Missiles and bombs

Yesterday my nephews, yet again, displayed tremendous and otherwise hidden concentration skills when plotting how to maximize the altitude of their home grown missiles.

Temporarily discarded was the idea of a airborne launch off a quad-copter drone – that is being trialed tonight in fact.

What was proposed and after much discussion executed was a soda gas bomb. The ingredients were; a soda gas carbon dioxide cylinder about 7 cm long and 2 cm in diameter (the ones used in those handheld old-school soda water bottles), surrounded by the grey stuff scraped off a dozen sparklers, wrapped in aluminium foil and then ignited in a steel bucket using a sparkler for a wick.

The result was an almighty bang and the exploded soda gas cylinder landed onto the roof of the garage.

After much brow furrowing, next up was a variation on the former effort, where the bomb, instead of being placed in a metal bucket was placed into a long metal tube (sounds familiar) – the tube was in fact the handle of a large car jack. Essentially we created a mortar and the results were spectacular. The missile (upgraded in category from a bomb now) was blown up and out of sight, never to be found.

Excited by this early success tonight’s efforts may incorporate the aforementioned drone launch and the use of a much larger Soda Stream bottle (at least 10x the size, probably much bigger). This should have enough explosive force to reach low flying aircraft.

This may be a good moment to excuse myself from further incriminating involvement in the project!