Cannon go BOOM! 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
As do most teenage boys, my childhood best friend Matt and I considered ourselves to be quite the pyrotechnics experts, and over the years made lots of small, mostly harmless fireworks and cannon and such. It's one of the of the nice things about growing up in rural Virginia and not having nearby neighbors.
Anyway, on this particular occasion, we had made our biggest cannon yet. It was about a foot of 1/4" ID steel pipe with a steel plug pounded securely in one end, and a small touch-hole drilled just above the plug. We propped it in front of a 4x4 that framed a flowerbed below the front porch, and were having fun pouring the powder from cut-open shotgun shells into our little cannon and perforating a nearby bag of mulch with BB's and individual pellets of buckshot. On the little cannon's soon-to-be-last firing, Matt decided we should try for a shotgun effect, and instead of 1 BB he poured in a handful, probably about 10 or 15. It never occurred to either of us that shotguns are called "smoothbore" guns for a reason, as our pipe soon explained to us.
It was my turn to touch off the cannon, and Matt retreated about 5 feet away to the top of the steps, behind a wooden guardrail. I lit a match, placed it to the touch-hole, and BOOM went the pipe. It had split at right about the midpoint, and both remaining peices were shredded to look like the result of a cartoon character sticking his finger in the barrel of a gun just before it went off. I picked up the muzzle end and out fell 5 or 6 BBs. The rest were permanently lodged in the barrel where we assumed they had bound up on a rough spot in the pipe. On the breech end, the plug had flown out and buried itself about halfway through the 4x4 we had propped the cannon against.
The part that makes us (and especially Matt) DA honorable mentions (disregarding our age at the time) was the one peice of shrapnel we could find, which was embedded about an inch into one of the supports of the railing Matt was standing behind...and our estimate of the trajectory would've put it right in his groin had the railing support not been there. We got lucky, and that was the end of our homemade cannon days.
As an amusing side note, my mom was home at the time (she was under the impression we were just lighting off some run-of-the-mill fireworks). It was hunting season, so our Great Dane was indoors, too. While Mom was a little surprised by the louder-than-average bang, poor Duke was much more so, to the point where he tried to climb under Mom's chair with predictable results.
Though I have lost the half of the pipe I kept, and my parents have moved from that house, the steel plug is still embedded in the flowerbed wall to this day. And my mom still thinks we were just lighting off fireworks.
aybe another time I'll tell you about the crater that we left along the gas pipeline behind Matt's house, or about the time I made napalm and set fire to our snow-covered driveway (yes, you read that right). And no, I don't do this sorta stuff any more, so hopefully you won't see me in the actual Darwin Awards any time soon...
-Robby
Submitted on 07/16/2002
Submitted by:
Robby
Reference:
Copyright © 2002 DarwinAwards.com
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