[aruanan]

Great link! I remember those good old days when anyone could buy a box of M-80 casings and a hundred feet of water-proof dynamite fuse and make their own. I also remember the wonderful silver salutes and big torpedos (giant exploding pearls). Torpedos (potassium picrate, the active ingredient) were still available in the Dominican Republic in the late '70s. Each sounding about as loud as a 20 gauge shotgun blast. I unrolled enough of them and rerolled the contents to make a package about 3 inches long by about 1.5 inches in diameter. I bound it with heavy string to get everything tightly packed and then threw it against a wall on top of a 6 floor apartment building in Santiago. It bounced off several times without exploding. I moved a bit closer and threw harder. When it went off it sounded like a cannon. You could hear the blast echoing back from the surrounding city. There was an 8" diameter blast mark left on the wall. Good times.

[proudofthesouth]

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a boy friend destroy a toliet in the boys bathroom with an M80. I think he got a 2 day suspension.