Reenacting is a dangerous hobby that is only made possible by the strick protocols of training and safety inspections. The thing that upsets me with the "American Guns" program is that obviously those "trained experts" didn't know a dang thing about what they were doing. As a reasult they violated almost every safety rule in handling an artillery piece that you could imagine.
True, what we do was not the way they did it during the war. But we aren't at war in reenacting. And safety is primary in a hobby which uses real guns for play.
I am just waiting for some "Backyard Bozo" to say "Hey, I can make one of those" and blow themselves and someone else up with the thing, by overloading it to make the bowling balls fly farther (like they did) or throwing powder down the barrel on a still glowing ember, whhiisvery possible using "Cannon Fuse" and not cleaning the vent between shots. And see that hit the newspapers and internet like the brillent relic hunter in Virginia a while back that blowed himself up deactivating a Civil War shell he found. He had done that many times before he made that one mistake.
There is one hard and fast rule when dealing with explosives of any kind over a period of time. There is going to be an explosion and some of them are not planned.