When we were little...back in Stone Age...we had these long strips of red paper with dots of powder embedded in them, and when you hit them with a hammer, they made a real nice bang.
They were in strips because you fed them into toy guns...
Next came the pipe stuck in the ground, a lit firecracker and a marble.
You could take the whole roll of caps, lay them sideways on a brick or an anvil and hit it with a hand held sledge hammer. The sound is deafening. We used to bite the bullet end of the cartridge and could disengage the bullet from the casing and pile up the gunpowder and do the same and get a really nice bang out of it. My Father and Grandfather would hide their cartridges from me because I was forever pilfering the powder from them and making explosives. One thing I never did was hit a cartridge with a hammer. We had these little poppers that were round and exploded by throwing them against the wall...we’d throw them onto the highway and let the cars blow them up...but they ruined your day if you chewed them. Also, never put strikers into a sewage opening if you don’t have an avenue of escape...I could go on...
Did you ever place the whole roll on a sledge hammer and hit it with a ball peen?
I used to take a sledge hammer to whole rolls of them at a time - that’s a serious bang. Sometimes I’d get two or three decent bangs out of one roll, but when I hit a roll with enough force, there’d be maybe one or two “caps” that didn’t fire.
I played with hammers a lot as a youngster, so I used several weights of ball peen hammers and claw hammers as well, but I finally settled on the 8LB sledge because it was so darned effective. it was a bit to swing for a young kid, but I had a knack for destruction then that I put to “good” use.
The sound was louder than a .45 cal I can tell you that. I was a pretty obnoxious youth at 8-10 years old - I’d pull this stunt at 7:00 a.m or earlier some days. I could also burp loud enough to effect a pretty good echo in the neighborhood at an early hour as well.
I’m just about laughing out loud at myself - the stupid things I did as a kid.
“When we were little...back in Stone Age...we had these long strips of red paper with dots of powder embedded in them, and when you hit them with a hammer, they made a real nice bang.
They were in strips because you fed them into toy guns...”
Yep, they were called cap pistols.
Mahalo
Ever put “strike anywhere” matches on an anvil and hit them? quite the bang for a kid...
Hitting a whole roll of them at one time makes an even nicer bang. Do it in the just inside an open garage and you get a nice booming effect.