Since last week's article about fire, I remembered a few other fire-related stories.  Hence the title of this week's article:  Playing with Fire - Part II.

Paper Balloons

I'm pretty sure Philip was the person who told me about these.  They required an open space away from any dry vegetation or anything else that might be flammable.  And there shouldn't be any wind at all.

Paper balloons were made from a large sheet of newspaper, such as the piece that was used to form the front and back pages.  It needed to be a piece that was close to being square in shape, not one of the rectangular single-page pieces.  The idea was to fold all four corners in until you had a semi-balloon shape, then you twisted the corners together to hold the shape.  Not easily done, but we managed to do it by starting with diagonal corners (top left and bottom right), twisting them together, then repeating the process with the remaining two corners.  Yeah, the result wasn't really very round, but it kinda worked. 

What next?  We sat the paper balloon on the ground, twisted side down.  Then we lit it with our trusty Zippo lighters.  The twisted paper made a nice fuse.  A successful "launch" occurred if your newspaper managed to hold its shape while burning.  The result was a very fragile ball of newspaper ash that slowly lifted off the ground and then quickly broke apart into small glowing ashes (hence the need for no wind and no dry vegetation).  That was an ideal launch.  But what usually happened was the newspaper unfolded itself while being burned.  Then you just had a piece of burning newspaper on the sidewalk.  Not very exciting.

As with many of the ideas described on this blog, the paper balloon started in one city with one set of hoodlum friends, and was later perfected in another city with a different set of hoodlum friends.  After Charlotte, my family moved to the Newton, NC area.  It was there that my hoodlum friend Andy (the poor guy who threw his hot dog across the room after it shocked him) and I perfected the paper balloon.  The main changes involved using a stapler to "seal" the edges of the newspaper together so they wouldn't flap open during the "ignition phase" of the launch.  Plus we discovered the paper ignited much more uniformly if we lit the balloon in as many of these stapled edges as we could.  Needless to say, we went through a LOT of newspapers and staples.  And we somehow avoided setting our housing development on fire.

Rocket Man

Once again, this story starts in Charlotte.  Philip had a model rocket that we tried to launch at the local elementary school.  But he only had one engine and one igniter.  But the igniter failed to work.  It briefly fizzled, but the solid fuel engine never ignited.  For those of you who never messed around with Estes model rockets, the igniter was basically a wire with flammable match-like chemicals deposited in the middle.  The wire got hot when you connected it to a battery.  The hot wire ignited the match chemicals and (if you were lucky) your rocket engine would ignite from this small flame (the igniter had to be inserted inside the bottom of the solid fuel engine).  Well, we weren't lucky and so the launch was aborted.  Later that evening, we were still feeling antsy because we hadn't managed to blow anything up all day.  Philip got the idea to grind up some of the solid fuel in the rocket engine and see if we could light it with our lighters.  Now, Estes rocket engines are just cardboard tubes full of dried, highly explosive chemicals.  Philip figured that it would be fun to light it and throw it in the driveway and let it chase us around.  He lit it.  It chased us.  A lot.  Then it stopped.  Funny thing about Estes rocket engines...I forgot there was a delayed ejection charge that was designed to deploy the rocket's parachute.  About the time I got to the still-smoking engine, the ejection charge went off.  I never ran so fast in my life.  Luckily, the ejection charge only lasted a second or two.  Philip almost died laughing at me.  I almost died from a heart attack.

Hooked on Rockets

Yeah, I eventually got into model rocketry myself.  But not at first.  In Newton, our 7th grade science teacher let us purchase and build Estes rocket kits.  I didn't participate in that exercise that year, and I couldn't remember why.  Now I think it was because of the rocket engine incident in Philip's driveway.  But by the 9th grade, I got another chance.  Our shop teacher wanted us to learn about assembly line manufacturing, so we got to build a whole bunch of rockets.  We each got a rocket to take home and pimp out with spray paint and old model car decals, etc.  Mine had a blue metal flake paint job and flame decals on the fins.  On launch day, we got to reach into a grab bag to choose our engines.  I was lucky enough to get a 'C' engine (the higher the letter, the higher your rocket would go).  It was a beautiful flight, but when the ejection charge blew, the shock cord broke.  The rocket body came tumbling back to the football field and the nose cone / parachute assembly landed on top of the school.  I borrowed a ladder from a construction worker and was able to retrieve the rest of my rocket.  The main rocket body wasn't damaged in the fall, although one cardboard fin got a little bent. 

Years later, I built several other rocket kits with my son.  I even built and launched a rocket I made from the cardboard tube left over from some Christmas wrapping paper.  It sounded really cool - the long tube gave it a real bass resonance.  But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  Years before the Christmas wrapping paper tube rocket, I decided it would be cool to make a rocket out of just a rocket engine itself.  I glued cardboard fins to the side of an engine, along with a soda straw (used to guide the rocket off the launching rod).  I made a crude nose cone out of construction paper.


This was shortly after I was first married.  I was in my early twenties.  My wife and I lived in an apartment near Startown Road.  There was a road and an open field in front of the apartment complex, so that is where I decided to point the snub-nosed rocket.  So I set up the launch pad on our front porch launched the rocket.  It took off and immediately made a hard right turn and went zooming off right past the house next door to the apartments.  Right past the guy's window, evidently.  I quickly drug everything back into our apartment and cautiously peered out the window.  The old dude that lived in the house came out and was walking around asking everyone if they had seen anyone shooting off bottle rockets.  Luckily nobody saw me launch the rocket, so I got away with it.  Whew!