When I discovered what Shockwave Exploding Targets will do to a pumpkin I knew I was hooked.
I bought more Shockwave, ready to atomize more pumpkins, when I
realized that pumpkins aren't around for long.
Do you know how hard it is to find a pumpkin after Halloween?
Not finding pumpkins sent me on a quest to find something else to
blow up.
Anything that isn't biodegradable is out unless I want to be
picking shrapnel out of the woods around our camp for the next year.
Which I don't, so that rules out a lot of things.
I picked up a honeydew melon and some tomatoes, hoping the
honeydew would blow like the pumpkin and that the tomatoes would
explode and make a giant mess.
I also found a video on Youtube of someone using Shockwave to blow
up a bag of flour.
So we headed to Tower Camp armed with Shockwave, a melon, some
tomatoes and a couple of bags of flour.
I really wanted to see what a flour explosion would look like at
night so Saturday night I talked the Island King and Saul Overman
into trying it.
We put a 3 lb bag of flour on top of a container of Shockwave and
set up the camera.
Saul was worried about being able to make the shot in the dark so
the Island King taped a flashlight onto the board we tape the GoPro
to and put close to the target.
The flashlight gave him just enough light to hit the target dead
on.
And we got a REALLY cool explosion.
The next day we were ready to see what other kinds of explosions we
could get.
We started with another bag of flour. I thought that if a 3 lb bag
would blow like the one from the night before, a 5 lb bag would be
even better.
The Island King disagreed, saying that 5 lbs was probably too much
bulk for the amount of explosive we had.
There wasn't but one way to find out.
Not bad.
The Shockwave comes in 1 and 5 lb containers and I bought the 1 lb
containers so we wondered what would happen if we split the contents
of one of the containers into 2.
So we made a cone out of packing paper and duct tape, filled it
with half of a containers worth, stuck it in a soup can and piled
tomatoes around it.
Well that was boring.
Next we put a full container under the honeydew melon and shot it.
It did blow up and we only found 2 small chunks of melon later but
it just wasn't as impressive as the pumpkin.
I wonder if I spray painted a melon orange it would look as cool
as the pumpkin did.
We still had half a container of Shockwave and one 5 lb bag of
flour left so we set that up.
The previous times we'd blown up the flour we'd stood the bag
upright on top of the Shockwave so this time we decided to lay the
bag on it's side on top of the target and see if it blew the same.
It didn't.
Granted we were only using a ½ lb of Shockwave so we knew the
explosion wouldn't be as big but instead of blowing straight out of
the top and creating a flashover, the flour shot out both ends of the
bag, which didn't cause any fire. It did cause a thick flour fog though.
It occured to me when all of that flour was hanging in the air that it might be cool to throw a firecracker in there. But I didn't have any firecrackers and my husband vetoed that idea immediately so I didn't.
So I learned that a 5 lb bag of flour, sitting upright on 1 lb of
Shockwave creates a pretty cool explosion. I will also be planting
pumpkin seeds ASAP. Oh, and I'm going to paint a melon orange.
I don't know what it is but blowing stuff up makes me Happy Happy
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