The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #145235   Message #3359268
Posted By: JohnInKansas
04-Jun-12 - 05:22 PM
Thread Name: BS: Fun with explosives
Subject: RE: BS: Fun with explosives
DD's link in the first post appears to have been blasted, and didn't work for me, but I think the pieces reassembled to:

Farming with Dynamite

The Book(let) indicates 12 pages and is barely half of what's at the web page. At the bottom there's some information about Project Gutenberg that I hadn't seen before, that may be useful to anyone who has a use for it.

An acquanitnance at an early job (almost 50 years ago) was the engineering department's "demolitionist" and almost certainly had lots of tales to tell, but didn't care much for talking about some of it. Everyone called him "Boom Boom" and I'm not sure I ever knew what his given name was. He did "mention" once that he piloted "the next to last" supply glider flown into Bastogne (with ~1800 lb of ordnance onboard) and records from elsewhere suggest that the last one "crashed successfully" but all later attempts were shot down before getting through.

His explanation of "blowing stumps" was that the ground around the stump should "thump" but you shouldn't see the stump itself move. You just go out and pick it up (completely disconnected). He did allow that it was easiest if the stump was more than a few hundred pounds.

He also admitted that occasionally a very large stump "accidentally" flew quite a distance in unpredictable directions - if nobody was looking. It seems like maybe that perhaps was sort of a fun thing done carefully, but admitted that "*** happens" to almost anyone who works much with explosives.

(He also really liked designing shaped charges for "cutting" holes in buildings, but management didn't approve of several of his proposals of that sort.)

John