Experimenting with explosives can be legal (more in the news)

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That Sweeney clip. He should have kept his pistol under his pillow as did my Uncle Billie Prattinton hiw Webley revolver when he was in Dublin in the 1920s as an "Auxie".

I remember the Jetex motor too. Heck it got bloomin' hot. Having no water I made the balsawood car version.
 
BORROW ?? did you give them back after you had finished with them pmsl
they were perfect and the tags were perfect for ****ing off the train drivers and for the posh Mod officers boat sledge slipways.
Oh to have my time as a kid again what jolly japes we had out all day bottle of juice two turned up jam banjo's and a kick up the arse as you were pushed out the door in by dark ? bed after Dr who :rofl: :old:


kenbro said:
We used to “Borrow” fog warning detonators from the railway track....stood them up by a wall then fired ball bearings at them with our catapults.
I got out of hand when the school sent us on a weekly cross country run along side the rail track.
Most kids in our year had detonators in class.
Of course, someone had to carry the can...2 of us got singled out to take the rap.
Fined 17 Shillings and 6 Pence each, 1955.
Ken.
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In pre-WWII Belfast my grandfather was prone to causing small explosions with carbide (calcium carbide, it was used in lamps to produce acetylene by dripping water onto it). Now he lived in very densely populated industrial Belfast with tightly packed terraced housing and I think this image is important to get the full impact of his activities. He decided, as you do, that small explosions weren't much fun when you could go big and so he gathered up as much carbide as he could manage. As any sensible kid knows you get a much better explosion if you contain it a little bit and so he decided to rig up a system of adding water, and a fuse, and to lay the considerable pile of carbide on the ground and place an inverted old metal dustbin over the top of it. He expected, on ignition, the whole thing to go off with a huge bang. What he didn't expect, which was a shame as it was what happened, was the metal dustbin (of the large type that you used to have in your back garden that the bin men picked up and dumped the contents into their bin lorry) to be launched vertically into the sky until he lost sight of it. At this point the story gets a little vague as, quite sensibly, he ran away and didn't mention the matter again for many years but it would be reasonable to assume that it isn't still up there somewhere, it didn't have a parachute, and that there is a better than 50% chance it landed on someone's house. How you produce a reasonable explanation for having a large, and heavy, metal dustbin come through your roof as if it had been flying past I've no idea.
 
I thought this was a part of growing up, well it certainly was when I was younger

However it stopped when I was involved in one experiment in a barn next to the stables. It included a confined space, a lot of oxygen a sniff of acetylene, some cable and a car battery.
The resulting boom and shockwave that almost vaporised the adjoining wall to the stables was quite literally terrifying.

At this point the reality hit home that the chances of something seriously going wrong was quite high.
It was then that dad said we better knock it on the head, as mum will be miffed if a horse lost a leg.
 
paul o' said:
BORROW ?? did you give them back after you had finished with them pmsl
they were perfect and the tags were perfect for ****ing off the train drivers and for the posh Mod officers boat sledge slipways.
Oh to have my time as a kid again what jolly japes we had out all day bottle of juice two turned up jam banjo's and a kick up the arse as you were pushed out the door in by dark ? bed after Dr who :rofl: :old:
Click to expand...
Yes Paul, borrow in inverted commas. The detonators were set up to work with the signal...if the signal was down for stop the detonator would lie across the rail, so when foggy (Like it often was in the 50s) the driver would hear the det go off.
When it wasn’t foggy we would bend the tags so the det was over the rail when the signal was up for go.

No juice for us, we used to knock on anyone’s door where we happened to be (We did roam quite far in a day) and ask for a drink of water. Seldom refused.
Very good times.
Ken.
 
Nitric acid and iodine surreptitiously mixed at the back of the chemistry lab, then slowly and carefully evaporated. The resulting crystals - nitrogen triiodide, if I remember correctly - were such fun!
 
Was't making gun cotton was we !! Add a few drops under Sirs chair it could be a very intresting lesson. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
VSS said:
Nitric acid and iodine surreptitiously mixed at the back of the chemistry lab, then slowly and carefully evaporated. The resulting crystals - nitrogen triiodide, if I remember correctly - were such fun!
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Farmer_J said:
At this point the reality hit home that the chances of something seriously going wrong was quite high.
It was then that dad said we better knock it on the head, as mum will be miffed if a horse lost a leg.
Click to expand...

I got it from my Dad as well, except he refused to show me... so I researched it myself ;)

Back when my Dad was a kid he used to come home from the chemists with stock bottles full of conc. sulphuric and nitric acid or jars of sodium etc. :rofl:
 
God when I think of the stuff we did I cringe.

The worst error we made was finally managing to rob some magnesium ribbon from the science dept at school so we could ignite our home made thermite. The only trouble was, we didn't have a clue how successful it would be and rather underestimated the temps it could reach.

In hindsight, igniting it on top of my mates mum's tumble drier in their garage was not a good idea.

Another mate blew his bathroom up. As you do when you are 13, we were chucking darts down the stairs at aerosol cans and hit a large air freshener. It was hissing everywhere of course, so Nath put his finger over it and was like "WTF do we do with it now?" Kids are never very logical. Instead of just chucking it out in to the garden, he threw it in the bath and closed the door then proceeded to go and find a lighter, and I quote "to see what will happen" Well it ignited the whole flipping room including his hair. It melted the shower curtain which fell in to the bath and again, bereft of logic when turning the tap on might have been a good idea, he decided to throw his dads dressing gown on the resulting fire to put it out. He got bollocked for that. We nearly died of laughter.

There were many more including hours of carefully removing strike anywhere matches and stuffing them in to small holes drilled in tennis balls. That was fun.

Now of course I am a fully responsible firearm owner who would never endorse such appalling behaviour :)
 
paul o' said:
1 foot of lead pipe fresh from a church nr you , add 2 ft of hobby store jet fuse , mix sugar and weed killer = wasp nest is gone or any other :eek::popcorn::rofl: all about growing up but I did know a lad in our school that lost most of his fingers getting the mix wrong :norty: anti steel my bike det easy to make vie tilt switch nothing is new just how it was Dads knew more about stuff back then and passed it on to the kids you never know if that tree needs to be moved :stir::norty:
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In the ground wasp nest destroyer here also, same explosive mix but my fuse was a straw packed with powdered match heads. Worked rather well though it was quite time consuming making the fuses. Got shorter each time.. Ha!


ATB ..... and shoot safely
 
In after classes Chemistry Club, my school mate and I made quite a large pile of silver acetylide - all too easily. It was Summer and some of the chem' lab's windows were left ajar. We later thought that maybe an unfortunate sparrow had decided to land on the bench top (near the window) and must have landed on or pecked or otherwise interfered with the drying out precipitate (also on the benchtop near the part open window (3rd floor of the school building). Whatever, pretty much all glassware above table tops level was decimated, as were a few cupboards and their contents which included bottles of Iodine and Bromine. When we came into school the next day there was a brown cloud coming down the stairs near the chem lab and the school day was called off to get the lab cleaned up and the poisonous clouds of fumes dispersed. Needless to say we did NOT own up to what we had been making up there, after hours!!.. We had not taken into consideration how touch sensitive that precipitate was/is when it dries out, and being in the early morning summer sun, it was dry and quite warm too no doubt...

ATB ....... and shoot safely
 
I know someone who blew a bolt through the palm of his hand, two large bolts with a nut joining them - as many red match heads as you could cram in the void between the bolts. Once tightened you threw it at the ground (preferably over a wall) and the assembly blew apart with a tremendous bang.
The tightening up was the really dangerous bit of course! as my buddy proved.
The silver powder from rope bangers was also a favourite, in a metal container it was truly impressive.
All jolly japes and would not have missed it for the world!!
Village life meant the ability to roam far and wide from dawn to dusk, no chance of adult interference once 'out across the fields'
Of course I would never condone repeating such tomfoolery.
 
ArunT said:
Now wonder how many seriously malicious people will use this to walk out of prison sentences in the future. 'Ohh I wasn't building an IED, was only self experimenting to crave my curiosity.' might become the norml and it does worry me about the future.
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So yes, we can do it out of curiosity. ;)
 
Farmer_J said:
I thought this was a part of growing up, well it certainly was when I was younger

However it stopped when I was involved in one experiment in a barn next to the stables. It included a confined space, a lot of oxygen a sniff of acetylene, some cable and a car battery.
The resulting boom and shockwave that almost vaporised the adjoining wall to the stables was quite literally terrifying.

At this point the reality hit home that the chances of something seriously going wrong was quite high.
It was then that dad said we better knock it on the head, as mum will be miffed if a horse lost a leg.
Click to expand...
That was a favourite in the workshops.
Blow up a balloon with 50/50 mix of oxygen and acetylene, place it on the floor behind someone working at a bench, then, get an arc going with the MIG welder and flick the torch towards the balloon, the little hot blobs scoot across the floor and flash/bang, and if you’ve never done it, it’s hard to imagine just how loud and how much concussion you get from a ballon. Loads of dust came down from the rafters too. Brilliant wheeze...At the time! No elf ‘n’ safety in them days, didn’t need it.
Ken.
 
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