Dan Dare rockets
My brother and I thought we were budding chemists, and had a little lab in half of the garden shed. Our parents thought we were educating ourselves, when really we were hell bent on destruction. I know things were more relaxed then, but we had radioactive salts in there!

Anyhoo, the best devices were our "rockets". Don't do this at home. The rockets were fashioned out of six inch lengths of inch diameter aluminium tube, with the end crimped over into a nozzle modelled on something like Dan Dare had in the Eagle comic.

These were filled with a mixture of weedkiller (full strength pre IRA) and sugar, and sealed with a solid rubber bung hammered in with a mallet as hard as we could. The danger still makes me shudder!

We set this up at a trajectory designed to fly sideways through our terraced house gardens, with no thought of the effect where they landed. A length of Jetex fuse shoved up the nozzle allowed us to light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance. Usually they didn't work, falling over or failing to light, but on one truly memorable occasion, we watched in horror as the orange flames shot the damn thing a hundred feet in the air, the angle taking it into the garden, I hope, at the end of the street. It frightened us so much we never made another one. How none of them exploded I don't know.

Length? I already told you, six inches, made of aluminium with the end hammered over.
(Classic Ray, Mon 15 Oct 2012, 21:40, 2 replies)

Sounds rather like pipe bombs..
(anvil, Mon 15 Oct 2012, 23:46, closed)

FLYING pipe bombs!
Now that's something I could get excited about!
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 16 Oct 2012, 16:55, closed)