[Centmo]

When I was thirteen, I had the brilliant idea to make my own gunpowder and use it to build a bomb to set off in the field across from my house. I looked up the recipe in my Encyclopedia Brittanica (this was the early 80's) and began collecting the ingredients. I will never forget the ratios: 75% Potassium Nitrate, 15% Charcoal, 10% Sulpher. After pulverizing the ingredients and combining, I funneled the mixture into a spent CO2 cartridge from a pellet gun. I inserted a sparkler as a fuse, and lay it up against a large tree. I lit the sparkler and ran around to the other side to wait for the explosion. After a painfully long wait, I heard a loud hissing sound and saw some something fly and land right at my feet, a jet of flames shooting out the tiny hole. I took off running but it never exploded. I was old enough to realize I had won a dice roll and never played with gunpowder again.

[sophacles]

Oh cool, glad you were smart enough to learn rather than doubling down and getting hurt!

My version of this story is from high school chem class. Somehow a lab partner and I convinced our teacher to let us test "which gunpowder mixture burns best". This was a several week long "student run experiment" type project, culminating with presentations in class. One component of the presentations was a demo - we chose to show the difference between the worst performing mix and the best performing mix. The "slow mix" made a ton of smoke and stunk up the whole wing of the school w/ suphur. The fast mix cause enough thermal shock to shatter the crucible we used - pieces went everywhere doing a little damage to the audience even: one kid's notebook caught on fire because some of the power landed on it. Another kid had a freshly melted hole in his big pants (it was the mid 90s) - I'm glad no one was hurt. We got an A, but younger folks told me that in later years fire experiments were banned.

The only lesson I managed to learn was: It's important to do bold stuff before everyone else, because you either get to have fun or deal with the rules that the fun people caused.

I'm not sure that's a great lesson, but I have yet to see it violated.

[watertom]

Ah chemistry class.

Our teacher would do a simple demonstration every year with a small piece of sodium and water. The plan was to have the small piece of sodium fizz around in the bell jar of water. He kept pulling off pieces of sodium that were too small, and they just went “pfft”. After the 5th failed attempt, he was mad and pulled off a large chunk, and he tossed it in the water. It didn’t dance around, it went <BOOM>, big <BOOM>, two feet from the students in the front row. I was 12 feet away and got wet and was hit with glass. He barely kept his job. It was awesome!

[jacquesm]

Exact same thing happened at my highschool, scene of the crime was a very muddy ditch. I wonder how many chemistry teachers the world over have made that exact same mistake.

[hilbert42]

I'm beginning to think I was lucky to have the chemistry teachers that I had. I recall my main chem teacher saying that we students could not do this experiment ourselves as we'd likely blind ourselves. He was very particular in the amount he selected and mentioned it'd go off like a bomb if too much was selected.

BTW, the lab table in our tiered lecture room was nearly 6ft/2m from the first row of seats and for the exercise the teacher had a sheet of perspex in front of the experiment (perhaps it'd happened to him with an earlier lot of students).

[bcrosby95]

This reminds me of a chemistry experiment our teacher ran where we put dry ice in a sealed plastic container so that as it warmed, it would increase the pressure which would let us see some of the co2 in liquid form (under pressure dry ice will go from solid -> liquid rather than solid -> gas).

Halfway through class we figured out if we put enough in the plastic container, it would create little dry ice bombs that would explode due to the pressure. So we started doing that and tossing it at people around the room.

[gliese1337]

Not quite as bold, but there were similar results to me and my friends being the first ones in our school to build a functioning railgun during school hours, and dissolve lunch trays in PCB cleaner...

(No injury or [unintended] property damage incurred, but The Adults quickly realized that we hadn't actually broken any rules, and there definitely should have been rules to be broken.)

[ClumsyPilot]

"there definitely should have been rules to be broken."

Oh man, I dread this - as kids, my parents would ride random horses they found in a field and come hone late,I walked to school alone at age of twelve before mobiles ,and kids these days have no freedom at all

[hilbert42]

Knowing the enormous freedoms that I had as a kid, I cannot conceive how bad it must be to be a kid today. I could write a long list of activities that were considered normal for kids of my era to do that if their parents permitted them these days then the do-gooders would accuse them of child abuse.

I'm firmly of the belief that keeping kids walled up behind glass and protected from life's knocks when young is one of the significant reasons for why many later lack resilience and develop emotional problems.

[flarg]

At school my chem teacher would run lunchtime demos of explosives, safety shield around his desk and all. The shield always blew off and we learnt not to sit in the front row

[packet_nerd]

Ha! Around that age (actually probably a little older) I begged and pleaded with my mom to get saltpeter and sulfur to make firecrackers and rockets. Eventually she relented and got it for me, but with the stipulation I had to wear a welding helmet, heavy coat, and heavy rubber gloves while working with it, and that only under supervision... Anyway, the actual gunpowder I managed to make didn't really work, just kind of fizzled out. I never managed to get a firecracker to actually make any noise. It sure was a lot of fun though. :-)

[0x0nyandesu]

Call your mom and tell her someone on the internet said she's awesome.

[jacquesm]

That sounds like you did alright at the making gunpowder stage but failed the containment stage. Pretty close though, so maybe you got lucky!

[pvg]

I love that the tremendous ambition of this is what kept it non-functional and relatively safe - the home-made gunpowder is probably not fine enough to blow up the very sturdy CO2 cartridge, the hole at the end of the cartridge is probably too big, etc.

You can make an equivalent functional microscopic 'pipebomb' with just matchstick head scrapings and the plastic body of a pen. This usually does produce a small satisfying bang and the risks of screwing it up are mostly limited to 'very nasty burn'.

[hilbert42]

I don't want to sound like a spoilsport but any extension of that to say water pipes with capped ends is in a different league altogether. Leaving the unlawful aspects of it aside, matchstick heads usually have powered glass in them for friction to generate heat. If any material gets on the screw threads when screwing the caps on then I don't have to mention the outcome. (It's happened many times before.)

[MertsA]

As a cautionary tale for would-be amateur explosives aficionados out there, you get a similar problem storing a lot of the more accessible energetic compounds as well. It can crystallize under a screw on lid and blow your hand off if it doesn't kill you outright. It can degrade and become more and more sensitive. There's plenty of news stories about teenagers blowing their hand off because they thought Acetone Peroxide was all the rage, but it's easy to overlook that while it appears simple on the surface, there can be plenty of hidden hazards that are unintuitive. You don't know what you don't know and the learning process can leave you pulling your socks off to count past 7.

Stiff cardboard tubes, packed clay, and low explosives like plain black powder, flash powder, etc provides all the confinement you need for a bang and a flash. Thermite is also fun, and so long as you're not igniting it on top of a car battery still filled with acid, it's quite a bit safer.

You can also go the slow pyrotechnic route with making smoke bombs. It's not as simple as it may appear, but from a hazard point of view nothing is going to explode. So long as you take some basic fire safety precautions like doing it outside away from structures and flammable materials on a hot plate it's safe and entertaining. Couple of safety tips, if you're grinding up your oxidizer in a coffee grinder (definitely recommend, mortar and pestle suuuuuucks) make sure you never use it for anything other than oxidizers in the future. If you use it to grind up a fuel later on there's a very good chance you won't get every last trace of oxidizer out so you could wind up with a bit of powdered fuel and oxidizer mixing together in the tiny joint between the blade and the bowl and completing fire triangle bingo. Another foundational precaution is to have a good understanding of what your ingredients are because getting it wrong can be quite hazardous, not just disappointing. For example a friend of mine in high school wanted to make some smoke bombs and was asking me for directions. I told him to find some stump remover from the hardware store and make sure it was plain potassium nitrate. He couldn't find it on the bottle and assumed it probably was and figured it would either work or it wouldn't. That bottle was filled with sodium metabisulfite instead of potassium nitrate and when he tried to heat it with sugar to melt it together it started decomposing into sulfur dioxide gas which combines with moisture in mucous membranes to form sulfuric acid. He had chemical burns in his throat and was coughing for a bit afterwards but luckily no lasting damage.

Another fun misadventure with the same friend. We came up with the brilliant plan of stuffing an entire gross (144) of bottle rockets into a huge pickle jar that was the perfect height to hold the body up over the mouth of the jar. We sprayed the fuses all over with starter fluid (ether, not lighter fluid), lit the bundle, and ran back. Moments after they started launching the heat from the exhaust (and the ether might have been a contributing factor) shattered the pickle jar and now all of the remaining rockets are splayed out in every direction horizontally. We ran and dove with rockets going everywhere and these were the ones with a healthy report at the end too so it's basically just launching fire crackers at us.

I'm not going to try to tell anyone not to play with fire, but please show some modesty and act responsibly. Everyone makes mistakes and overlooks things. Plan for this, expect it, and position yourself so the fallout for things going sideways doesn't involve the fire department or the coroner especially when your latest escapades involve showing your friends. They're idiots, they will do dangerous things out of ignorance. Don't put someone else in a position where they need to know anything other than stay behind that tree and don't come out if it doesn't go off. They aren't going to stop drop and roll, they're going to panic and make things worse like running with a flaming gas can spreading fire all over the place. Aggressively plan for failure because things will go wrong and you need to be able to deal with that when it comes up.

[AmericanChopper]

You pretty much had it right. It seems the two things you missed were:

1. Milling the powder makes it a lot more effective. My buddies and I would make ball mills with old washing machine engines, and whatever non-sparking material we could find for the balls.

2. If you want it to explode rather than burn you have to granulate it. Wet it and let it dry, and grind it a little bit and pass it through some mesh to grade it.

The raw powder is good for making rockets, but it won’t very readily explode.

[bserge]

Black powder won't detonate by it's nature, it just deflagrates, burns real fast. Those cartridges can hold a lot of pressure, only something with a higher explosive velocity like nitroglycerin or TNT can fragment them.

[wil421]

Back in the late 90s I found a document called the Anarchist Cookbook on the internet. It was full of fun ideas for a teenager. Some were fun destructive ideas like how to break open a coke machine or make small “bombs”. Others like how to derail a train or make exploding shells from shotgun shells were not so good. There was some pretty serious stuff my friend and I wanted nothing to do with. I looked for the doc again but can’t find it anywhere online.

My friend and I took the powder out of fireworks and into a spend CO2 cartridge like you did. We used an M80 fuse and had a similar experience as you, some fizzing but no bang. Based on ideas in the Anarchist cookbook we sawed open shotgun shells and tried to get the gunpowder out. I think it was mostly sawdust mixed with buckshot and little gunpowder. No bang. My fiends brother caught us and said dude you’re making pipe bombs so we stopped.

Anyone else heard of the anarchist cookbook in the early internet days?

[hilbert42]

Yeah, the Anarchist Cookbook used to be a must-have file for nerds in the early days of the internet, it used to turn up in collections of hacks and even in floppy disk/CD collections attached to computer mag covers.

I don't think most ever took it seriously, it was just an antiauthoritarian status symbol of the early internet. It was a badly-written compendium of nefarious bits and pieces collected by the likes of youngish teenage boys. I suppose the powers that be would now consider it dangerous material and its possession deemed suspicious. That said, go to the chemistry section of any library and you'll find much more subversive info therein.

BTW, when I was at school a part of the chemistry curriculum was to make and prepare black powder then test it. Moreover, the complete chemical equation of the reaction was in our textbooks and we had to understand it. Not only was the explosive reaction presented as just one equation but also it was subdivided into its constituent parts, sub-reactions etc., so that one fully understood the chemistry. That's to say we had to know how to calculate proportions for full combustion, etc.

Being allowed to officially make black powder under the auspices of the chemistry teacher made chemistry fun. Oh, how times have changed. Boring!

[wil421]

Myth busters did a show about something called guncotton and I always wondered if I could make it but I’m not really into that kinda stuff any longer. Pretty cool you were able to do it in a controlled environment.

[hilbert42]

Yeah, the novelty with making chemicals that go bang pretty much wore off in my teenage years although for a time in my 20s I had Miner's Right permit which allowed me to buy and possess Gelignite for said purposes of mining - but I wasn't making the stuff, just using it. Not thought much about it lately but I know that gaining such a permit today is immensely more difficult than when I obtained mine.

Making guncotton/nitrocellulose, picric acid, etc. isn't that hard. In fact, as I've mentioned elsewhere in these posts, I made nitroglycerin in the school lab. (note I'd strongly advise those tempted not to do so - even if you're a good and careful chemist, as such acts are frowned upon with much greater severity than when I did it decades ago).

The fact is that with the type of training we students had had, by the time we'd finished five years of high school chemistry we could make most of those chemicals by following the procedures for doing so. It was only at university we eventually got to understand the underlying theory behind why those procedures were formulated the way they were.

BTW, about the only chemistry I do these days is to figure out what's the best prepackaged cleaner to use in the kitchen. :-)

[bombcar]

http://textfiles.com/anarchy/

[wil421]

Haha yup that’s it. Oh god I remember reading about how to get nicotine out of cigarettes and use it to poison someone, thinking why would someone ever do that.

Thank god I never boiled bleach to try to make plastic explosives.

[annoyingnoob]

I used to use CO2 cartridges and match heads, with model rocket fuse from the hobby store. If you overfill the cartridge, or pack it, it works more like rocket engine and slow(er) burns. There needs to be some space inside for the initial spark to spread to get something more exciting. I suppose I never tried somehow packing it with the fuse all the way through the material. You want to get as much of the material to burn as quickly as possible. Found that grinding the powder out of model rocket engines (yikes!) works better than match heads but is decidedly more sketchy.

I grew up pre-internet. A high shcool friend had a copy of that book, but we never used it for much. Found our own fun.

We were just boys being boys back then, I'm sure we'd be in big trouble with those things now. Do not try this at home.

[MertsA]

Forget the anarchist's cookbook. The army has a few excellent manuals on improvised munitions and incendiary devices. You can usually find someone selling a copy at local gun shows.

https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handboo...

Don't mess with primary explosives though. They're either too difficult to manufacture cleanly in an amateur setting or too unstable to be made by anyone who isn't a complete moron.

[xcskier56]

I remember hearing about it in high school (mid 00's) but there was a rumor that the government was tracking everyone who downloaded it so none of us ever dared

[iamthemonster]

The government wouldn't track what you do online, that's ridiculous! They would have to ask a social network to do it on their behalf.

[nwellinghoff]

Wimppp.

[psyc]

I have a clear memory of a similar recipe being laid out in an early 80’s kids’ cartoon, in which a character needs to MacGuyver some gunpowder in the wild. I became obsessed with mimicking the feat, but never figured out how to source the ingredients. Although in the cartoon, I believe they got the potassium nitrate from seagull shit. Around the same time, The Dukes of Hazzard provided instruction on Molotov Cocktails. I was four or five.

Oh, and then there was Mr. Wizard……

[verve_rat]

That sounds like an episode of Transformers[1] I randomly remember sometimes but never bother to look up, until now.

[1] https://tfwiki.net/wiki/A_Decepticon_Raider_in_King_Arthur%2...

[psyc]

That’s definitely the one!

[fsckboy]

making gunpowder was in an episode of the original Star Trek (which was based on a published sci-fi story) where Kirk made some in his battle with the Gorn.

[quercusa]

I had a very similar experience (using a piece of copper pipe). We made a strategic error in testing it in my friend's driveway at 11 pm. My friend's dad was a chemistry professor, so he could only be so upset about it...

[hilbert42]

"I was old enough to realize I had won a dice roll and never played with "I was old enough to realize I had won a dice roll and never played with gunpowder again."

Right, fortunately most of us survive such experiences a little the wiser. If you read my post below then you'll see we officially made black powder as part of our school chemistry curriculum. I've often thought that the reason for its inclusion was twofold, the first being that it made chemistry fun as bangs and pops amuse most kids, but second that it was an excuse to control the environment in an era when kids had much more ready access to dangerous chemicals than nowadays.

By explaining the dangers of making black powder such as ensuring one mixes components in a mortar and pestle of a type that cannot generate sparks, mixing one's ingredients slightly damp then drying later and preparation in small batches, etc. then kids get the safety message early on.

The safety message was never lost on me. As I mentioned in a HN post ages ago, I unofficially made nitroglycerin in the school lab one lunchtime - right, that was never on the curriculum - but I reckon I did so safely. First I was careful to inform myself of the facts. Not only was I scrupulosity careful with the temperatures and the ratios of the critical ingredients but the quantity that I made was just sufficient to prove that I could actually make it. To this end, with the exception of acid-neutralizing sodium carbonate soln., I measured the crucial chemicals out strictly in eyedropper amounts - as that was the practical minimum I could make, so I ended up with only a drop or so of the product (which, I did eventually make go bang).

Nothing went wrong because we were constantly drilled in safety. The point is safety was always stressed in our chemistry classes by our teachers. Such instruction wasn't only done when making black powder but also with any dangerous process and or production of dangerous chemicals, for example, poisonous hydrogen sulfide had to be prepared in a Kipp generator in the fume cupboard - with no exceptions whatsoever. Essentially, good lab practice was an essential part of our coursework.

We had access to many dangerous chemicals that you'd never see in school labs today, mercury - pints of it, carcinogenic benzene, hydrofluoric acid, metallic sodium and potassium, uranium (as disks about twice as thick as quarter), radioactive alpha and beta sources and we prepared fuming aqua regia to dissolve tiny bits of gold leaf and so on but we were always taught safety measures before we handled them.

(What horrifies me these days is that the modern approach to safety is to simply remove or ban these dangerous substances altogether, especially so from classrooms.

By not exposing kids and even university students to them under safe, strictly controlled conditions, we're breeding a race of people that are fearful of anything that's classified as a chemical. We've now a population that's disproportionately fearful of all chemicals and this is not helpful when it comes to having to distinguish between what's truly dangerous and what requires, say, careful handling/disposal.

For example, these days, the very mention of mercury or any of its compounds to the GP and you'll get almost the same reaction or level of horror no matter what form or chemical formulation that the element comes in. I cannot think of a better example of how potentially dangerous this fear without a sense of proportion can be than with mercury. At one end of the spectrum we've metallic mercury, a comparatively dangerous metal, but not so dangerous in that we've used it in amalgam form in our teeth for centuries and the population is still here alive and kicking but at the other extreme we've dimethylmercury which is just about the most grotesque and dangerous of chemicals known.

Overly isolating the population from chemicals and stopping students from having early hands on experience to potentially dangerous ones (no, not that one) at school and university under safe controlled conditions leads to this loss of a sense of proportionality. In my opinion, this is not a helpful state for society to be in.)

[loonster]

The same can be said of modern playgrounds. They are so "safe" that kids have to use them in ways that they were never intended to get any thrill at all. Modern playgrounds require adult supervision to prevent the kids from doing stupidly dangerous things.

[hilbert42]

Right, absolutely. See my comment in reply to ClumbsyPilot above, I echo similar sentiments there.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention above that not that long ago I'd come across a person who had never actually physically seen mercury even though having studied chemistry at high school. To me, it's indicative of how far things have come since my formative years.

[withinboredom]

I had a similar experience, but with napalm.