When I was a kid my oldest brother (20 or so) used a splitting gun to rip apart particularly knotty log sections for fire wood. Back then they used "squibs" which were essentially just a paper tube filled with slow burning powder. He blew one huge chunk of wood about 25 feet straight up in the air with it. The old man came out and took the gun away. Apparently he felt his nap was more important than the firewood...
in the late 1960's I saw a demonstration of this technique - how they split posts in "the old days". Back powder, fuse, more substantial container, As I recall, belted into the log (not drilled), with a heavy log hard against the container. Very effective splitting tough timber to fence posts.
Keep up the good work Dave Love your work . takes me back to 1969 blasting big redgum tree stumps out of the ground at Saddle Back Mountain west of Kiama NSW 2 or 3 1/2 sticks of ICI jelly + 1/2 1lb jam tin anfo with red paint mixed in 3 stumps at a time a 3ft + 4ft +5ft safety fuse crimped on det long angle slice white detcoard taped, match heads to fuse strike with the box Old time Federal matches { Bunnings sell some good matches in the BBQ area SAMBA brand made in china} Land rover idling 5 ft from last fuse . Rule no 1 if something does not go right drop it move onto the next . Spare box of matches in Hat band 2nd spare box in top pocket .Rule no 2 see rule no 1. Yes Ruel no 3 if Land rover stalls RUN! Drive to next hill and wait see boom red soil turn silver grey mushroom up then then turn red again with chunks, hear the boom then 1/2 second later feel the boom keep an eye out for shrapnel falling sometimes with extra large stumps with 4 charges under them .
Pretty jealous. Sounds like good fun. Not envious of the work you older fellas were faced with though. I don't mind a hard day but you lot are a different breed!!
My job as a kid was to light the fuse and run, we only used a wet potato or grain sack to lay over the top when wet, but not dripping wet, the sack weighed enough to contain the blast. Normally the last blast of the day we put in a vertical one with out the sack, so everyone could have a few laughs over a beer.
Dear Dave. Congratulations Not many people know anything about these old powder wedges.I researched these quite a bit, looked all over the place trying to find one to buy. There are not many out there, and the people who had them wanted about 300. dollars american, So I built my own , out of extremely high quality steel ...... There are a number of tricks to using these. among which is put a sandbag over the top and get behind cover . You should only need Black powder. See how you drove the powder wedge in at the center??? Dont do that. Try placing it at the 12 oclock, or the 6 oclock position, about 1/3 or 1/4 of the edge.and I only need 100 or 120 grains of black FFG, and a fuse., make sure its very well driven in, and there is wadding keeping your charge in place , plus a log to keep it bucked up, and not flying around.. Good luck with that. These usually will work , but be careful.................I love mine , I used the best chrome moly steel I could find, Works great , but I still sandbag it., every time., This can be looked up on google as " black powder splitting gun " , Or Log Gun , either one , on google. The best demonstration I found is exactly " BLACK POWDER SPLITTING WEDGE DEMONSTRATION " on You tube .........................................................Joseph Henry , Boise Idaho.... .
Thanks for the placement tips Joe, Paul has a much bigger one now that was made on a CNC machine, looks real good.... and I promise that I will only use black powder.
(Narrator's voice) "So even though Paul had been warned about Dave's devil-may-care attitude about chamber pressures -- the smokeless powder experiment proceeded... with disastrous results."
As a hand loader of center fire ammo, whenever I hear “mix the powders” I feel cold chills on the back of my neck. Plus not all smokeless powders are the same as most people know. Some have drastically faster burn rates than others. I’ve seen 8.1 grains of a ‘mid-rate’ propellant blow up heavy barrels and receivers. It’s all about the PSI over Time. Adding a slow powder to a fast powder doesn’t equate to a mid power conflagration. They are both going to happen. Glad no one was hurt by your experimenting with explosives / flammables.
Yes, it was a bad idea... being aware of the possibility of catastrophic failure, we did ensure that we were out of the line of sight of any possible shrapnel.
@@demolitiondavedrillandblast I love what you guys do. Have you ever just drilled auger holes into the stump to pour flash or smokeless powder? Also, you can get shaped chargers to cut through those stumps with little explosives. You’d have to make a 3 to 4 in steel cylinder “can” for the powder and with an open end capped with a concave copper “cap”. The look like big primer cups w/ anvil. But it will turn tank armor into plasma. FYI, I use about 24 grains of a mid-rate smokeless powder for 5.56 reloads and they generate 50k PSI easily and that’s with a path out to lower pressure concentration (muzzle) Thanks for sharing this! Looks fun!!
Black powder and smokeless powder mix works as High Explosive. During Leningrad siege Soviet Army has a TNT shortages and fills hand grenades with that mix.
I have never had any success viewing this video. Every time it returns "No connection (Playback ID: ) Tap to retry". At least on this attempt I saw about 15 seconds of video before it crapped itself. It's the only video on RU-vid that gives me this problem ...
Well that is really interesting, this video was shot partly on my phone and partly on my Sony handicam, the video formats are different and I have to use two different video editors to patch it all together and some times they get a bit clunky, try using another machine or phone / tablet, try using a RU-vid down loader and then view it??
@@demolitiondavedrillandblast thanks Dave, I will try your suggestions and see how it goes. I used to think it was our snail's pace ADSL connection, but we ditched that months ago and are now on wireless broadband which is great.
I have been fighting with that error for like 5 minutes! Now I know it's not just me, so I am going to open it in the browser instead of the app and see if it behaves lol
I've tried for 15-20 minutes to get this video to play in the app, no joy. However I copied the link, opened a private tab in Mozilla and it played just fine. Seems like someone is trying to quash the video. I've heard of those old bp splitters, how many grains of 2F you reckon it would hold? Also what kind of tree were you splitting here?
Perhaps a higher grade of steel for splitter. What brand and grade BP were you using? Years ago I had a sample of small pea sized BP used for slabbing sandstone in western district.It seemed to have aeration holes like honeycomb. They wanted a softer blast to not pulverise the stone. Just occurred to me , why not drill a bore sized hole in the log, fill with BP or smokeless and a bit of stemming behind it?
The American style of these are a bout four times the weight for the same charge of black powder, their wedges are roughly the size of a 400gm soup can, the extra mass restricts the flight of the wedge.
Hi Ted, the hole that is bored down the centre is a large diameter hole most of the depth and then a smaller diameter hole for the powder chamber, the reason for this is to prevent you bashing it into the log so far the you start to compress the powder charge. The rod is just to measure that the powder charge length does not extend into the large diameter hole section.
Hi. Typically modern shotgun loads run 10,000 to 12,000 psi as a standard, and High power rifle loads in the 5.56 will run around 55,000.psi and those are normal pressures . Used properly, these log guns willwork pretty well . Look on You Tube under " BLACK POWDER SPLITTING WEDGE DEMONSTRATION ..."..... I built my own splitting wedge, and always throw a sandbag over the top, and get behind safe cover. It you can see it, you are not safe..
