Confederate Sharpshooter

I was blessed in many ways growing up. I got to hang around with some very talented and intelligent men, work with machine shop tools, and generally do a lot of things that I didn’t really appreciate until later on in life. Some things just tend to stand out in life though, and for me those things usually went ‘boom.’

This incident took place back in the old days of the machine shop, when it was in the little wooden building by the railroad tracks. As I described earlier in my post Mr. Ralph, we were doing a good business with case hardening parts for a local factory, and part of this process involved washing the parts down after heat treating them, and of course the waste water was then treated and flushed down into the city sewer system. This system had worked well for several years, until at last one long day Ralph forgot to clean out the system and left some residue in the pipe. This residue had set up, hardening to a solid mass as solid as rock. This pipe was either 6” or 12” cast iron, I can’t remember which right now, but it was underneath the floor- a full 8” of poured concrete. To put it simply, replacing the pipe was not an option- not unless you wanted to rent a jackhammer and waste a few days busting concrete, pulling heavy iron pipe out of the ground, and refilling the whole mess and pouring concrete again. No, not an option at all. Nor was this going to be as easy as using a plumber’s snake or drain cleaner- the residue from the cleaning part of the process looked a lot like set concrete itself, and was nearly as hard- although considerably more brittle. That was a nice property for the proposed solution.

I’m guessing I would have been around 7 or 8 when this happened, but I may have been as old as 10. Details get fuzzy when you go back that far, but suffice to say I was a kid. Dad was not only running the shop at the time, he was doing a lot of the machine work as well, and wore a blue and white uniform with his name over the pocket, just like everyone else in the shop. About this time we’d gotten a contract- I think it was for a short run of government vehicles, but I’m not sure- and the product we were supposed to produce was the rear end housing for a small vehicle, something like a Cushman scooter or the like. Usually in Detroit parts like this are made either by punch press, or by hydraulic injection- either way tremendous force is applied to make the metal flow into a prescribed shape. Of course, we didn’t have this option- the part run was way too small to make setting up and tooling for that profitable at all. Dad had come up with a much simpler way of doing it, and was quite proud of the result: a round plate was drilled and bolted to a heavy steel block, which had a concave area machined in the center. In the bottom of this dip was a carefully measured amount of very fine black powder, with an electric squib wired in the bottom. Once set up, and behind a big shield of boiler plate, the switch was thrown, and POP- perfect dome shaped rear end cover, ready for painting. I think we made a few hundred this way, and I’d pay real money to find one today and have for my ‘collection.’ I wonder if anybody changing the rear end lube in one of the little vehicles ever took notice of how the covers were made. (Wildcat cartridge shooters are well familiar with this process, often called ‘fired fitting’ brass.)

For this reason we had several metal gallon cans of very fine black powder in the storage room at this time, and a good portion of it was about to be put to use. Long after the regular employees had left for home, dad brought me into the shop and into the back room where the case hardening furnaces and equipment stood, cold and quiet after a long week of heat and noise. It seemed a little spooky, being used to the usual clamor or the shop, to be there in the dark late at night. (This also marked one of the first times I stayed up past bedtime as well.) I was then introduced to what was to become a hallmark of my dad’s: The Merita Bread Bag, or wrapper. I don’t know why he always used that particular brand of bread bag, or why I remember it so clearly, but we always used the exact same kind. As I watched, thrilled with the excitement only a kid can feel, dad carefully poured black powder into the bag, with what seemed to me to be a rather large quantity of the explosive mixture. Then came an old electrical cord, wires stripped and copper wire tangled and ready to short out and produce sparks. Finally he wrapped the entire mess with sticky black electrical tape and bagged it again to keep it all dry when it was submersed into the standing water in the pipe. Carefully he lowered the charge into the clogged pipe, and measured how far it had proceeded into the system by counting the number of hands of cord going into the pipe. Satisfied it was where it needed to be, he covered the opening with a big square of boiler plate, and rolled a stump with an anvil bolted to it over the boiler plate. We were all set.

Safely behind yet another square of boiler plate, to my undisguised glee dad handed me the extension cord, and told me to be prepared for some noise when I plugged it in. With the impatience of youth I found the receptacle, and as long as I live I will never forget the wonderful sound and feel of what happened next. There is nothing in this world quite like a black powder explosion going off, and nothing as unique as your first experience with one. The sound, the boom, is overwhelming. The new feeling of having solid earth move under your feet, and the distinct smell of black powder smoke is addictive to a young man, having experienced it once, you just have to do it again. I was hooked. But it wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. The force of the powder going off had shot the standing water back out of the pipe with such force as to lift the boiler plate, stump, and anvil together, and the anvil actually shot up high enough to let me see it over the shield, almost reaching the ceiling in the room. As it hung in mid air, the water that had propelled it there reached us, and a dark rain of greasy water showered down on us both. What comes up must come down, of course, and the first thing to hit the ground was the boiler plate, with a mighty metallic clang that echoed through the neighborhood. A millisecond later the stump/anvil combination repeated the performance, and seconds later it was very, very quiet, with only the acrid smell of smoke hanging heavy in the air showing what had happened. Then, as our ears cleared from the noise, you could hear it.. faintly at first, then louder… the unmistakable sound of water draining freely down a drain pipe. Our clog, to put it mildly, was cleared.

The fun wasn’t quite over yet. Our shop was in the city limits, and in a quasi-residential neighborhood- several houses down the street on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was near 11 pm, and all decent folk had long ago gone to bed. Suddenly lights began to come on in these houses, and before long a local police car slid to a stop in front of the building. I’m pretty sure he was the only policeman on duty in town, but I guess there may have been another somewhere. At that time we had a pair of heavy wooden sliding doors that opened from the machine shop to the street, to unload trucks from, and as dad slid the doors open the black smoke literally rolled out from the shop into the cool night air. The policeman was one of dads good friends, back then everybody knew everybody else in our town. The sergeant spoke first, obviously concerned someone may have been injured. “We’ve had calls there was an explosion down here. What happened?”

Fanning the smoke out of his face and the building, my dad uttered a phrase that was to be repeated over and over at family gatherings for years to come. With a deadly serious poker face, he stared directly at the local law enforcement officer and said, quote: “yeah, I heard something too- I think it came from over there somewhere….”

The Sergeant just rolled his eyes up into his head, looked down, got back in his car, and drove away.

Next week: We help Grandpa launch an apple tree into space.