[s1artibartfast]

A lot of good lessons to be learned from KNO3. An early lesson was not to melt it and incorporate fuel on a kitchen stove. Next lesson was how to build a outdoor brick stove. Then we learned a couple pounds would fill up several square blocks with dense smoke and burn a hole through blacktop.

Not sure how we made it through our youth without learning what the inside of a jail cell looked like, but I suppose things were different before 9/11.

[kbenson]

> An early lesson was not to melt it and incorporate fuel on a kitchen stove.

That was, indeed, an aspect of the problem I alluded to before. I have made it a few times before, and I was going to use the gas grill outside, but it seemed to be acting up, and I didn't trust it, so I thought it would be "safer" to move inside.

Combine that with me iterating on a few different batches with "improvements", such as lining the bottom of the pan with tinfoil so I could lift it out, and then next making an extra large batch... well multiple lessons were learned that day, including how to deal with insurance companies from some shrewd negotiating from my parents, given most the entire kitchen needed to be replaces and the entire house needed to be scrubbed floor to ceiling.

> Not sure how we made it through our youth without learning what the inside of a jail cell looked like, but I suppose things were different before 9/11.

Ha, probably true, especially since my recipe came from a copy of the anarchist cookbook my older brother happened to have (and I wouldn't be surprised if you happened upon it the same way). It's got a lot of dangerous stuff in it, but honestly, as a tool for sparking curiosity it works pretty well.

[dhosek]

I grew up with a (stolen, of course) copy of Steal this Book in the house.

[dhosek]

As a grade school kid, I was taken to the police station for making a bomb with a couple friends. Fortunately for us, no charges were pressed (presumably because we didn’t manage to ignite the bomb and it was the 70s).

[hermitcrab]

I met someone on holiday whose brother has been blinded for life by a pipe bomb he and a friend made. So the risks of messing around with that sort of thing are very real. Better to couple youthful enthusiasm with some adult oversight. It can still be a lot of fun (see my comments on youth rocketry competitions elsewhere in this discussion).