[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.