Potassium Nitrate is used in preserving meat, like corned beef, it is also
known as Saltpeter.
If a wife sprinkles some on the husbands cornflakes, she doesn't have to
fake a headache that night.
At least that is the lore. Not sure if it really works or not.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Weekley
Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2018 11:47 AM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT Homemade fireworks
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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