[footfootfoot]

Chris, you and I would have got along like a house on fire. I discovered the match thing too, gunpowder and shells were unavailable to me as a kid living in a small city. We'd use wooden matches and scrape the sulfur into a container.

Living in a densely populated area it was tough to find a place to conduct my tests so I built an oak and plywood box that I would use to test my bombs. They were much more modest than anything you guys built.

I think I've mentioned this before, but my high school physics teacher said I was the only student he'd ever had who used the words 'blow-up' and 'experiment' interchangeably.

I was always in it for the bang and the physics of it, never for its anti-personnel potential.

I saw some footage of the explosion and it seemed that fireball went upwards, but all the leg amputations suggest to me the seal of the lid failed directing the energy horizontally rather than in all directions.

The gasket/lid area would be the weak spot, unless they thought to groove the body of the cooker to create weak spots. (can't recall the term for this at the moment, like the old fashioned pineapple grenades)

Bert sounds very creative in his problem solving.

I've not told my son about this chapter of my life, but we did make our own black powder for our science experiment, and put it in a bamboo tube and made an M-80 looking thing.