one seemed totally normal - especially because his dad had an awesome machine shop. I was about 13 yrs old.

Once it was finished we weren't sure where to set it off, so we decided to go up the street to the canal. We figured we'd light it, toss it in the empty canal channel and listen to it destroy whatever was in there.

While my friend stayed on the canal road to light it and drop it in the channel, me and another friend scaled down the side of the road to take cover. When we got down to the lowest point, we noticed the ditch that ran perpendicular to the road. The ditch was how the neighborhood got irrigation water from the canal when it was full. This ditch provided a perfect view of the canal channel, so we told our friend to drop it right in front of the ditch so we could see it explode. (Stupid...stupid...stupid)

He lit it, dropped it right in front of the ditch, and BOOM! Crazy loud and pieces of shrapnel went everywhere...including down the ditch channel. I audibly heard pieces of it hit the chain link fence behind us. When the smoke cleared (literally) we were all kind of shell shocked and I turned to see 4 or 5 large chunks of shrapnel stuck to the fence. Extremely lucky that none of us got hit by any of that shrapnel. It would have torn holes right through us.