Gunpowder Explosion Kills Man Making Cannon

That's correct ladies and gentlemen. Smokeless powder isn't the same thing as muzzleloader powder.

Another cleansing of the gene pool by Mother Nature.

Darwin Rules!

This doesn't quite add up.

Nope. If you manage to ignite smokeless powder while pouring it into a metal tube, you'll have a very nasty roman candle, but not a bomb. It doesn't add up. And smokess powder isn't all that easy to touch off.

something inaccurate about that story.Black powder explodes,smokeless acts differetnly.
they had to have capped it and lit the fuse..and miscalculated the fuse...for it to 'blow up.
sorry he's dead,but I gotta wonder who else may have gotten hurt with this bomb??!

Could have been static electric spark. I do not know what it takes in this regard to get smokeless off and running.

I'll lay odds the shotshell powder was up on the fast burn scale. With some piling up at the breech of their cannon, and a cloud of it filling the breech end of the barrel, it might have gone off like a cloud of grain in a silo.

who wants to bet they were really making a pipe bomb?

My money is on pipe bomb, especially given the behavior of the survivors.

Disclaimer: I've done some foolish things in my life; the things I describe below are probably among them. Don't assume that because I didn't get hurt doing them that you won't, either.

One day I decided to see if smokeless powder would make it easier to start a fire with a flint. I gathered up some dry grass for tinder, dumped the powder from a few .22 cartridges into a small pile on the tinder, and went to it with my flint & steel fire starter. When I directed the sparks onto the smokeless, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Repeatedly.

I've tried lighting a few different types of smokess powder using sparks from a steel and flint. I never was successful. Caution: That doesn't mean that it can't happen, or that it never happens. Don't go do something stupid with smokeless powder and then say I told you it was safe because it couldn't ignite. Never said that.

So, anyhow. Smokeless powder is rather insensitive to sparks. Strike one.

I can also tell you, from personal experience--kids, please don't try this at home--that if fill a rifle cartridge with smokeless powder, do not seat a bullet in it, and then light off the powder with a match on the end of a stick, it creates a long, dramatic, and dangerous spout of very hot gasses for a brief instant. Getting in the way of it could make you an instant candidate for numerous plastic surgeries, I think. But it is in no way explosive.

Smokeless powder, when not confined, is not explosive. Strike two.

He was probably smoking...

If they had a Black Powder cannon, (small one) and they used Smokless powder in it, it would have blown up right quick. With no further Info, it is all a guess.

Smokeless powder creates MUCH higher pressures than BP.

It's no surprise that it blew up.

Darwin wins again.

gunpowder explosion

Something ain't right. As a young kid I tried to make a bomb by opening several shotgun shells, emptying the powder into a container,closing it with a cap tightly, inserting a fuse made from firecrakers through a hole drilled in the top earlier: the fuse was a tight fit through the hole. When I lit the fuse and ran the result was more like a roman candle. A huge flame was all. Then I tried using a firecracker as an ignition source. The bomb was under a 5 gal. metal bucket with a rock weighing about 20lbs. The rock and bucket were blown about 10-15 feet up into the air. Smokeless powder requires more than a flame to make it explode and it must be confined to really be effective.

hehe

that whole darwin gene pool cleansing thing sounds accurate. nice

sounds like they were making a pipe bomb rather than a cannon.

cannon

About 1960 or there a bouts me and two other idiots decided to build ourselves a cannon. We used shotgun shells. A pipe with a flash hole drilled. Held in place with a vice bolted to a table in the back yard. Filled with the powder from about 5 or 6 shells, packed into place with rags, then the shot from about a dozen shells packed with rags over that.
I will guarantee a match flame will set it off and blow the family incinerator to bits. You were allowed to burn your trash back then. Times have changed but foolish boys have not and this is flirting with disaster for sure. We were very lucky the only damage was to the incinerator.

NOW!!!
CAUTION!!!!!
DO NOT, I REPEAT DO NOT do or try this!! as later I have read of boys being seriously injured and even killed doing such foolishness. Scared the hell out of all of us and we were good boys for sometime there after for durn sure. and YES we all did run like the wind to other places in the area. It is kinda hard to hide a trashed trash burner in Mikes back yard, and the noise opened most doors on the block to see what was going on, so we were of course caught.

Ok, this doesn't make sense. It was not a cannon.

I've made a "cannon" with some metal pipe that was capped at the bottom with cement and then a good 2 feet of pipe went into the ground. There was a hole drilled into the cement that allowed a wire with a nichrome fuse to go through and then the wire came out the bottom and up through the ground with about 100' running to a box which was a detonator.

I used smokeless powder too as I have a lot of respect (maybe too much) for black powder. (although I'd argue you can never have too much respect for any powder)

I used the cannon to launch essentially a potato slug (pipe was smaller than the potato so shoving the potato down over the pipe basically cored it making a slug).

It worked really well. One time out of curiosity I put a bunch of powder in there with no potato and as was said, you just get a massive roman candle type thing. Fire goes high into the air.... but certainly no boom.

Granted - this whole thing was dumb and I don't recommend anybody try it (and I was what, 16? a bonafide pyromaniac at the time).... but at least it sheds some light on this story as it is definitely missing facts. I agree with others, it had to have been a pipe-bomb.

Guiness Book of Records 'Stupid'

Sometimes you have to wonder where the line is between "That poor guy" and "I hope he didn't contaminate the gene pool".

If anyone is wondering, this is how loose(well, sort of) smokeless powder burns.

Either way, it's a stupid thing to do. Obviously, the combustion was confined enough to build up explosive pressure.

sounds like this guy pretty well scorched his head past tolerance for life to continue. may have inhaled and took out his lungs as well. a very sad result to a very foolish activity-albeit one similar to several that God only knows why i and many other young men have been more than fortunate to survive. so many stupid acts just when life is most worth living. may his family find condolence somehow in their grief.