Tales for spoiled brats

[chilehed]

Used to go to the local drugstore and buy a bag of salt peter.

Great young minds think alike! Saltpeter's awesome.

I have a bag of garden sulfur, and have been toying with the idea of mail-ordering some potassium chlorate. Do a youtube search for "exploding hammer festival" to see what that looks like.

I guess in some ways we never grow up...

 

[chilehed]

He told a story about a couple kids he once caught throwing quarter sticks of dynamite into the water...

This reminds me of the time some Brazilian friends came back from a visit home. Their son had filled his suitcase with firecrackers, cylinders a bit bigger than my thumb with what looked like long wooden matchheads sticking out the side. ("Hey, I figured they wouldn't check my stuff, I'm just a little kid!")

Good lord, those things were powerful, he stuck one in an empty Hi-C can (this is back when they were still made of heavy steel) and it absolutely shredded that thing.

 

[Legion]

Great young minds think alike! Saltpeter's awesome.

I have a bag of garden sulfur, and have been toying with the idea of mail-ordering some potassium chlorate. Do a youtube search for "exploding hammer festival" to see what that looks like.

I guess in some ways we never grow up...

Just don’t let them mix it into your mashed potatoes and feed it to you.

 

[Avi]

I remember push along mowers. They were hard graft when you're a kid. I remember going back to the old house after being away for years and being gob smacked at how small everything was. Those lawns and garden were huge as a kid.

My aunt and a family we know in Boston still uses the new versions of these. For urban homes with just small plots of land (think 15 ft by 10 ft small patches of lawn etc) its basically just free exercise and far less up keep / hassle.

 

[Avi]

Used to go to the local drugstore and buy a bag of salt peter. Would bring it home and mix it 50/50 with sugar over low heat on the stove. This was done in an empty coffee tin since it could not be cleaned when done. It slowly melted and you had to keep stirring it as it melted into a carmel colored thick goo. Then as it was cooling off you remove with a spoon and quickly and carefully (very hot!) mold it into a golf ball size orb. You would get lots of balls out of one batch. After it was cooled off you light the thing and heave it - an amazing smoke bomb and from a tiny ball like that. It was like a torch shooting smoke and sparks like nothing you have ever seen. No eye protection, and mom right there in the kitchen making cookies. It might just as well have been Play-Dough. That was a major pastime of ours until...

My brother was making a batch in the kitchen and was in a hurry. Mom was tending to other siblings while he was trying to get that batch done fast before the guys got there to have fun with it. Are you ahead of me yet? The heat was too much for the ingredients and a coffee can of ingredients ignited in the kitchen. WHOOSHHH!!!! Flames, sparks and SMOKE - LOTS of smoke! All us kids ran around opening all the windows as the smoke was literally pouring out the house. Do you think that put an end to it? Nope.

(Hands on hips): "From now on, you can't melt it - just mix the powder together and light it on the driveway." So the fun continued. How we got through childhood I do not know.

Oh and mom got a new kitchen floor and countertop out of the deal. Good luck buying any salt peter today, it is used in explosives. Truly, we used to just walk in and buy bags of it, no problem.

I have a Ph.D. in chemistry because of all the crazy things like that (KNO3 + sugar, peroxide + acetone , 2 liter bottles + HCL + aluminum foil, Sulfuric acid + sugar, nitrogen tri-iodide etc etc) as a pyromaniacal youth. We bought saltpeter at our drugstore that we could bike to. I do think this sort of visceral fun is really central to making kids not see science as boring. When you are just getting that age, science as taught feels boring, dry. But making stuff blow up, as youth that is just fun and you pretty quickly go from just following someone else instructions to .. I wonder how I can make this even more awesome?

Avi

 

[Avi]

A question for American members, and anyone else for that matter. Did you collect birds eggs? It was definitely a British schoolboy thing among generations older than me although we seemed to catch the tail end of it. I was given a huge collected of eggs by an older cousin, which included a much coveted an illegal, swans egg.
.

I don't think we have the accessible bird variety in cities here ? Pigeons and Crows! Now that said I will say whenever I try and explain conkers to Americans here .. people will look at you like "that's a game? poor thing, your parents couldn't afford toys for you so they just made **** up" Go back to your Sony ps* ya whippersnappers!

 

[chilehed]

I have a Ph.D. in chemistry because of all the crazy things like that (KNO3 + sugar, peroxide + acetone , 2 liter bottles + HCL + aluminum foil, Sulfuric acid + sugar, nitrogen tri-iodide etc etc)...

NI3? Damn, you were a lot bolder than I was, that stuff's crazy unstable.

Haven't tried peroxide and acetone, but I've got a jug of 30% H2O2 in the garage.

On the 4th I showed a couple of the local youth the reason you never throw water onto burning magnesium. They were pretty impressed.

 

[Ravenonrock]

No code of conduct in the schoolyard. Between Catholic and Protestant, English and French, make an alliance and get ready to scrap. Bullying and fighting were a constant. If you were weak, you were doomed. Teachers didn’t give a gee whiz. I had an older brother of 7 years which helped in my neighbourhood, but not at school. Those were some tough years. My dad had 8 brothers and his advice was “man up”.
Some of those years just felt like survival.

 

[chilehed]

peroxide + acetone

Haven't tried peroxide and acetone, but I've got a jug of 30% H2O2 in the garage.

Okay, so I just looked that reaction up - no thanks, I've kept all of my fingers so far and plan to keep doing so. Maybe (MAYBE) I'll do the melted saltpeter/sugar bombs, I've been working on a new design for a floating-arm trebuchet and throwing those at the rock quarry would be fun.

 

[Avi]

Okay, so I just looked that reaction up - no thanks, I've kept all of my fingers so far and plan to keep doing so. Maybe (MAYBE) I'll do the melted saltpeter/sugar bombs, I've been working on a new design for a floating-arm trebuchet and throwing those at the rock quarry would be fun.

Right .. I probably should have said something. Its actually not too different from KNO3 (or chorate ) variants (in reality) but that said somewhere post us being kids that one has definitely gone from a "kids experiment" to an "absolutely not" don't even think about it (mostly because people who actually create mischief seem to love that one)

For a long time MIT used to drop a big chunk of sodium into the Charles River off the Mass. Ave bridge which was a lot of fun.. I think just recently they stopped doing it because of liability issues.

As an aside I agree w/ your (someone's) Mom.. I don't think there really is much advantage melting the sugar/saltpeter. We pretty rapidly just moved to just mixing ludicrous amounts of it together rather than the rather nerve wracking "melt into delicious pyromanic caramel" concept

Avi

 

[Captain Pre-Capsize]

As an aside I agree w/ your (someone's) Mom.. I don't think there really is much advantage melting the sugar/saltpeter. We pretty rapidly just moved to just mixing ludicrous amounts of it together rather than the rather nerve wracking "melt into delicious pyromanic caramel" concept

Avi

Agreed. It is plenty impressive as it burns its' way across the driveway. The only reason we melted it was that was how we heard to do it. Melting and forming it into balls does make it possible to throw the smoke bomb into a sorority house, the fire station, or into a school bus full of students. Just kidding!

 

[rbscebu]

I remember push along mowers. They were hard graft when you're a kid. I remember going back to the old house after being away for years and being gob smacked at how small everything was. Those lawns and garden were huge as a kid.

I still have and use a push along mower every week or two on my lawn (that those damn kids won't keep off).

 

[Doc4]

oh and no hearing or eye protection

"Eye protection"? We called that "squinting".

 

[Owen Bawn]

My aunt and a family we know in Boston still uses the new versions of these. For urban homes with just small plots of land (think 15 ft by 10 ft small patches of lawn etc) its basically just free exercise and far less up keep / hassle.

I have personally witnessed former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic candidate for President Michael Dukakis use a 40 or 50 year old push mower on his small front lawn in Brookline, just outside Boston.

 

[StuMcB]

I was telling my daughter only yesterday about a situation we had here in the UK back in the 1980's with the media. Because of the IRA troubles the TV news couldn't play the voices of any IRA people, activists, politicians etc with their real voices so they would use an actor to voice over them. So you would have a reporter interviewing some person who would have no mic / voice but would then have their words spoken by one one doing an impression of how they sounded. To say strange was an understament.