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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

• packet_nerd 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Call your mom and tell her someone on the internet said she's awesome.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    That sounds like you did alright at the making gunpowder stage but failed the containment stage. Pretty close though, so maybe you got lucky!
• withinboredom 5y ago
  I had a similar experience, but with napalm.
• psyc 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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%27s_Court_(episode) https://tfwiki.net/wiki/A_Decepticon_Raider_in_King_Arthur%2...
    • psyc 5y ago
      That’s definitely the one!
  • fsckboy 5y ago
    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.
• AmericanChopper 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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?
  • bombcar 5y ago
    http://textfiles.com/anarchy/ http://textfiles.com/anarchy/
    • wil421 5y ago
      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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • xcskier56 5y ago
    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
    • nwellinghoff 5y ago
      Wimppp.
• sophacles 5y ago
  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.
  • gliese1337 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      "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 5y ago
        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.
• quercusa 5y ago
  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...
• pvg 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
• deleted 5y ago
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• hilbert42 5y ago
  "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.)