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Had an interesting experience with switched spark plug wires when I was a kid. We had a Farmall H with a loader on it that we used to clean out the hog houses along with a lot of other things. The muffler was too high to fit into some of our buildings so we had welded an inlet into the side of the muffler so it pointed forward instead of up. One day I was cleaning out our cattle feedlot and I quit for dinner. When I came back I found the cattle had pulled off the plug wires. I reattached them and went to start the tractor. It cranked over but wouldn't fire when suddenly there was this very loud explosion. I was looking on both sides of the tractor trying to figure out what had exploded when, with a loud clang, the muffler came out of the sky and missed me by about three feet. I then discovered I had attached the plug wires wrong and the explosion was when it had fired with a valve open. The muffler had been launched into the air with such velocity that I didn't even see it leave, even though I was looking directly at it time. From the time of the explosion until the muffler arrived back on the tractor was several seconds so it must have gone into the air quite a ways. I was home alone at the time and have always thought about what people would have thought if they had found me lying unconcious on the ground with a muffler beside me. Sometime we can be pretty dangerous in our stupidity.
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