Syrian Hell Cannon Mortar with Explosive Rounds, Part 1

[Music] in 2010 a series of revolutions began to spring up across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring revolutions formed in Egypt Tunisia Yemen and eventually Syria this conflict eventually grew larger resulting in a convoluted war a civil war led by President Bashar al-assad the Syrian government wages war with the many faces of the Syrian opposition this conflict also resulted in an interesting array of improvised weapons as depicted here such as artillery shells and other explosive ordnance one particular weapon we notice caught our attention so we decided to build one [Music] howdy folks welcome to their episode of ordnance lab I'm Sean and today we're going to be talking about hell cannons which are a series of improvised mortars typically found in the Syrian conflict and our goal here is to recreate that part of the services we offer this is a total advertisement is the ability to replicate a threat be that some sort of improvised threat that you'd find on the contemporary battlefield be that roadside bombs and provides mortars such as this also Factory munitions such as claymores grenades and we're working on the RPG simulator also so lots of things is pretty much no threat that we can't replicate now with this right here what this is is that whenever like the first you're in Oia f1 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 there were munitions everywhere Saddam regime had ammo caches and ammunition dumps just scattered all over the country so the insurgency was able to easily find standard military munitions so 155 rounds were really popular for IEDs standard explosives all kinds of stuff was able to be used but as the conflict continued in the interdictions were done for the IE d manuals the the stuff that was used to initiate it all kinds of different things were done to remove the sources for standard military munitions and the insurgents were forced to improvise and people are pretty smart they can figure out a lot of things how to make weapons out of all sorts of things in the Syrian conflict it's been a similar thing where the resistance forces have been able or all types of excuse me all types of insurgent forces against the government have had to improvise munitions as both the ISIS guys and also the counter regime fighters there's a million different players in that conflict one of the ones that they've been able to replicate is the hell can in them these mortars right here where they're able to take things with propane tanks and whatnot able to turn them into a somewhat accurate indirect fire munition now and as always here at ordnance lab this is not a political channel we're not here talking about politics or anything else we're just discussed and hey here's what the weapons do nothing else related to it we're gonna go out there we're gonna fire some of these off we're going to test it right now where it's not fused and doesn't have any sort of payload gonna see what happens for how far it goes and then we're gonna load it up with some sand to see how far it goes with the weight and then we'll load it up with explosives and make a real live round now as we always like to save it we don't do any gunsmith that goes beyond a half dremel and a hammer so we've got Kody here with weapon genetics who fabricated this here he'll cannon which is actually legally this is no different than a black-powder cannon and is not controlled as a firearm by ATF because it's a muzzleloading black-powder cannon and Cody you can talk about with your badass shirt some more about what's going on here yeah so we wanted to replicate kind of what they're doing overseas you know very rudimentary basic weaponry so what we do is we took a piece of half-inch pipe we weld it on the end cap with a fuse hole and we made some simple legs that you can take on and off put inside the the mortar and move around so very similar what they're using overseas very simple we just got ol open-source information and did a lot of research on the internet looking at what they're doing a picture yeah yeah ideally we built this one a little more heavy than they probably did overseas just for safety factor but it would be something similar to this just not probably to even to this quality even as simple as this particular mortar is yeah and this isn't going to be fired like a standard mortar with a regular mortar you get your gun team they drop it down as a primer that hits and fires it off this right here is gonna operate off of a black powder charge in the bottom where it's going to be okay hey we drop the round in there along with the the charge and then we'll initiate it from a bit away and it'll fire out and then the projector will go downrange so again this is Cody made this this is just an example of what he can do he could have made this thing beautiful like some of the other guns that you built but this is a prototype for us to do that we're gonna make our final one where we get some larger ones we'll mount it on the back of a trailer and have all kinds of cool stuff to roll down the highway with yeah well the next one will actually have mounted on a an actual tripod with adjustments a little more reformer T&E yeah this one we wanted something very similar to what they're doing overseas very rudimentary very simple something that you know they could actually manufacture over there and we're simulating that here so this is more just like Achmed I want to kill those guys over there but I'm not close enough to get it done let's build something for it and this is what they did we're not sure what the range is going to be and this is open-ended testing we only have two projectiles because we didn't have enough empty propane tanks hopefully this first video will survive enough shots where we can actually load it up with a full round but again inshallah we'll see what happens and if you have some of these tanks send them to us yeah we could use them yep so alright well let's see what happens we only had two projectiles made for this project so we had to do a good amount of preparation to ensure everything went smoothly first step was to assemble the cannon so Cody got to work doing his magic once the assembly is complete we needed a way down the projectile to the approximate mass of our live projectile so he packed the round full of sand then we added our estimated amount of propellant we decided on a certain amount based on an educated guess where the hell cannon ready Sean did the honors of dropping in the projectile and we set up the cameras to catch the action well I don't like Butch Cassidy the Sundance Kid you think you used enough dynamite there butch we we didn't even record it for downrange because we thought that it was going to be like just a little bit turned out we must have thrown that thing like a 150 meters or so and it went way the hell out there you can see it like spit it in the air and then it went down to it it went very uncontrolled and then as it got up yeah it fell perfectly like a boy yeah it stabilized so we're gonna go out there and try to find it in Shiloh seriously doubt we're gonna find it but a holy crap that thing went at least 100 to 200 meters or so I'd say with just a small charge of black powder so we're going to try to find it then we'll see what we're gonna do we've only got one round left so we're gonna have to see if we just want to lob it downrange and see if it actually goes boom but we'll see if we can find that other one but oh my god alright sorry again sorry that we couldn't get the video of that from the way downrange but it was epic alright let's do it again the projectile launch went far but than expected and went further than anticipated it reached a good deal in altitude then shared over to the left into some brush all of us began to search and we then found the projectile and roughly where it came down all right so we launched our search party so we're filming with the phone so sorry for the crappy video quality in comparison but we were able to locate the the round and damn it got jacked up on the way down we put some sand in there Cody's idea right before we launched it so looks like these right here will not be reusable but not quite sure if the damnit like I wonder how much this damage came dr. Reds from the tree yeah because he looked pretty intact when it was flying however I do think that the wings and stuff when this can which was we didn't talk about was part of our design push through this it definitely damaged it but yeah I think this was from the tree cause I saw it hit this cedar tree or whatever yeah but yeah I mean still if like I said it fell down perfectly so I'm thinking when it hit a first branch it may have tipped a little sideways and hit yeah it's not this isn't super thick material so it's not surprising that got pretty dented up but you see the black powder burns all around it but it perform yeah till 18 because it really stabilized in flight as it worked its way down and it came down just like that having had the fuse on there with the explosives we definitely would have had debt well insha'Allah would have had detonation so I think it's ready to move on to a lawn like we're not going to launch this one here in case a we have UXO but we're gonna launch it and with a real live projectile and our fuse on there and you'll see what happens our recovery projectile was ruined but not to worry as the real one is up next we filled the projectile with a kilogram of explosive then fitted it with an impact fuse assembly all right so we got the other projectile ready to go this one is loaded with a kilo of explosive and we got an impact fuse here hopefully how this is gonna work is it's gonna fly out come down hit the fuse blow this up like a standard artillery shell right the only difference is though is that this one's a little bit heavier than the one we tested out before we're not totally sure what the arc is gonna be like but we're using approximately the same amount of propellant so we'll see how that goes but total this thing is weighing in at about 1.7 kilos so hopefully you know this works all right but we have to can't the mortar here and this actually doesn't constitute the firearm but this is the destructive device so this is the that has the serial number on it and I was and this one just simply has Kody's uh chicken scratches on the side so what we gonna do is going to drop it in the tube well first put the propellant stick fuse in there let it off and in shalat it kicks off and we have a successful test of this mortar let's take a look Cody got to work in preparing the hel cannon for the main event he cleared the flash oil fouling to fit a fuse with a one minute delay then he filled the powder chamber with an adjusted amount of propellant to reduce the estimated range in altitude of the projectile with a big smile Shawn dropped in the round and we stepped back to watch the show [Music] [Music] [Music] the round worked far better than expected and caught the range on fire we had a halt our moment of celebration to rush to him to fight the flames once out we step back and surveyed the damage one phrase never been done before for once we actually pulled it off we've been doing all these things for years like whenever we do videos like we try something it always seems to go to hell but Jake's fuse went right the first time a little too right as y'all can see in the around us and in the video rather spectacular the the thing went off and we were like yeah jumping up and down and then like oh crap we got a fire to put out so thanks to heroic efforts when from Cody Jake and I we managed to put the fire out without calling the fire department for help so as you can see if you welcome looking around here that there's a empty spot where actually it landed where it landed and blew all the stuff out around it all the stuff that would burn and then of course lit everything else on fire there which is kind of funny but this is really kind of Bugs Bunny ish that you can see the fuse sitting right here that is the only thing left and so it landed just perfectly was kind of funny whenever was flying we was like oh man it must not gone off and then I saw it coming - straight down because it turned over and BAM went off we got little pieces of the propane tank around here and we've also got our tail feathers right here that we're laying what about a meter away from it so just wow we're really surprised with for once something we actually did went right the first time and yeah as I said before never been done before so we'll go ahead and look around here and survey some of the damage and see what else we got to find we never did find any fragments from the warhead explosion the only thing we recovered was the tailfin assembly and the fusing the burn resulted in a rather large scorch patch in the range that we decided to use as an ideal target for future videos on explosive projectile weapons that were working on mainly because the patch is already burnt and we can't burn it any further the blast area was unburned and gave us an approximate idea of how large the explode was on impact a little over three meters at the widest point in our book this was a complete success all right well got Cody here who first did an amazing job helping us put out the fire and wouldn't be eighth we would right now be hanging out the fire department waiting for them to are well thanking them for helping us put out the fire without Cody's help and clearly man you did a badass job with this you were saying this is about your first can and when you were like what 10 yeah small little brass ones about 25 caliber steel shot so I've been thinking about buying a like a Napoleon style cannon for a while but man this performs so yeah like it was it landed actually pretty accurately line right what we launched it you'll see in the video where when it recoils jumps up as it exits but you know these are hero design not for us sustain fire these are shooting Scouten inshallah and clearly by the way I want to say that me chanting Allah Akbar back in the truck while man in the drone was obviously you know Allah Akbar inshallah for guiding the round and for assisting us and putting the fire out so what we're going to do now is to kind of show where we're going Cody's working on making a bigger mortar for us because of course you don't stop with something like this right here we got our first success but we're gonna do now is we're gonna show one of the rounds we're working on that we're gonna be doing for a larger scale one we're gonna go ahead and put that in our blastin pit we'll set it off and give you all a taste of what's going to be coming and so we'll go make that and blow her up for the final blast we excavated a hole we have been working on for our napalm bomb video to minimize fragmentation issues and to contain a bit of the blast we decided to place the upscale warhead in it also helps us make the hole bigger we then set up some mannequins nearby to see what kind of damage is expected when the warhead goes off alright so here it is the coop to drop the biggest charge we are going to set off for this whole experiment on mortars ideally we're going to transition to this size of warhead the propane tank size ones are alright you know it's got about a kilo of explosive in it this bad boys got 5 kilos of ammonium nitrate based explosive so we filled it up and then we with the same idea explosives we've been receiving permission downrange you know we haven't get away all our secrets but this bad boy is filled almost to the brim so this is going to give an idea of what the actual explosion is gonna be when we launch it from the barrel it's also going to give us a deal so the safety dimensions of how far out we need to be when this goes off because we've never set off a warhead like this you know specifically it's gonna throw shrapnel everywhere and that's what these dummies are here for it's gonna give us a deal what we know what to expect so we're gonna do is we're gonna use a standard time fuse with a blasting cap stick it in there light it off get to a safe distance we got a bunch of cameras here set so we can get some good footage of this going off so let's light this baby off and see what happens [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] well that was a hell of a bang we've got pieces of the mannequins too scattered all over the place I mean man we have a chance to watch the video because we got to get the hell out of here but just utter devastation and I'm gonna climb here into this to our new crater we've been trying to trying to dig this thing out a lot of different ways for another video and it just totally cratered it in here and so this is going to be the kind of stuff that we're gonna be building up to we did that smaller one thick made that pretty good foot it was about that bigger so I'd say of an area that it blasted out whenever it landed with a 1 kilo gram charge this right here was a 5 kilogram charge that went off and we're gonna be launching that next time next time pretty soon with one of the hell cannons that Cody with weapon genetics is working on for us he's already got the pipe sourced for it so we're gonna be working on doing the T&E terrain or terrain elevation adjustments and working up some stuff to see how actually accurate we can get it to be with an a predictability of hey can we put rounds on target and walk them in from there so this is just an unlimited opportunity for cool stuff to do now remember our patreon account does none of this stuff happens for free but hey if you're a customer that needs to simulate these kind of threats for improvised munitions factory munitions or anything else weakens provide that for you like these hel cannons we can make those in any size our only limitation is time and money we also have our claymores we have some RPG simulators we're working on that will give you the ship the same shape charge effect and just pretty much anything and everything so hit us up at info at ordnance - lab comm and again hopefully y'all enjoyed this video thanks for watching remember to subscribe and we'll see y'all next time thanks for watching if you like this video be sure to hit the like button hit subscribe if you want to see more and stay tuned for another episode here at ordnance lab

Channel: Ordnance Lab

Views: 455,581

Rating: 4.7584071 out of 5

Keywords: Hell Cannon, Explosives, High Explosives, HellCannon, Syria, Cannon, IED, Mortar, Improvised Mortar, Artillery, Improvised Artillery, TXMGO, Ordnance Lab, Syrian War, War in Syria, Bomb, Improvised Explosive Device, Indirect Fire, Iraq, War in Iraq, Iraq War, Destructive Device, Blackpowder Cannon, Explosive Weapons, Explosion, Explosions, ATF, DOD, NFA

Id: _CkBCt7L29k

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020