 50%
to the altitude attained
the previous night. We decided to
modify four
more rockets and put
them aside in the closet for easy access.
When this
was done, Doug had a jar
full of stuff that came out of the warheads
including: 12 fuses
about 3-inches long each, some paper, 4 plastic
nosecones and a big
handful of these little black balls about the size of
12-gauge buckshot that
turned out to be the 'red sparkly popper things'.
It appeared that the
outer layer was a simple gunpowder coating designed
to quickly burn off as
red shower of sparks. I surmised that
the inner
core had some kind of
magnesium thermite that gave off an intense white
light and a loud
bang. Pretty cool if you ask me. Lots of energy packed
into one teeny little
ball.
I didn't want to see the
popper thingies go to waste, so I told Doug we
were gonna put them in a
hole in the ground and set them off. He
gave me
another big smile. It's amazing how kids think alike... even
when
separated by 30
years. As I was digging a shallow hole
with my hand, Doug
asked if it would be
alright to put an army man next to these things so
that "When they go
off, it would look like he was getting shot with a
machine gun". Dang.... exactly what I was thinking. I agreed and he ran
off to his room to dig
something out of the mess. He returned
in about
3 seconds, out of breath
and holding a cheap plastic imitation
of Robert
E. Lee on horseback and
a Civil War cannon. I pointed out that
they
didn't have true machine
guns in the Civil War, but we would overlook this
for the purpose of the
demonstration. He handed me the action
figure and
I placed it and the
cannon next to a rather large pile of black beads from
which a few of the fuses
extended. I figured that three inches
of fuse
would take 2 seconds to
burn, so I had at least that amount of time to
stand up and take a few
steps back. I neglected to recount the
night
before... when the
warhead ignited IMMEDIATELY upon reaching apogee.
Tricky Chinese. They had installed extremely fast-burning
fuse in these
things and that fact
totally escaped me. I squatted next to
Robert Lee
and gave a short
eulogy. Doug laughed. I took the trusty Bic lighter
and placed it next to
the fuse. One flick got the lighter
going and THIS
IMAGE IS ONE I WILL
REMEMBER FOR A LONG TIME. My hand holding a lighter
next to a pile of
explosives. There is usually a short
but noticeable
mental pause that occurs
immediately before something bad or really stupid
happens. It is where that little voice in your head
says: "You dumbass."
The fuse burn time was
in the 1/1000ths of a second range.
The pile of
little popper thingy's
immediately ignited into a tremendously brilliant
ball of fire. All I could think was
"...th...th....thermite..."
Unfortunately, when they
are viewed at ground level, these little popper
thingies become REALLY
BIG POPPER THINGIES and have a tendency to jump up
to 15-feet in every
direction from their point of ignition.
I
instantaneously became
engulfed in a ball of fire that sounded a lot like
being in a half-done bag
of Orville Reddenbacher's popcorn. It
was all
over about as fast as I
could snap my fingers. After the smoke
cleared,
Doug started laughing
his butt off. That meant I was still in
one piece.
Doug does not laugh at
dismembered limbs. He said I jumped about 10-feet,
an action that I do not
remember.
I checked my clothes for
burn marks, and found none. He checked
my back
to make sure it was not
on fire. No combustion there. The driveway was
peppered with black
holes where the concrete had been scarred from these
things. A close one. Another REAL close one.
My mind ran the tapes
again to re-hash what it
had seen. All I remembered was being
inside
something akin to a
30-foot diameter ...... flaming dandelion.
Whew. We
examined Ol' Robert E.
at ground-zero.
Instead of a machine-gun
peppering, he got nuked. He and the
horse he
rode in on... and his
cannon too. One side was untouched, but
the other
side was
arc-welded. Real warfare. Doug examined it real quiet-like and
then started laughing
again.
I assume he will
remember the finer points of the lesson as he grows
older. When I now speak
of "almost being burned beyond recognition" he
will have a slightly
better understanding of what I mean. I
hope that
this vivid image tempers
the knowledge he now has regarding rocket
construction. Oh
well. After all, if your dad isn't
gonna teach you how
to get your ass blown
off, who will?