The first time I seen this done I was at a friends party and he asked if I wanted to set off some "Redneck Fireworks".. We threw a plastic bag full of canned vegetables in a bon fire. You could hear the plink...plink..plink.. then they started going off, most of them stayed in the fire but a few flew out like rockets..
That got me thinking and I tried it at my house a few days later. I took a metal coffee can and put a cup of gasoline in the can. Set a can of salmon in the coffee can upside down and set it on fire. After a few minutes it blew launching the can a few hundred feet into the air. The salmon stayed in the coffee can and the explosion blew the fire out so it worked out well. I launched about 5 cans that day.
If you had a steel pipe nipple of the right ID with an end cap and a blow torch it would make a decent canned food cannon... lol
Edit.. I almost forgot, I had a experience similar to yours Marco but it was a total accident. A couple of friends and I were camping out in the woods by my friends house and we had a huge fire going. The fire was full of scrap wood from where his dad worked, the fire and wood was stacked about 3ft high.
We had a tree house that we had built and had just spray painted it camofluage... There were a couple spray cans lying around and one was near the fire pit... It wasn't in the fire but close enough that after a few hours it burst sending all the gas and paint straight into the fire causing a huge explosion which leveled the fire pit and scattered the burning wood in a 20ft area in the middle of the woods. We were running around putting out smoldering wood all night.. It was hilarious at the time but when I think about it now.. what if we had been sitting around the fire when it happened. If we weren't impaled with burning stakes we would have 3rd degree burns..
Ah the good ole days
