I tried gun powder myself as a kid but never got it right. I also
bought my potassium nitrate and sulfur from the pharmacy. What medical
use did that stuff have? The best I could get was a slow burning
fizzle. To my credit I also figured out that paper towels soaked in
potassium nitrate mixed with water and dried also made a passable fuse.
All I had to go one were the Foxfire books and had to modify my
experiments with the resources I had. I'm lucky I didn't have the
internet back then or I may not be around or at least semi intact.
[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.
--
*Jay Weekley*
*Cyber Broadband
*
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