Hmmm,
When I was a kid, I once took a whole roll of those ribbon caps, not the ones in a plastic circle, the ones on a paper roll.
Anyways, i took the whole roll, stood it straight up and hit it with a hammer.
All I remember is a white flash and not being able to hear anything.
When I was a Teenager, we decided to tape like 20 bottle rockets together and tie their fuses together and lead it to one long one. So we get it all setup, light the fuse, run away and wait. I guess the weight was too much for the power of the gunpowder so they just exploded. It was pretty fucking insane.
Psh.
When I was in high school, my friend and I used to build pipebombs to blow tree stumps out of the ground. Black powder and those disposable CO2 canisters, ignited with cannon fuse. Well, we decided we were bored with that and wanted to make something bigger.
Queue the 5 inch long, 2 inch diameter steel pipe with screw on endcaps. Also, we thought up a new ignition system, powered by electricity, so that we could detonate it from far away. We thought this was a good idea. Let me add here that the friend that I did this with was not the brightest crayon in the bowl, if you know what I mean.
Generally speaking, I would work on the igniters while he build the doodads. Well, he decided that he could just do both. He filled the pipe with black powder, put the igniter inside of it, THANKFULLY didn't put the other end cap on, and sat it on his chair. He then sat down IN said chair and started tinkering with the ignition system. It went off. He probably should have lost a leg, but as it was, it only ripped one of his pants legs in half and singed his leg.
Another time, we were trying to make a giant smoke bomb out of sugar and black powder. You had to melt the sugar and then pour in black powder. We thought we'd save time by just mixing it together, pouring it into a large Folgers coffee can, and heating it with a propane torch. He was stirring it from in front, I was holding the torch behind, when suddenly he yelled and jumped back. I wasn't sure what was going on until a second later, when all the black powder ignited, filling his garage with smoke and singing the ceiling. If it wasn't fire retardant material on the ceiling, it probably would have burnt to the ground. One of his neighbors called him about two minutes later to ask if we had set a candy factory on fire, because the smoke smelled like caramel.
Ahh, youth.
