For all of you with little boys...or maybe you still are a little boy, (standard:humor, 1826 words)
Author: Subzero22	Added: Feb 05 2004	Views/Reads: 3012/2159	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
About a father and his children. If you think just shooting off fireworks is dangerous, you should read this.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

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 handfull 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 maching 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 can snap my finger. 

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.  O well. 

After all, if your dad isn't gonna teach you how to get your ass blown
off, who will? 


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