Ben:  This is a bit of a late post, but possibly better late than never…

To celebrate the 4th of July, we had a number of families from the church over for the afternoon and evening.

There were a lot of kids over and much fun was had in the swimming pool.

One of the families brought along (unbeknowst to me) a signal cannon.  Here’s a picture of one that I snagged from eBay, that was pretty similar to what they had (except that they only had the metal/aluminum cylinder but not the wooden carriage).

The basic premise is that it is a very loud noise-maker.  It consists of a metal cylinder which has been smoothly bored most of the way down, and has a separate small fuse hole.  A fuse is put in the cannon, and then it is loaded with gunpowder (up to the top lip, I believe) which is then tamped down (in this case I think they were using a short broom handle).  No projectile is fired, but the resulting noise is extremely loud (for those of you who have played the game “Bang!”, think of the “BLAM” made by the Howitzer).  On its first firing, I was behind the house by the pool, it was pretty startling.  It was only fired twice, which was probably okay as we live in a pretty quiet neighborhood.

We had purchased a bunch of fireworks (of the lesser explosion variety) to set off after it got dark.

Davison was our chief firework lighter and did a pretty good job of it.  We landed one firework on a neighbor’s roof (they weren’t home and it rolled off without starting a fire) and almost hit a couple of vehicles with others. But it all ended safely and the kids had a great time, especially with the sparklers and the snappers.

We also had some items that generated smoke which didn’t really work well in the dark, so we lit some of it off the next day.

All in all, it was a pretty fun way to celebrate with friends.