i was at my friends house today, and i still had an empty CO2 cart***** in my pocket from an engineering class at school. i have made 3 other successful CO2 canister bombs using whistle mix (from a piccolo pete) in the past, but i noticed he had some smokeless powder, so we used that. we also opened the canister a different way than i usually do; instead of sawing the top off we hammered a nail into the hole to make it bigger. after using a funnel to put the smokeless powder in it, we realized we didn't have any fuse, so we cut the handlish thing off of a sparkler and used it as our fuse. after lighting it it made a noise, just not a boom. it was still intact, which was depressing. i was wondering if anyone knew why it didn't work, my hypotheses are that the smokeless powder burned to slow because it was pretty course, or maybe the sparkler lighting system was ineffective. another hypothesis is that we filled it too high up. actually, i think thats probably the problem. (we filled it almost all the way). anyways, any imput on why it didnt work would be nice.

edit- why didnt it fucking say c a r t r i d g e it said cart***** ,or something....????

Smokeless powder is a colloided solution of ceelulose hexanitrate in glycerine tetranitrate, and requires extreme confinement to go bang. The coarseness of the powder and the little airgap didn't help either.

See, even with blackpowder, you only fill it about two-thirds. Any more then that and you lose power and report, because it needs a zone to build up pressure. So, next time, Powder it much finer, only fill it about half-way and epoxy-seal around the fuse.

But really, CO2 carts aren't very good casings. They don't make a very loud boom, and throw dangerous shrapnel everywhere. It might sound strange, but a paper casing is far, far louder and brighter then a metal one, not to mention safer.

hmm, thanks for the imput, paper as in computer paper, or as in like cardboard? yeah, basically the entire thing got fucked cause we didnt have much time or tools haha, but next time we shall grind the powder up (could that be a bad idea?) and not fill it so much. and epoxy the top. (where does one get epoxy?)

would you care to explain the paper casing? like, how to make one so that it doesnt suck haha

You know, that's a good idea. I'll write a tute about making paper salutes.

Epoxy, you get from hardware or hobby stores as two-part glue.

There shouldn't be a problem grinding smokeless as long as you don't create masses of friction or sparks etc, it's pretty inert. Just in case, though, gloves and googles are a msut,a s they should be when grinding ANYTHING.

yeah, good call. glasses = keeping my eyes haha. okay, i think i shall get some epoxy, because i see it in lots of places in the pyro section for various things. i'll keep an eye out for the tute on the paper salutes mate, that could be fun.