Ah, adolescence, cherry bombs and M80s!
There's a high bridge (several, really) in Lynchburg, VA, where I grew up. My neighborhood buddy and I built model planes in his basement & had our own way of disposing of those that we no longer wanted — we blew them up in mid-air. The models had insufficient wing surface to create much lift, a deficiency made worse by the weight of the CB taped to them, so they were aerodynamic bricks. Still, the vertical drop (maybe 150-200 feet over a wooded ravine & railroad track) was great enough to allow detonation before the package hit the ground. Pretty impressive to a kid!
Cherry bombs also made great pretend-antiaircraft devices when used in conjunction with a Wham-o Slingshot. Safe operation required a two-kid crew: a gunner to load the unlighted CB into the slingshot pouch and an igniter to light the fuse. Even the flash and smoke puff appear reasonably authentic to a kid, and detonation occurred far enough (and high enough, hopefully) to be very loud, but harmless.
One kid in our neighborhood made "squirrel bombs" by dipping cherry bombs into glue, rolling them in BBs, and letting them dry. Delivery system into the tree canopy was the Wham-o. (BTW, the "Wrist Rocket" was a later Wham-o improvement. If the wrist brace more powerful elastic had been available at the time, the greater range and accuracy would have been most welcome.)
Ever see the result of dropping an M80 (AKA "depth charge" or "ash can") into an empty glass one-gallon vinegar jug? A lot of shrapnel, fortunately on a mostly high-angle trajectory. (Swift legs and a wall or bank for cover are advisable.) The M80 was powerful enough that it could be used for illegal "fishing" if dynamite was not available. (That's one thing we never did.)
And then there were the principles of physics that could be learned from those devices—for example, the enhanced destructive power of underwater explosions. Drop a CB or M80 into a toilet (the fuses had an oxidizer in them and would burn underwater), and the result usually was a big bang and a big mess from water splash. (At worst, the porcelain bowl would shatter, a cost of "only" a few hundred dollars.) But drop one into the loo and then flush it, and the destruction is much more severe, according to where detonation occurs. The best case, where detonation is still within the porcelain fixture, leaves nothing above the level of the floor (essentially the same damage as the previous scenario). OTOH, if the explosive had passed into the pipe, it likely ruptures, perhaps shattering completely, the pipe inside the floor or wall. Neither good nor amusing, but crudely educational.
Case in point: the latter kind of explosion occurred in a high school graduation prank within the class two years ahead of mine. The perpetrator was an honor student who had won just about every athletic and academic award that could be won. He was stripped of as many honors as possible, and his parents had to pay a huge repair bill to the school. (He played football for a prestigious university, became a physician, and about 20 years later, went to prison for Medicare fraud. Go figure where the short was in his brain.)
