Footage from 2012 captures the moment a Syrian Rebel's homemade artillery piece almost kills him. He definitely wasn't expecting the blowback to be that hard.

The real problem with homemade weapon systems is that someone has to test them. When you're doing it in a peacetime environment, you can often set safety measures in place to keep yourself in one piece should the weapon fail. In a wartime environment however, your best bet is to take that thing out to the field and just send it like this Syrian Rebel does right here. Unfortunately, when you just send it like that, sometimes you're gonna have to face the consequences of the weapon system not working as intended.