I attended the semi-annual BBM advisory board mtg yesterday morning and was there early setting up my presentation and chatting w/ one of the board members, Pete Lovelace. Big guy, probably in his early 70s. Looks like a combination roustabout and rancher. Said he never went to high school. He was home-schooled back before it was a hyphenated evangelical buzz word. He's in the final phase of building a big log home in Cody. He's downsizing after selling his ranch out on the South Fork Road. I was told by John Rumm that it was "a really big ranch". You should know that the South Fork Road is the site of the big spreads for mighty high net worth individuals.
The conversation with Pete goes all over the landscape from buying an old 4 cyl Cleveland motorcycle that came with its own parts bike ("It drove like it was hinged in the middle"), buying and selling 8 gauge elephant guns to blowing up things with dynamite. "My father taught me how to use dynamite. Set my first charge when I was 12. Back then there was always an open box of dynamite in the back of the store and if you needed to blow a few stumps you just grabbed what you needed and off you went." Pete told me how many sticks he used for a big stump and where he put them. "If you put your charge in the right way you hardly hear any noise. Just a big "Whmmfff'. If you hear a lot of noise and a big explosion you haven't set your charge right and you're losing most of your energy."
He described the difference between lifting a white oak and a basswood. "White oaks are hard to move, but basswood is just about impossible. Sometimes you've got all the dirt gone and the stump and all the roots are still there lookin' like a big ol' octopus. Even the bark is ripped off but everything else is there." He told one story about blowing a channel through some deep woods for a construction project and the fumes from the blasting were giving him powerful headaches. He talked to a sales rep from DuPont and the guy says "Pete, you should be using Gelex. Dynamite is a nitrate and the nitrate is what's giving you headaches. Gelex is a nitrite and won't give you a headache." Pete said from then on he was a Gelex man.
I told him about some of my experiences as a kid with blasting powder that we swiped from an unlocked powder house at a nearby quarry. I said we also swiped a few sticks of dynamite. I remember it was packed in cardboard boxes with sawdust. Lucky for us the quarry owner kept the blasting caps separate in a second locked powder house. I asked him if dynamite ever gets unstable. Pete said "Yep. If you see a box of dynamite that's wet you better call the fire marshal. The nitro glycerin has separated out from the dynamite and it gets mighty touchy." I thought back about the half-dozen sticks of dynamite I had stashed in my parents garage for about a year or two and wondered how close it got to sweating before I got rid of it. Lordy.
From dynamite and blasting powder, Pete segued into pyrotechnics. "Here's something that's fun to do out in the backyard when you've got to do some entertaining. Get you a 55 gallon drum, metal not plastic, with the top open. Put a lit candle or road flare down inside. Put a board across the top and then balance a glass jug with about a half gallon of gasoline on the middle of the board. Then you stand off about 20 yards with your .22 hornet or your varmint gun. Not a regular .22, mind you. Regular .22 won't get the job done. Then you put a round through that jug of gas. The bullet instantly vaporizes the gas which then is ignited by the candle or flare. Goes off like a volcano. Big ball of fire and a mushroom cloud. Everybody loves it. A real crowd pleaser."
Thought you'd want to know.