Written by Kent Learned, 30 March 2021, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
One of the pirate shows wanted to use pyrotechnics to simulate cannon shots and gun shots. I’d already made several pyrotechnics firing boxes for a show in Gold Nugget Theatre. In the pirate show, these were used to fire the cannons and their corresponding explosions in the water that came about 1 second later. The guns had to look like they were from the 1800’s, and were a totally different kettle of fish.
Management wanted there to be several layers of safety systems to make sure that the guns could only go off during their brief time slot during the show. I ended up using 3 different very low frequency tones on the sound track, two of which were required to be present to enable either of the two “Stunt Guns” to be fired.
The first stunt gun was a dual barrelled gun that looked like an over-sized 1800’s dueling pistol. It had a push button trigger that controlled a custom made firing system. It had two barrels, so there was a second shot in case the first one failed. The second gun had four barrels, instead of two, as it needed to fire several shots. You needed strong hands to hold and aim these guns. I made them in my shed from welded pieces of 25mm water pipe, and dark timber, weighing around 6 or 7 kg each. There was a multi-conductor cable for the trigger and the pyro “bullets” were also wired into it as well.
The box controlling the guns was an adaptation of the roller coaster system photo control box. It looked at the sound track audio for the show, with its low frequency tones that “enabled” the guns at the appropriate times. The firing circuit for the pyro bullets was borrowed from a model train circuit that stored lots of electrical energy that was needed to fire the pyro “bullets”. It was a fairly complicated box, which had several fail-safe interlocking systems. It also had to turn on in a “Safe Mode”, so there were no accidental firings upon turn on.