Rich is right. Accidents can easily happen. Any use of pyrotechnics must be treated with the utmost care - just ask the Portsmouth Model Boat Display Team. I remember years ago somebody experimenting with 'blowing up' a merchant ship for an Atlantic convoy display. The very small charge that was supposed to just hole the model had a much greater effect than anticipated and those present were lucky to escape without injury. The story was published in Model Boats as a warning not to get involved in this sort of thing on an amateur basis. Explosives of any kind are unpredictable in their effects. You only have one body and it's best to keep it intact! Unfortunately such warnings are not heeded by the 'like a big bang, won't happen to me' brigade. The resulting injuries can be particularly nasty.
Colin
The Portsmouth Model Boat Display Team take safety extremely seriously, with a series of rules and regs that the members must follow to use these effects, also the models are checked yearly (MOTs) by our resident experts, we have safety documentation as well as rules, and pyrotechnic range safety checks have been carried out in the past at secure locations (pays to know people in the MOD!), our paperwork is second only in depth to a typical model yacht race, and you know how dangerous they can be.
As far as the article in Model Boats magazine, I have got most articles that have featured the team in the past and can not pin down this incident. I feel that in the 90s the magazine suffered from an undercurrent of 'dissing' the activities of the Display Team and can think of at least two articles. One at Olympia where an effect was described as leaving an undescribable mess spreading across the bottom of the pond following a series of explosions, I was there and it was my model. This was designed to do what it did and did not leave an undescribable mess spreading across the pond. At the first International Festival of the Sea we had a good write up with the addition that our use of a drydock resulted in HMS Victory getting her bottom wet for the first time in 125 years. No mention of the adjacent dry dock filled up for a diving school having any contributory factors, nect door to that was the Mary Rose and next door to that was HMS Victories dry dock..guilty.
I must say that in recent years the coverage of our displays has been excellent and has shown no sign of this apparent bias of previous years.
I would take issue with the statement 'experimenting'. This is not permitted at a public display, all our experimenting, as stated earlier, goes on behind closed doors.
Pyrotechnic effects are dangerous and any posts I have made in the past on the subject have related to the safety aspects and not the practical side of creating these 'big bangs'.
Daemon seems to be looking into all the proper aspects of this side of the hobby and I wish him well with his pursuit of this in the UK.