How do your cornflakes taste? On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 2:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 > * > > -- > 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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