IEDs - 90's college student style
output'.

My friend at the time (he later 'dumped' me 'cos he thought his missus and I were getting it on - though to be fair, he created a self-fulfilling prophecy....) were in to fire in a big way. And canons. And guns - well .177 air pistol things were totally ineffective and causing anything other than a muted 'pop' when shot. Perfectly normally teenager interests.

I forget now, how we came to decide this is what we'd do...

A local carpet shop - this was the days of greengrocers in the high street, FineFare, Budgens etc. etc. - used to store its discarded cardboard carpet roll inners - monster monster toilet tubes - out the back.

We found that these 6ft-long tubes, about 1/2inch thick and with an internal diameter of little more than a Swan Vestas lighter re-fill gas cannister.... made an excellent improvised mortar tube!

After much experimentation - and wasting of pocket money on gas re-fill cannister after re-fill cannister after re-fill cannister - we worked out how to get the most out of these 'mortars'.

Our housing estate backed on to a nice woodland area, which in turn surrounded a number of fields. We would find a typical 3-strand barbed wire fence looking out onto a field, and lean a tube up against the top strand. We'd dig the base of the tube into the dirt a little, drop some rags down it, set these alight and then slide in the mortar - the lighter re-fill cannister. We later found pre-drilling the base of the tube at the position where the rags would burn really helped things along...

We found these re-fill cannisters would blow up big-time, then launch themselves (what I recall) up to a couple of hundred yards. When we retrieved the cylinders, we found they'd always blown around the seal at the top of the cannister. I'm not sure we'd have taken-out many Taliban, but we sure scared a few bunny rabbits.

So, not a school project as such - only 'cos our teachers at the time never asked us to be so innovative - but something that I remember fondly, a full 25 yrs on.
(__spc__, Tue 18 Aug 2009, 21:31, Reply)