A Little Too Much Powder Butch?

[archerforkids]

Pop was a pipe fitter/welder. We were running a 6" steel pipe from the plant we were working at out to various holding tanks on the property.
Inevitably 2 to 3 days a week when we started up in the morning there would be some variation of critters "napping" in the 40' stalks of pipe we were handling. After a 2 hour circus one morning trying to unass a skunk an old sideboom operator stopped laughing long enough to show us how to get them out of the pipe. He had us pick up one end of the pipe about 6 to 8 feet off the ground with a front end loader. He grabbed a torch and cranked up that sweet spot and hung the end of the torch(unlit) into the lower end of the pipe. After about 2 minutes he set that puppy off with a now lit torch. I'm pretty sure when them skunk hit the ground, they were hairless. I know for a fact they took the odor with them.
Oxygen and acetylene or a potent mix when properly applied.

 

[D Coots]

Ahhhhh, yes boys and their toys, some things never change.

To answer your question swimster, you can set off a charge next to buildings depending on what your using to do so and how you set the charge up.

In the mid 1970's I had a blasting company and did some powder work for a company that was putting 1000 pair phone cable under ground from Fresno to Yosemite national park in California. The cable was plowed in with D8 cats with a 6' plow tooth on the back. This worked fine until they came out of the Fresno valley along hwy. 41 which is the way into Yosemite park from Fresno. Once they started climbing up the hills to the park they hit what we called blue granite.

That part of the Sierra's is for the most part granite rock and you will never plow anything in it. At one point while going through the town of Oakhurst The cable had to go within 2' of a store full of plate glass windows, my crew and I used shaped charges drilled 4' down and after I set the charges in the hole we mixed the granite dust from the hole into a slurry and put back into the blast hole and let it set up almost as hard as it was before we drilled it. We then placed wet burlap sacks on top of that and chain link fencing on top of that and then put old car tires on top of that.

I set the charge off very early the next morning before hwy. 41 got moving since we were working within 50' of the hwy and right next to the store. Everything went just as it should an we moved on to the next place to shoot.

This type of blasting was very common in that area because that area had become poplar and people were buying up the land for their cabins which they built and then found that they had to put in their septic systems in or across large patch's of granite.
There were three other blasters in that area but none of them would touch those jobs. That made it very good paying work.

Tough stuff that granite. My Dad and I had to blast through limestone in town near houses back in the 60's. I was in the ditch drilling the holes and loading them. Filled the ditch with dirt, set it off, no problems. The insurance company was more worried about me working down in the ditch than blasting damage.

Don't think Dad was....

 

[cmysix]

My Aunt and uncle owned a restaurant right at the split of Ogden Ave and Plainfield road in Lyons IL. Quarry right next door you could feel them blasting during lunch.

 

[SecondsCount]

Used to play with, is the key word Butch. I used to determine the hole size, pattern, what explosives to use, and load the shot. When I bought the company we started having the powder company do all that. I had to be in the office.

A couple 30 gallon garbage bags full of oxygen and acetylene pulled up in the air on a crane boom, and set off with an electric blasting cap makes a concussion you can feel a hundred yards away they tell me.

I had a good friend that would fill large balloons with the perfect mixture for his cutting torch. He would lay out a long strip of toilet paper, with the balloon on one end, and light the other. It would make a nice boom. Enough to get the neighbors to look out the window

 

[D Coots]

When I played with acetylene and oxygen, I was more nervous than when loading a shot with tons of explosives....

The result of the former was injury, no injury with the latter....

 

[archerforkids]

Years back when my younger boy was about 12 or so, I had an interesting "occurrence" .
I'm sitting at the house working on some blueprints and out of no where is this window rattling BOOM. Sounded real close so I go out onto the back porch and find my boy and his friend out there just cackling and smiling. They had several empty 2 liter soda bottles, 2 brand new 1-cup stainless thermoses (cheap Walmart variety), some chlorine tablets if I remember correctly and some other liquid ingredient that I don't remember for sure. Maybe alcohol.
Anyway, those little chits said watch this Mr.Anderson...in goes the crushed up tablets, liquid whatthehellever it was and on goes the cap. Shake it up real good and throw it across the yard. BOOM!!!
Needless to say I shut that party down on the spot. Obviously I should have sooner, but curiousity got the better of me. As I am going back in, I asked what the 2 thermoses were for. "We wanted to see if it would blow them up" Oh Hell No.
I still have those 2 thermoses. Great for that extra cup headed out in the morning and you don't really want a big thermos.
Oh, and every where those darn bottles blew up a 4 foot diameter dead spot in the grass showed up that took me 2 years to grow back in.
Boys will be boys

 

[Capt. Oblivious]

Chlorine and milk, allot of people have lost eyes with that combo

 

[Macropod]

This was a blast while building a highway in Montana. Paul’s buddy moved there from Michigan. He has a contracting business there. This was a little too much powder.
View attachment 1386731

The irony of the sign...

 

[JAlfred]

Chlorine and milk, allot of people have lost eyes with that combo

Or brake fluid.

 

[Retired shooter]

Dry ice in a 2litre soda bottle makes a loud boom and shakes a lot of dust off of the factory floor.

Dont ask how I know.!

 

[snert]

J and L steel (LTV corp) in the late 1970's. Tasked with removing inches of dust and dirt from the strcutural steel holding up the roof of the steel plant, the greatest generation grew tired of trying to whisk it off with brooms, air lines etc. Crane operator lifted acetylene and oxygen bags ito the rafters with fuses. Dirt came right down.

And according to my dad who worked there, a 20 foot seamless pipe will lift right off the ground and shoot a hairless (recently alive) rat across a large production plant and smush same on the far wall after being filled with a bit of the same mix. Even grown men will be boys...

 

[bluealtered]

We do have to grow old, but we don't have to grow up!

 

[LAH]

I've watched many blasts on the strip mines but have only helped blast in the underground mines.

 

[archerforkids]

When I went to special training as a cop, we spent 2 days on explosives. I came to the conclusion guys like me were meant to direct traffic around all the chaos. Barring a few shenanigans in my youth, things that go boom are meant for me to avoid. Unless it has a cool stock and nice trigger of course