From: Vincent.Cate%sam.cs.cmu.edu@ssyx.ucsc.edu Subject: Good old days in Jr. High Date: 1 Mar 90 10:29:01 GMT In Junior High School started really really liking science. I did a number of more or less safe things (Fuel Cells, rockets, pictures from balloons, flame throwers, 1,000,000 V Tesla coils, etc) but the most fun was explosives. It was really easy to get started. I just looked up "gunpowder" in the encyclopedia and it gave different proportions of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfer. I was able to get saltpeter as the local drugstore as long as my mother came along. They would say, "Do you know that he can make explosives with this?", and she would say, "Yes, he is going to." I could order the sulfer from a chemical place. So I could make lots of gunpowder. I made various small explosives and tried to make fuses by soaking string in wet gunpowder. I never really liked these fuses. If think the problem was that if I had enough gunpowder on the string to make sure that it did not go out it would burn rather fast. A group of us pyros all had lunch passes and would go to one friends house that was close to school and do things like make hydrogen. One time I made match bombs and took them to school to show everyone. I thought it was neat that you did not even need gunpowder. I wanted more than just my pyro friends to be able to see them so I did them during lunch just across from school. When I came back across the street a yard duty took me to the principle. The principle slowly unwound the tape on my one remaining match bomb and told me how these were so dangerous and not allowed at school, etc, etc. He talked about suspension and all. Then he called my mother. He explained to her what I had done. Then I heard her say, "Let me get this straight, he light matchbombs off across the street from the school?" Then the principle said, "Yes, thats right." Then my mother said, "So what's the problem?". The principles attitude changed at this point and I was out of there in a minute with no further trouble. Most explosions went off as planned but not all. The worst caused me to stop using what had been my favorite ignition method. I would put one tiny strand of wire from a power cord through the gunpowder and then put 110 V through that to light it. The strand of wire would be vaporized (but there were lots more) and the explosive always went off. One time I was trying out a cannon and was going to use two extension cords to get far from the garage. I plugged one cord into the short cord that was connected to the cannon. The other cord was wound up and plugged into itself. I asked my sister to plug in the other extension cord and she did not realize that there were two on the ground there since there was only one end. She plugged in the visible end and the cannon went off in my hands. It was a particularly big charge and my mother and several neighbors came running outside. After checking that we were OK my mother went over and assured the neighbors, "Its OK, its just Vince." One fantastic mother, eh? I did stop with the explosive for awhile after that one. I needed a good way of getting long delay fuses. Where I lived you had to have a license to buy fuses so I could not buy them. What I finally came up with worked really well. If I dipped a string in wax I could get fuses that took minutes to burn. This gave me plenty of time to get far away before things went boom. To me, this was the key thing in safety, get FAR AWAY. So fellow pyros, I recommend the string in wax method. -- Vince PS Has anyone ever tried the fertilizer and oil method? Always wanted to make a big hole out in Nevada someplace. :-)