We met up in the driveway of my house, and some people were a bit slow in getting there (you know who you are!) Once everyone got there and the car was loaded, we drove out of the city to my cabin in the mountains. Once we got there the goods were spread onto the table and we grabbed some stuff to play with.

It was still early afternoon so we had to save the good stuff for night. I loaded my pack with small stuff, firecrackers, bottle rockets, cracklin balls and a few other small things. One thing I did not have was a small propane tank *wink wink*. I also had a BB gun to shoot at whatever looked fun. We went to a small lake and played around with the small stuff.

All the inevitable things like firecrackers and bottle rockets going off too soon or too close to people happened. Then we started tossing things close to people and that surprised a couple people! I tossed a cracklin ball above my friends head and misjudged the timing. The contents exploded all around him, it was pretty funny.

I had two cobs with me, one for the propane tank, and the other to set off underwater. I taped the cob to a rock so it would sink in the water. It was fused with two bottle rocket fuses and taped to try and keep water from getting in. My friend had a video camera with him, so we were going to record some of the stuff we did. I lit the fuse and tossed it in, but despite all my high tech masking tape, water got in and the second fuse did not ignite. Oh well, I should have used only one fuse. We had used up most of the stuff we had with us, and decided to set off the big one, a cob on a small propane tank. We walked quite a ways up a road and then up a hiking trail to a boulder field to set off the device. I taped a cob to the tank and placed it in a small cave area made by some large rocks and got everyone way back. My friend set up a video camera only about 15 feet away in the rock pile to film it. I told him it might get blown up, but if it did it would have been very funny. The camera was set up and started, and I lit the fuse and ran as fast as I could. The explosion was loud, but the tank clearly had not blown from the sound of it. I went to the blast site to examine the tank. The tank had a dent in it about 3/4" deep and about the size and shape of the cob that had been taped to it. This dent was very cool, but I was disappointed the whole thing hadn't gone. I wanted to try again, but didn't have any more cobs with me so I had to walk all the way back to my cabin to get another one. I only had two left, and I wanted to save one for night. I took the cob back to the boulder field and taped in over the dent from the previous one. I lit the cob and ran away. The result was the same as the last one. The dent was bigger and deeper, but it did not puncture the tank. Damn container! Why can't you be made of cardboard?!?! Oh well, I should have tried something smaller like an aerosol can of hairspray or something. We left the tank in the rock field and went back to watch movies until it got dark.

When it got dark we loaded everything into the car and went to a gravel parking lot. We had a bunch of stuff, so we got started right away. There were a lot of rockets and we launched them from a 5 foot section of ABS tubing I had brought. One end had a metal lid tape to it and it worked very well for rockets. None of the rockets were too special, but the ones with whistling engines were nice. I had two cakes, both Black Cat brand. One was a Double Decker and had gold bursts and comets. It sounded cool, but wasn't really that great. It would have been very good if it was used in combination with other effects at the same time as part of a show, but by itself it wasn't much. The other cake I forget its name and had a fan design with the tubes to have the shells break spread across the sky. Fireworks usually don't have good descriptions on the packaging, so I didn't know what it was going to do. As is turned out, it was just a series of red, white and blues shells over and over, it was pretty boring. The only cool part was when one broke low, only about 20 feet above the ground. Fragments of the shell hit some of my friends but nobody was hurt and it looked kind of cool.

The best class C was of course the shells. I got a Black Cat ProMag shell pack containing 36 shells. One cool thing about it other than having lots of shells is that it came with an HDPE mortar instead of a cardboard one. The shells were all pretty good, and the double break shells were especially nice, but I have seen better class C shells. Some more generic no-name brand shells I have seen have had larger and more impressive breaks.

The best fireworks were the homemade stuff. Some things, as expected were lame, and some were cool. The lamest thing was just a ping pong ball filled with the contents of many craklin balls. I expected it to all go up pretty quickly, but it was surprisingly slow. I had made several devices using a mixture of cracklin ball and sparkler powder to see how they would work. One was a rocket that I had taken out the wimpy payload and filled the remaining space in the tube with this mix. The rocket lifted off well, with a lot of sparks, and shot me in the face pretty good! The payload wasn't great, and I don't think the sparkler powder ever ignited. If I had added some black powder it probably would have been better.

I had another rocket that I had made myself. I used an estes D engine, estes body tube and nose cone, and some homemade fins. It was to be the first test of my rocket launcher so I didn't want to risk putting in an explosive cargo. I put the rocket in the tube, and got on some protective equipment, not knowing what to expect. It worked perfectly, I pushed the button, and a moment later the rocket went soaring off into the night sky. It made surprisingly little smoke, less than the class C rockets.

I had two other things using the cracklin ball/sparkler mix. They were both in cardboard tubes I had saved from a cake that I filled with the mixture. One had a fuse going in from the bottom, and the other had the fuse coming in the top. I expected the bottom fused one to act like a mine, and the top fused one to act like a fountain. Surprisingly, it was reversed, and the both were pretty good with lots of crackles and sparkling.

The second coolest thing of the night was a Super Soaker 25 water tank filled with match heads, black powder and magnesium shavings I spent a long time to reinforce in by wrapping it in duct tape. It was pretty good, but not as loud as I would have liked. I think it is more fun to just make several smaller ones instead of one big one.

By far the coolest thing was the Can o Rockets I had made with over 200 bottle rockets. The sticks were cut off to the level of the fuses so that the fuses would sit directly in the layer of powder at the bottom of the can. Having almost no stick meant almost no guidance or stability, but that just added to the fun. I lit the fuse and ran back. There was a flash of light, and about 2/3 of the rockets lifted off. A moment later the rest went. There were several different brands of rockets, so this explains the delay. The rockets formed an expanding globe and then all exploded within about a second. It was really cool! We finished up the rest of our stuff, and went back for the night.