4th of July has come and gone again


Festivities and explosives abound.

Once again the copious amounts of explosives were used at the Boucher Family Abode. We spent a combined total of about $500 on mortars and fountains. I picked up three mortar sets including some never before used four-break mortars. Mark picked up some huge fountains that I had my doubts about but was pleasantly surprised.

One fountain in particular was quite impressive. The last one we used was about as big as two loafs of bread side by side. Fired that bad boy off and it did a wave like effect side to side followed with a big finale into the air with a five shot mini-mortar. Very cool. The four breaks were rather impressive and did get up there pretty good.

Though out of the eight tubes we started with only one made it through the entire barrage. I think we had maybe 120 - 150 mortars to launch and there were four of us firing almost continuously.

We had several spectacular failures. Including my brother getting stupid for some reason. We've been doing mortars for five - six years now and for some reason he forgot which end was up and destroyed the first tube on the first shot. It is rather spectacular to have a mortar fire INTO the ground and then explode all over the grass.

The rest of the misfires included the bottom of a tube blowing out not to be caught until the second one fired five feet into the air. Grass was singed quite well on that one.

We also started off the night with this 'shogun' saturn missile battery that was like 4 - 5 ft long. It took several minutes for that one to fire off. It was pretty cool.

Next year we hope to have more funding so we could get several of the big fountains at the end and more of the missile batteries now that we know how they perform. We were experimenting outside our usual glut of mortars this year and I was really impressed with the fountains this time.

Posted: Sun - July 6, 2003 at 01:12 PM           |

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