Found this article about anvil-firing.
Back in Arkansas it was called Shooting the Anvil.

More than a few of our foolhardy forebears rang in the New Year with earth-trembling blasts that threatened -- "and sometimes claimed" -- lives and limbs.

Called anvil-firing, the ear-splitting holiday custom was forsaken long ago, possibly because it proved so hazardous. (The custom is preserved -- "safely" -- at special events held annually around the country.)

The revelry started when the firing crew lugged a pair of matched anvils to a field or some other open space. They'd place -- "one anvil atop the other one" -- the bottom anvil upside down, the top one right side up.

Anvils have little cavities or holes on their undersides. So the crew would pack black powder into the mated cavities, stick in a fuse, light it and stand back,
hopefully at a safe distance.

The smoky blast would launch the top anvil, called the "flier," skyward. Everybody watched the anvil's flight to lessen the chance of somebody getting hit on its return trip to earth.



More at:
Happy New Year. Don't try this at home. - Kentucky Lantern

Bekeart
Two Anvils Short of a Shoot ...

We used to launch lit cherry bombs (the real ones, not modern baby food propellant fired) with heavy, homemade slingshots until cousin Carroll lost a finger.

One of our family friends, a very good Mr Fix it would make his own slingshots in the 50s -60s and then sell them They were a bit on the crude side but did they work well.

Made out of 5/16 square stock and he knew exactly what companies inner tube to cut down to get the most power out.

Those slingshots were the Weatherby magnums of slingshots. You could easily launch a cherry bomb or Ashcan well over a 100 yards. The shooter assumed the launch position and the other miscreant lite the fuse and told you SHOOT IT.--

They had a very heavy draw weight but were they fun and much more powerful that the best commercial made slingshots of the area! Of course I got mine confiscated.-

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14 S&W Revs none with locks!

Even as a kid, I was smart enough to figure out that lighting the fuse of a cherry bomb or M80 while holding it was a bad idea.

Well, we were all German farmboys.

As a young kid on a road trip with parents we stopped at South of the Border motel, across the street they had the biggest fireworks store ever! I bought a gross of M 80's (can;t believe my parents let me) Did some major destruction with those and yes almost blew my fingers off

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Still Running Against the Wind

Some folks have it down to an art!

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"I also cook."

They forgot to add that no anvils were injured in making the video.

All we used to do was use 16oz Coke bottles to launch bottle rockets at each other in the grapefruit fields. Had some great bottle rocket wars back then, and no one got hurt. Then when I got older my room mate and I would use 3/4 inch pvc pipes about 4 feet long like bazookas to launch bottle rockets across the stock tanks at the teenagers over the way. We thought that was fair because we let them steal our beer.

The official sponsor is ACME.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Lots of moonshine would make it even more safe.

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No baby we aint

We did the slingshot thing with firecrackers.

I learned my lesson when one of the fuses went much faster than the others. Luckily it was just burnt bruised fingers that hurt like heck once the numbness went away. Could have been worse.

I had to come clean to the parents because the injury was evident on my thumb and forefinger. The old school parenting technique took over so not only did I have to deal with the pain, but I was also grounded for a week.

That was the last time I held any explosive in my hands with a lit fuse. Experience is the best teacher.

There is a video on the net of a kid shooting a couple of pounds of Tannerite packed into an old riding mower. The mower blew apart and the shrapnel removed a portion of the shooters leg. Hard way to learn a lesson.

The guy lighting the fuse didn’t seem in any great hurry to get away from it

Bet it was a LONG fuse of KNOWN BURN RATE.

Bekeart.

OMG I remember Pedro's Arsenal so well. It was heaven to a dumb kid

A little off topic, but some of the replies reminds me of a story my Uncle Ben told me about one of his childhood memories.

His folks went into town and left him alone on the farm. They were rebuilding the chicken coop at the time and told him to stay off it. A few weeks earlier, he was riding with his dad and they picked up a hitchhiker. When the guy got out, Ben found some .22 rimfire cartridges on the seat and pocked them.

While his folks were away he retrieved the cartridges, stuck them in a crack in a log and was hitting them with a hammer. He got his face close to have a better look and one of the case heads ruptured and a piece hit his earlobe. He said it bleed like a stuck pig!

When his parents got home, they patched him up and wanted to know what happened. He told them he fell off the chicken coop and quietly accepted his punishment!

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"I also cook."

Fun wasn't it? My brother and I were playing Red Rover with M-80's and wrist rockets. I fired one over the house at him, I heard it go off, he came around the corner and said "Better come look at this." I went around front and he pointed to my dad's canary yellow Karman Ghia roof. I walked over and there was a blackened disc from the exploding M-80. I went next door and asked my neighbor if he had anything that would take it off before my dad came home. He had a buffer and some compound, it worked and dad came home to a freshly waxed car, the neighbor was cool.

Those real M80's and Cherry Bombs would take off your fingers. The Silver Salutes were pretty powerful as well. Friends tested one in a mailbox and got a visit from the local LE advising them of the federal offense since there was mail in it. I am sure it was a scare tactic, but it worked. Everyone in the neighborhood knew better than to mess with a mailbox once the story got out.

Gee! What could possibly go wrong?

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Who are those guys?

It was always lively fun when the guy in the back seat tasked with chucking the lit M-80 out the window in the tunnel dropped it on the floor behind the driver. Or, better yet, in his lap...

Feather the end of the (woven) fuse with a finger nail.
Never gave it a second thought.

Anvil shooting was a regular event at the Blacksmit guild of the Potomac spring fling

"Hold my beer and watch this"

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Jim
Many K and N Frames

My brothers and I did such sports as drop rocks on 22 shells, throw primers in camp fires, fill those hard cardboard tubes that were in the center of rolls of calculator paper with black powder, then graduated to pipe. Along the way there were a few minor mishaps. like cuts from flying brass or in the case of the wooden cannon and firecracker powder, some slivers. My stepfather finally took charge and educated us on how to use explosives. Launched some decent sized rocks quite a ways.

I have graduated from such foolishness

11" in length. 2" OD at breach firing .750 balls with 60 gr of holy black. But on holidays its just the black and a good wad of aluminum foil which doesn't go far. Solid boom though

That wheel is one piece? Beautiful.

Ya, the wheels are on piece except for the rims being slices of 6" pipe and having a brass insert for the center of the hubs.

Here is a shot of it after some stain, the brass taking on some patina, I also made brass castle nuts for the axles

Now THAT looks like fun!!!

We used to get drunk around the camp fire on hunting trips, somebody would throw a handful of .22's into the fire and yell "ammo in the fire" and we'd scatter.
Love those REAL M-80's and silver salutes-one could do damage with those. We had galvanized pipe cannons that we would load black powder in and shoot marbles at the brick school until we tried packing the powder and blew a hole clear through the brick, split the pipe and sent it skittering down the block. Thank God nobody was near or behind it when it went off. As a responsible adult I gravitated to safer things...like potato guns using White Rain hair spray as propellant. Can't wait until my grandson gets a few years older so I can build him his own potato gun

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Forum consigliere

We were always told " three second fuses . . . aren't "

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Qui plantavit curabit

Geee...I lived a sheltered life I guess. About as far as we went was smacking roll caps with a hammer.

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John 3:16 .

Saw a kid in school put an M-80 in a toilet as his buddy flushed. That bathroom was closed for a few days.

I remember a aluminum container that held a fuel pill, that was ignited
by a rolled up fuse at it's base, that stuck out the back of the container
that acted as a small jet engine, that we could attach to our toy cars or big bulsa airplains, for a fun thing to do, when around ten years old.

How about the billboards?


Only 250 miles to Pedros and every mile after that!

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Still Running Against the Wind

As this is a "family" forum I can not tell you the things we did with those M-80's

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Still Running Against the Wind

Jetex motors are powered by a solid pellet consisting mainly of guanidine nitrate, which burns to release an exhaust gas in large volume, leaving little solid residue. Thrust developed is modest and sustained, making it suitable for aerodynamically lifted flying models. The exhaust gas is not excessively hot, which confers a safety advantage.

More at:
Jetex - Wikipedia

There wer also the CO2 cartridges for propulsion

Bekeart

We did the anvil shoot at mountain man rendezvous on the 4th of July.
Got a real bang out of it!

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Eccentric old coot

We took chances that in retrospect seem foolish yet had the foresight to take precautions and no person suffered injury nor did we destroy property. Hand held bottle rocket wars were chancy, but it taught us how to duck and cover.
The one really stupid thing I did was with a CO2 cartridge. No one had the spring loaded needle gizmo to pop the exhaust end so I held it in place in the road with my foot and popped it with a hammer and nail. Had no idea how fast and far that thing would go skipping down the street, by some miracle it managed not to go airborne or smack a parked car or house.
Never again, that one I left to the pros.

There was an Army Surplus store "Smith and Edwards" that sold large gunpowder pellets in bulk, 25cents a pound. They were about an inch long, quarter inch in diameter and had about dozen very small holes running through the entire length. We would take those and wrap in aluminum foil, put a point on one end and poke a hole in the other with a pin. Hold it with a pair of moms kitchen kitchen tongs and hold a match to the end with a hole, they would ignite and hiss off into the air, sometimes going quite far. We fooled with those things for hours, they were probably nitro smokeless cannon powder for all I know. We tried to make bombs but didn't have the equipment or know-how to use a threaded piece of pipe...Good Thing. There was a radical kid at school that somehow got his hands on dynamite, probably through his dad's business or somehow. He would sell quarter sticks with a fuse for more than I ever had to spend, maybe five bucks. A couple of my well heeled friends bought one and stuck it under an outdoor payphone on the shelf. They lit it and ran down the street where their car was waiting. It went off and lit the street up like daylight, flattening the phone booth. Unfortunately an off duty cop was on his way into the house and saw them running to a red V.W. It was a small enough town that they narrowed it down pretty quick. The next day one after the other got a visit from the F.B.I., they were good boys after that episode, their families were well connected...if it had been me they would still be piping sunshine to me somewhere.

Funny you mention that. We were at a World Series of Rock concert in the old Cleveland stadium in 1977 (I think). Kansas, Rolling Stones and a bunch of other bands. It was one of those day long affairs with the Stones playing last.

To make a long story short someone was lighting M-80's or Cherry Bombs in the bathrooms. The concert security came over the loudspeakers threatening to cancel the remainder of the show if it didn't stop.

I can't imagine the riot that would have ensued with the thousands of stoned, drunk and hallucinating kids in attendance, but it stopped.

We had been hearing the booms echo through the stadium, but we were on the infield, so we had no idea what they were doing.

Certain little things jog your memory.

My grandfather and his grandfather inadvertently did a similar number with a huge tree stump back in the 30s. The younger man had been summoned by the elder one to provide the physical labor, digging out a small chamber under the stump and chopping away at the major roots anchoring the stump, while his grandfather, who had handled explosives in the nearby coal mines, prepared the dynamite charge. After they were all set up, the older gentleman twice decided to add just a little more to the charge - just to be sure, mind you. By the time they were ready, they had attracted quite a crowd of neighbors surrounding the old man's big back yard. They lit the fuse and waited, making sure everyone stayed well back. When it blew, it really blew, sending the stump hundreds of feet, over the old man's house, across the street, over my grandfather's house, and down to the bottom on his terraced back yard. My grandfather's main concern afterwards had been how close the stump had landed to the new stone barbeque he had just finished, dreading my grandmother's probable reaction. The incident became a favorite story often told by my mom, my uncle, and my very numerous older cousins. The two gentlemen involved achieved a certain amount of undesired notoriety for their achievement.

You will appreciate this
Man Blows Up Garden While Trying To Kill Cockroaches || INSANE NEWS - YouTube

Rocket? Welding job on Akutan AK apiece of 8" pipe, a oxygen bottle and a sledge hammer to knock off the valve and away she goes. Get a nutral flame going with a cutting torch, place the tip flat on a piece of steel and smother the flame, fill bread sacks, rubber gloves etc,. I have heard a big garbage bag will take out a lot of windows. 2 weather balloons would be fun, one to fill with O2 and acetylene or propane and the other with helium to float the first balloon. A simple delay device. I bet that would get some interesting results. Did I mention a good alibi and a better lawyer?

The all-time winner happened 50 years ago in Oregon. Never fails to amuse:

Guys in shop class messed around with the Acetylene in small amounts. I remember Rudy Hitsman was the teacher and he would pop a cork when someone did that, caught them smoking in the arc welding station or turning the forge furnace on and letting the gas run for a minute then throwing a lit paper towel in to hear it whoosh and blast a 4-foot flame out of it.

Looking back on it I can't believe they let us have access to all of the things they did without anyone getting killed.

When he caught us, everyone had to put all the tools away and spend the rest of the period at their desks in the classroom. A fate worse than death. We all loved shop class.

He was the drivers ed teacher as well and relished playing signal 30 to attempt to scare us all out of the things we immediately went and did as soon as we got our licenses.

Years later I ran into his son at a HS reunion. He was a couple of years behind us at the school. He told me his dad would come home and tell them at dinner what we had done and laugh about how onery we all were. Gave me a bit of insight into him as a person not the authoritarian teacher we saw.

Gallon paint can with nail hole in bottom. Spit in can. Drop in a lump of carbide. Put the lid on. Light hole. Ears ring for a week.
[URL="http://https://www.bigbangcannons.com/"]

A buddy of mine took a standard water heater tank and cut the top off, fitted a spark plug into the drain bung. He would haul it out to the middle of his semi rural street, unscrew the spark plug and insert his cutting torch pour a good quantity of acetylene into the tank, screw in the spark plug, drop a basketball down into the tank, hook up a coil and battery and set that sucker off from a relatively safe distance. I swear it nearly sent the basketball out of sight, the boom was very satisfying. The bet was whether or not the ball would pop when it came down, it didn't and landed in the street fairly close to the tank and again bounced to nearly a telephone pole and and a half.
Crazy...
I watched welders at the pier I worked at in Nam do something similar with military garbage cans, those buggers flew. The plastic garbage bag thing was standard fooling around for those guys, they had one of those mini fridges and sold ice cold beer for a buck, they did a booming business.....

I got to be the fuse lighter when I was 12.My neighbor Phil was 15 and the launcher (they were his cherry bombs) We sent them high into the sky in the field behind his house,the horses went nuts and Phil’s mom raised holy hell with us!
(He also taught me to smoke)Helluva guy lol

In my neighborhood it was 2 brothers named Chuck and Sam who lead the rest of us astray. My one brother was with Sam when Sam whirled a piece of chain and then let it go to spin up and over the powerlines. He said it was quite a sight, briefly lighting up the evening sky. Took out the big transformer for the neighbor hood. The power company and my step dad were not pleased. I was with his brother Chuck when he started up a self propelled mower he had aimed at someones garden on the way home from school. My parents did not approve of them or their family which only made them more interesting at the time.

Sam died in a car wreck at about 22, Chuck was famous for being arrested on one of him many DUIs and using his phone call to order a pizza. He went on to graduate from the state pen and then die of alcoholism. Their cousin who had a small ranch south of town made his claim to fame by rustling an elephant from the circus. Alcohol was believed to be involved.

PS. My Driver's Ed teacher was also the HS shop teacher and a really nice guy. Believe it or not I took shop all 4 years of HS. It and gym were my only thing that ruined my D average. Him and his wife were killed by a drunk driver while I was in the Marine Corps.