[ChuckMcM]

I was one of those kids that read that the original Bell jetpack used Hydrogen Peroxide with a silver catalyst for "fuel". I tried it on the peroxide I bought from the drug store and it didn't work. So I figured "oh it just needs to be more concentrated." My friend and I built a pretty crude still and about 10 gallons of 5% hydrogen peroxide. I don't know what the concentration was when we finished, but I do remember trying to pour some into a steel pipe which was to be our "tank" for our test rocket. To say that I was startled by the pipe being yanked out of my hand by the steam exploding out of its end would be an understatement :-) We spent the rest of the afternoon "blowing up" ant hills in the desert by pouring like a quarter up of our distillate on to them.

[Danieru]

How? How!?

How is it you always have cool and relevant stories!?

[ChuckMcM]

I chalk it up to curiosity on my part and survivor bias on the stories part. Folks who have known me for a long time know that I am a very curious person and I spend an inordinate amount of my spare time reading and "investigating" things (which my wife calls puttering). But there is also a bit of survivor bias here, it only seems like it is true because I don't have any stories to share on a lot of things here and elsewhere and don't. Oh and I'm "old", so I've got a lot of time between when I started doing crazy stunts and now, so even doing only one every couple of years I've got double the number of crazy stories than a "young" guy :-). That said, I'm sad that during my high school and college years the (late 70's early 80's) it was so much easier for me to explore things, whether it was the high school district's shared mainframe, or home made high concentration HOOH than it is today. No doubt if I were one of my own kids growing up in the 90's I would have been arrested and my parents assumed to be poor examples of responsible adults.

[gregpilling]

Agree on the parent part. If I let my kids do anything remotely close to what I did as a kid, CPS would never let me see them again. I left in the morning and came back at dark, with no check in. I did experiments with things I learned in the Anarchists cookbook. Its amazing what you can blow up with household objects. You kids today have it easy blowing up stuff - just go on Youtube. In the early 80s you had to know someone to get the really bad somewhat illegible copy. My kids love watching Mythbusters when they blow things up. I wasn't sure whether to be happy or worried when my 8 year old asked for Polycarbonate blast shields. He was thinking of things he wanted to blow up, and how to do it. That made me worry. He wanted to do it safely and had given some thought to shield and remote triggering. That made me happy, i did not have the same focus on safety as a kid and burned my eyebrows off several times. As of today we have not done anything, he has got his attention on other projects and I am not going to bring it up.

TL:DR - typical 12 year old kid from 1982 would be labeled child Al Quaeda terror cell, parents would go to jail for 25 years.

[HCIdivision17]

I know, right? He's like a modern Tom Sawyer.

EDIT: It occurs to me this might not be taken as a compliment. I meant it as one, though: Chuck's always got some cool story to add, and I suspect his biography would be a heckuva ride.