New Years Ingenuity

Ah, the fruits of a bored mind. Welcome to another idea that, initially, was just a joke but soon turned into reality. What could make a night of fireworks better, even when you have artillery shells, roman candles, bottle rockets, a 250-shot saturn missile battery, and a roll of 2000 firecrackers? That's simple: make your own launch system.

The launch system comprised two basic parts: the tubes and the fuses. We needed a way to make sure that we were able to launch a lot of shells, and at about the same time (roughly).

TUBES
The tubes were all (roughly) 13-inches long with holes drilled about 5-inches from the bottom of the tube. We ran the fuses out of the holes and then put the shell into the tube.

To make sure that the shell fired right, we also put some, well, cardboard I guess (it was left over backing from my new entertainement center, not sure what that is), and then secured with a couple layers of duct tape.

The tubes that we had made were then placed around one of the tubes that came with the artillery shells and secured with duct tape. When everything was said and done, tubes looked like like this.




FUSES
The problem was merely how to get all of the shells to go off at the exact same time (or at least close). We couldn't sit there and light all the fuses and have some shells firing off while we were lighting them.

The solution that we came up with is simple. Put gas in a container and put the fuses in the container. When we would light the gas, it would continue to burn all of the fuses until all of the rockets fired.

Simple enough really, and it worked quite well. We ran all of the fuses out the sides of the tubes and then bound all of the fuses together with duct tape (for organizational and control purposes only).



We finished everything at about 12:05am New Years Day. We then took everything outside for the big launch (and hopefully it went right). We stacked some bricks up around the sides of the launchers so that they wouldn't fall over and start firing shells at my house.

At about 12:15am we light the gas and it was go time. I was the lucky one, and my friend was the lucky one to film. The film is available online (right-click, then select save-as; 22MB) for your viewing pleasure. There is also a smaller version of the movie if you want to stream the clip. There are some more photo's on my Flickr account as well.

We would especially like to thank the drunk guy speeding down my street for driving by right as the last shell went off (and then yelling at us for it). Now that I review the video, you are obviously right... we surely must have hit your car.

New Years 2006 · Fireworks · Amusement