Notes From The Bottom Drawer, "Better Uses For Your Empty Whiskey Bottle" edition

Have you got an old whiskey bottle laying about?

The Fourth of July is coming and you might want to dig it out and try making some of your own fireworks.

I know from past experience that a whiskey bottle makes for great fireworks because as a kid we would frequently make our own, and the best we ever made came from a Jack Daniels bottle.

We had already mastered simple aluminium foil and acid bombs with plastic soda bottles, but only after the vinegar and baking soda ones had been found lacking in any real oomf. Molotov Cocktails were briefly experimented with, but the true key to them is not in the construction, but in the hand that delivers them. This was quickly abandoned as the materials were too costly and the mess afterwords was too much.

Then came gunpowder.

Have you ever heard of a thing called Pyrodex? It is the modern version of gunpowder, and it is advertised as being smokeless. It isn't gunpowder and it isn't smokeless. It is explosive like gunpowder but it is certainly not smokeless. It is smokeless in the same sense as a semi-boneless ham has very few bones, but it has at least one big one. Pyrodex is what most people use in their replica black powder firearms. It is measured in pound weights but is ground to varying grades of "F" or "G". The more letters, the finer it is ground.

(description of how to make whiskey bottle bomb followed by how well it went off.) It was marvelous and we almost blew the bridge up.

Doc