Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Couch to 5K Accountability Thread
Carl-E:
--- Quote from: Redball on 29 Jun 2012, 19:24 ---It all sounds slightly forboring.
--- End quote ---
Forboding + boring, or a typo?
Redball:
[bad(bad pun)] No TV in front of those treadmills, and the personal entertainment doesn't quite cut it.
bainidhe_dub:
--- Quote from: Redball on 29 Jun 2012, 19:24 ---Those are empty tubes, I assume, so I don't have to imagine the sight and sound of igniting damp powder and oxides.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, we're dropping shells today. We built all the racks yesterday, then tipped them on their sides or upsidedown so they wouldn't fill up with any rain, and somebody was supposed to put tarps over the finale, but that never got confirmed. But the way it was raining sideways last night, plus the fact that some of the racks were tipped uphill, we'll have to see... Fun fact about black powder, though - it won't fire when wet, but it's all ready to go once it's dry again.
Redball:
So do you have a very careful way to dry powder? All I've known about gunpowder was learned in series of historical novels: Flashman, Aubrey-Maturin, Hornblower. And I don't remember much of it. One of the funniest moments in the 20 Aubrey-Maturin stories (Master and Commander was the movie) was when Aubrey's ship went into battle with gunpowder intended for celebrations. The dazzling colors during the battle stupefied captains and crew, friend and foe.
OT: I thought I was funny when a friend would announce she was going to the powder room. "Keep your powder dry." It never got a laugh. Hmmm.
bainidhe_dub:
Basically, yeah. If a shell doesn't go off, and for whatever reason you can't just attach a new fuse and try again, you have to use a special pin (it looks like an eye bolt without threads, but it's made of a metal that won't cause sparks & set the thing off in your hand) to puncture the charges, and then soak the shell so the powder all gets wet and goes into the water.
If a shell goes into a tube with an inch or two of water at the bottom, there's a chance it will soak into the lift charge (see diagram, we use shells like on the right) and when the fuse is lit, the shell will not get to full height before the effects charge goes off, aka a low break. I guess it could also maybe weaken the paper-tape cone that attaches the lift charge to the effect, and they could separate. If the shell goes off inside the tube that is a Bad Thing and can destroy the entire tube and several around it. Here's my husband with a 5" tube that had the shell go off in it, from a show two years ago. Fortunately that was on a barge so it was electronically fired, so nobody was close when it happened.
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