Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Firecracker guns

rockingbbar: "Those old Kentucky rifle play guns that used to shoot cork round balls used to make decent shotguns when loaded with a couple of fire crackers and a wad of BB's in a bit of rolled up paper towel.."

Yessir! I had one of those play Kentucky rifles.
It had a place where you could put a cap, like from a cap gun. Then you put a cork ball down the barrel.
The power of the cap would shoot the ball about 40 feet.

I got 5 black cat firecrackers and poured the powder down the barrel. It was a very fine, silvery powder, almost like dust.
I found a marble that fit the bore real well, it was about a .45 caliber bore. Didn't use a patch didn't know about that.
I knew that the thing was liable to blow up. I wedged the rifle in a bush. I tied a 30 foot string to the trigger and got back about 28 feet.
The rifle was aimed at the neighbor's concrete block foundation.
I pulled the trigger and it fired! Big cloud of smoke, big big bang.
I went over to the neighbor's house and there was a one inch hole in a concrete block.

The gun didn't blow up, nor even swell up much.

This thread should be self explanatory to antigunners about why taking all the Guns away will be a futile action. lol

We were making our own when we were 10!

I learned how to make hydrogen. You get a glass one quart coke bottle, put in 2 tbsp Red Devil lye, and put in five or six strips of aluminum foil.
Add 4 oz. water and it starts to foaming and it makes hydrogen.
Get a big balloon and put it over the top of the bottle, in a few minutes you have a hydrogen balloon.

I knew about the Hindenburg.
I got 3 of those balloons and tied them together. I made a gondola of aluminum foil, and tied it to the balloons.
In the gondola I put a lit cigarette, and stuck a cherry bomb into the cigarette near the filter.

Launched the little flying bomb, and up it went. Had to get the binoculars out but it was up about 500 feet, and about 1/2 mile away when it blew.
There was a flash, and then a big explosion. Real big.
But no noise. It took several seconds for the noise to be heard.

This was in 1965 right near Peachtree DeKalb Airport in Atlanta. I hate to think, if a kid got caught doing that today, they would have me down at Gitmo getting waterboarded.

LOLOLOL

Back in the fifties, we made pistols that shot marbles out of a piece of 1/2" water pipe. Standard Black Cats put marbles out of sight. Would put a marble thru plain old dutch siding!

Im missing it somewhere. Maybe you send me some crestor so I can see it.

I was thinking more along the lines of Preparation H.............

For a junior high science project, three of us made a firecracker cannon. We got one member's father to weld shut the end of a piece of pipe, weld on legs so we could anchor it in the ground, and drill a hole to coax the fuse through when the firecracker was dropped down the barrel. The premise was to measure how far firecrackers (illegal in Iowa, by the way) of different sizes/makes would propel a ball bearing. This was to be measured by the puff of dust raised on the football field when the bearing contacted the ground. The class was taken out to the field, we loaded the device and fired it off, with a very distinct puff of dust appearing down the field. Things went well until we reached the point where no puff appeared. Since the city well building was in the park across the road from the field, further shots were terminated at that point. Can you imagine such an experiment being sanctioned and carried out today?

When I was a paramedic in Georgia, 20 years ago, we used to have bottle rocket battles.
Firecrackers are illegal in Georgia but that was no problem, on a trip to Tennessee, I would pick up the ammo.
I would buy 10 gross of bottle rockets, that is, 10 packs of 144 rockets.
Then, I would buy several dozen roman candles.

We would get 10 paramedics out in a field at night. Each man had a gross of rockets and about 6 roman candles.
Had to make a launching tube, a 3 foot piece of one inch metal pipe. Had to wrap the tube with newspaper and hold it on with duct tape because that tube got really hot.

All troops had to wear protective goggles. Alcohol was involved.

Damn, that was fun, running around on the battlefield at midnight shooting all those rockets. You were in trouble, you were standing there near enemy lines lighting your bottle rocket, an unseen enemy from 10 feet away, kneeling down, he lit up a roman candle and started firing at you. The roman candle fired on "full auto" and that was a real threat. Probably time to retreat. Believe me, a roman candle ball right in the face really hurts.
Damn, that was some fun. The wives were disgusted, they said "Y'all boys are out there in the meadow at midnight acting like a bunch of children!"

Baloons filled with Methane gas work about same..

Ouch!

Methane's HEAVIER than air.

GTC

When I was 10 I traded a neighborhood boy an old camera I had found at the dump for an Arisaka rifle his dad had brought home from the war. I discovered that some ball bearing I scrounged up that were a close fit to the bore and a lit firecracker dropped in behind it with the bolt quickly slammed shut was a lot of fun.

Had one tip over one time and blast me right in the shin bone. That hurt like a mo fo! I can't imagine getting hit in the face with one.

I'm a 'tater gun fella, myself.

We used an old trapdoor from "Ye Olde Hunter" when the original balloon head BP ammo we bought with it ran out. (The Rifle and ammo were sent to us via USPS.)
"Black Cats" were the charge of choice
Fishing sinkers hammered round, and greased worked well.

GTC