I don't know if this counts but. . .
When I was about 10 yrs old, my father was stationed at Forbes AFB outside of Topeka Ks. My friend David Kagarice and I use to fish crawdads in a stream by the golf course after collecting and re-selling all the golf balls we found. We would sit there on this old broken concrete culvert that was half burried in the ground. One day while at the culvert, we got a little bored for a lack of catchin' crawdads, which was directly related to the fact that we ate all the hotdogs we were using for bait, and the imagination of ten year olds reached knew heights!
You see, David was the Idea man and I was the, ahem, Engineer. David couldn't help but notice how much this culvert looked like a cannon! Well, I immediatly ran some calculations, figered trajectry, wind velocity,projectile velocity, and came up with a supplies list. According to my calculations, with one small bag of Kevin's (my neighbor) fathers reloading powder, a masonry bit in a hand drill, a string wiped down with black powder, we could probably launch a bowling ball (borrowed from the base bowling alley) accross three fairways and safely land the ball in the opposite field where we could recover, clean and return it to it's right ful owners.
It took the better part of 4 hours to hand drill that hole in the culvert. I hadn't figured on wire reinforcement. Againsed my initial advice we went with a seven pound ball, David suggested it is easier to run with a seven pound ball as opposed to a 14 pound ball. We figured there was about 5 feet of culvert buried in the dirt so we had to do a little back-filling, probably a good thing we did. We snaked the fuse from the little sack of black powder (I'm sure it wasn't more than a pound or so. . . ) through the fuse hole then shoved the bowling ball in. It was a little tight but a pretty good fit over-all. We were ready. . .
We decided that safety was of the utmost importance so we should probably wait until the guys on the green tee'd off and got a ways down the fairway. We also figured we should be well behind the cannon once the fuse was lit. Ten yards oughta do it! The fuse was lit and we were at our battle stations, palms were sweatty and hearts were POUNDING.
KABOOM! It felt like I got hit in the face with rock salt, but we did see the "cannon ball" fly. I counted 4 distinguishable pieces David claimed more. Of course I was never sure he could really see anything past a few feet with those coke bottle glasses! Considering the amount of noise, flames, smoke and dust particles that remained suspended in the atmosphere, we decided that there was only one thing we could do. . .
Run like hell!
We heard sirens for most of the day. David and I spent the next few hours trying to figure out the answer to those unavoidable pending questions, 1) What did you do today? 2) There was an explosion by the golf course today, do you know anything about it? 3) Do you know why Kevins father would be in his garage screaming something about blackpowder when he came home from work? and 4) What are all those littld cuts on your faces?
Sorry Doc. I don't think I should help you out with this one. . .
Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
at 50 yards it nearly tore his head off! You don't need the hairspray ones to make a real weapon out of them!
