What are the odds it would go off after all these years?
“What are the odds it would go off after all these years?”
That all dep-—
My cousin gave me an old powder horn from the early 1800s years ago. It was in bad shape, but what the heck, I took it. I got to digging around in it with a stick and the dam thing had some powder in it. So I got all the powder out and thought I wanted to see if it would still burn. It did, and dam good too. WOW. I burned a good portion of my hair off my arm.
Fair. A man was killed some years back by a cannon shell that was live and over 150 years old.
“What are the odds it would go off after all these years?”
More than you’d want to risk.
Black Powder can be very unstable many years after manufacture. Very dangerous.
I just got back from the Somme battlefield in Northern France. Every spring farmers plow up ordinance from WW1. A couple of years ago a large shell spontaneously exploded manking a crater 20 feet across.....
I still go off occasionally, after all these years. You never know. Better safe than sorry....
Low but some of that stuff is still active. There was a thread here a few years ago about a guy in Virginia that was killed by civil war UXO that he found, took home and blew up in his garage.
If the internals of the mine have not been compromised by moisture, pretty damn high. If moisture has the odds are very low. If it is dry inside, it can still go boom!
“What are the odds it would go off after all these years?”
Lots of explosives have their consituent component chemicals change over time and a lot of the time those changes make them unstable.