I was a bomb maker as a kid myself. Won my high school science fair on "How to Make a Bomb with Household Items." Accepted the award in a sling after making a pipe bomb in the basement with a copper pipe and packing it with a crab mallet. The explosion removed all the skin from my left palm but amazingly only a couple minor scars remain.
I didn't have luck making C4 out of aspirin nor nitro glycerin either. My how times have changed. On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Jaime Solorza <[email protected]> wrote: > No hablo...boom > > Jaime Solorza > > On Wed, Jul 4, 2018, 10:33 AM <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Various thoughts.... >> >> I used to make all my own fireworks as a kid. Get potassium nitrate from >> the druggist, grind up some charcoal briquettes, add some sulfur from the >> druggist, do endless mixture variations until you get one that works and >> you have your powder. Red devil stump remover is also potassium nitrate. >> You can get that at home depot. >> >> You can mix that with sugar and also get something that works. In that >> situation you want to cook it to melt the sugar. Rocket Boys (Homer >> Hickham) used that to do their missiles. >> >> If you grind it all up (never did blow myself up by literally grinding >> these components together in the basement of my parents house) and them mix >> it with water into a slurry, you can spread it out thin on a cookie shoot >> and bake it in your mom’s oven at low temps until it is hard. Then you >> break it up into small chunks. That process is called “corning” and makes >> the powder work all that much better. >> >> Then you can wrap up balls of the stuff (again wet to form a clay type >> consistency) in paper towels. Then you load a paper towel roll with some >> powder, a ball, more powder, another ball etc. And you have a great roman >> candle. >> >> Hard to get this stuff to go off like a fire cracker. You have to really >> compress it. I made a small cannon out of water pipe (hole drilled in a >> cap for the fuse). Crammed and hammered a bunch into the pipe followed by >> cotton ball wadding them a bunch of fishing sinkers and solder for the >> projectiles. Put it on a chunk of fire wood with nails hammered in and >> bent over the pipe to keep it still. Homemade fuses can be made by soaking >> paper into a potassium nitrate and water mixture and then then left to >> dry. Best to roll them into the fuse while wet. Thin paper like >> yellowpages worked pretty good. >> >> My fuses were crap though. On the cannon/pipe bomb the fuse went out so >> I lit a dry pine tree needle as a punk and probed the hole in the pipe cap >> to get it going again. Stepped back, nothing. Went back over there and >> got down and put my ear next to the pipe cap. Yep, could hear it sizzling >> in there. So I got up and took a few steps back. KABLOOM!!!! Huge huge >> huge explosion. My best ever. Blew the pipe cap off. Split the pipe. >> >> My dad came running out of the house looking to see if he could find all >> of my body parts. I had a grin on my face a mile wide... He demanded that >> I dump all my powder into the dirt. That was a very memorable 4th of >> July. I think of this incident every 4th. I give thanks for coming away >> unscathed. (And I lived in dry land wheat farming country in central >> Oregon. Always and extreme fire hazard). >> >> I also perfected acetylene bombs. Made nitrocellulose in my mom’s >> kitchen. Tried to make nitro glycerin and mercury fulminate in the HS >> science lab. They were both flops. >> >> Still have all my digits and my eyesight. Probably not going to be >> allowed to pass this knowledge to my grandchildren though.... people just >> don’t want kids to have fun anymore.... (I would totally freak out if I >> knew my grandkids were even thinking about trying some of this stuff). >> >> Some say I am not risk averse. I say I get bored easily. >> >> >> >> -- >> AF mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com >> > > -- > AF mailing list > [email protected] > http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com > >
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