Made some interesting ‘trip mines’ out of devil bangers and party poppers with my 5yo step daughter at the weekend.

Fantastic way to bond making explosions in the back garden.

She’d spent the Friday night at her father’s with her older half sister who had great fun in winding her up about zombies. She now thinks she will hear them coming from the bottom of the garden which helps her sleep at night.

We could of course told her they don’t exist etc. but where is the fun in that. We’re making punji traps and spears later.

When I was an apprentice in Bedford in the late 80’s another lad made a small explosive device for a joke over the Christmas holidays and carried it all the way back from his home in Devon on the train; it blew up just as he got back to his digs in Bedford.

It took half his hand off.

When I ran an airsoft site we used to do fuel lift explosions, flour bombs and the like using commercially available stuff. We bought the lift fuses etc from the same place we got our player used pyrotechnics from. One day I wasn’t in the office when they delivered a box of 200 mk5 ‘flash bangs’ (0.5g of black powder with a strike fuse). Only they left a huge slab of proper blasting explosive that was meant for a quarry in Portland. I was so tempted not to tell them. Bet the quarry were confused by their delivery too…

Slightly OT but me and my mate set fire to an abandoned church when we were 11. Imagine our surprise when it literally exploded a few minutes later.

The police turned up whilst we were amusing ourselves in the warehouse next door, flying about atop old cable drums. He got done, I ran away.

We used to make bolt bombs as kids. You needed two large coach bolts and a big nut. The nut screwed on a couple of threads then the cavity filled with match heads, a mix of red and black types. The other bolt screwed on carefully as tight as you could, then thrown into a hard surface. If you got any material in the threads they could flare in your hand as you tightened it up, so we had an early lesson in safe working practices!

Living in a rural community we had unlimited access to crow scarers. Twelve on a rope which was hung in a tree and lit to smoulder, the banger’s fuse was lit after an interval and the things went off like a twelve bore. Removed from the rope they made brilliant throwable bangers, albeit with a very short and unpredictable fuse. A mate built a mortar tube that could fire of all things a crow scarer inside a sausage. One underneath in the tube would launch the exploding sausage into the air and experimenting with fuse lengths meant an impressive air burst.

Best effect was a crow scarer in a tub of sweet and sour sauce inside a phone box.