--- On Fri, 5/21/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
Sorry for the long delay in replying, it was a... rough week.
> I used that same substance, different mixture. More sugar,
> I think, and I used it for smoke bombs, it burned slowly
> with copious white smoke, basically harmless. Except a
> friend of mine was melting down the stuff on his stove and
> pulled a spoon out of the hot mixture, which apparently
> caused a thread of it to fall down into the gas flame and
> the whole thing blew up in his face. No eyebrows, but not a
> lot of permanent damage. One freaked-out mother when the
> house filled with the smoke, fire department, the whole
> messs....
Heh, the way I always did it was with a hot-plate outside, on the picnic table,
and I used a double boiler to heat the stuff.
One thing I found out, after reading some website I don't recall the name of
now, was that substances other than sugar could be used with the KNO3 as a
fuel. Sorbitol, of all things, worked very well. The local "alternative foods"
store sold the stuff by the pound. I found it melted down easier, and was less
hygroscopic.
> You didn't use a fuse? I made fuses with matcheads next to
> each other wrapped up with masking tape. They always
> worked.
We didn't use fuses per se; the earliest method we used was small lengths of
plastic straws filled with FFFF pyrodex (a blackpowder substitute) which we
ball-milled down to a fine powder. The ends of the straw section were sealed
with epoxy, with the pyrodex powder inside. A length of nichrome wire was
passed through this, and soldered to copper leads, which ran to a switch box
and battery some few hundred feet away.
Later on, we found a better way to ignite the engines, more rapidly. Epoxy was
mixed with fine magnesium dust, wetting it, and then potassium nitrate was
added to make a paste. This was cast into small sections (1/4" diameter, say,
2" long), with nichrome filaments embedded inside. When heated from a current
passed through the nichrome, the plastic stuff would ignite and burn with a
brilliant white light, and ignite the engines very effectively.
> Anyone know how I could get or borrow a fast neutron
> source? The level could be tiny. Commercial sources are
> normally way out of range of what I could afford, AFAIK.
> Farnsworth fusor?
I suppose you could do something like the "radioactive boy scout" did. But let
me state for the record that I ain't responsible for if anyone actually does
this, nor if they grow a few extra limbs from the effects of it. :)
And as to your discussion of the disappearing art of making Persian carpet...
it is an ironic thing that as technology progresses, those things that led to
what we now have, seem to vanish by its own hand.
There must be another way.
--Kyle
