Cut the blue wire.
Oops.
thanks for posting this.
The South will rise again.
Good thing to know.
I’ll be extra careful the next time I bring A CANNON BALL HOME!
The stupid.
IT’S SPREADING.
Jedi.
One lucky redneck right there.
L
They used to call them torpedos back then. Why? I dunno.
When will this country be healed of this conflict?
Did it have a Confederate Flag painted on it?
Amazing that it could be viable after 150 years. One might imagine that there are live munitions still from World War I and World War II somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered (one way or another).
The civil war era stuff is much more dangerous than modern munitions. Fortunately, there’s also a lot less of it.
Why is he referred to as “the man” and no name is given. April Fools?
Tonight on the local news here in Houston they told about a disk jockey in the 60s or 70s announced a Russian sub was spotted in Lake Houston. If you saw Lake Houston you’d know that’s not possible. They said there was a traffic jam of people trying to get to the lake to see the sub. The sheriff called the deejay and made him announce that it was a joke. That has to be the best deejay April Fools joke I’ve ever heard.
During World War I an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the Germans forces fired at each other during World War I were duds, and most of them have not been recovered. In 2013, 160 tonnes of munitions, from bullets to 15 inch naval gun shells, were unearthed from the areas around Ypres.
Black powder can still be a viable explosive not just as designed but because of chemical changes over time - somewhat like liquid Nitro leaking out of TNT. Will it properly make a gun go bang, probably not...will it go BOOM, hell yes.
Words of advice, do not drill a hole in it to get the black powder out.
My father taught me to consider every rifle or pistol to be loaded until I personally verified it wasn’t. Should apply the same rule to Civil War explosives.
In 1958 they were widening the road and needed to move things. They got a crane to move the Grand Slam bomb but couldn't budge what should have been an empty casing. They summoned the base Armaments Officer and he gingerly pried open a panel on the bomb and discovered...you guess it: all 9000 lbs of Torpex explosive.
They very gingerly moved the bomb to a "safe space" and blew it up and it did go BOOM!
A Grand Slam 22,000 lb bomb:
Gate guards at RAF Scampton:
