Alcohol & Firearms Don't Mix

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MaverickNH

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Remember those Alcohol & Firearms Don't Mix campaigns from the 1970s? The signs pictured a bottle of liquor (XXX on label) and jar of gunpowder, with a big red X though it all.

Well, at the gunshop today, looking at reloading supplies, I remembered my teenaged buddies and me pulling open numerous 22lr cartridges and pouring the powder into some whiskey stolen from some parent's cabinet. We lit it on fire and ran like hell, expecting a mushroom cloud.

Imagine our disappointment when nothing happened. We figured we were either short on gunpowder or need stronger liquor and gave up. I guess we were rather dim kids from Iowa, with the real message lost on us.

Back to pipe bombs and M80s...

Electrolysis of water with a Lionell train transformer into oxygen and hydrogen was much more rewarding. You caught it in a plastic trash bag and floated it over a candle. Add some 91% Isopropanol and we had air-fuel bombs! [smile]
 
Chem grad students at my college used to fill weather balloons with hydrogen, tie them off with a string soaked in alcohol and release them after setting the string on fire. Lit up the whole sky like daylight.
 
Electrolysis of water with a Lionell train transformer
The typical Lionel transformer outputs AC so your electrolysis wouldn't have worked. You probably used an HO powerpack (yes Lionel did make a few of them too) to produce DC current with the separated gasses rising from the anode and cathode.
 
The typical Lionel transformer outputs AC so your electrolysis wouldn't have worked. You probably used an HO powerpack (yes Lionel did make a few of them too) to produce DC current with the separated gasses rising from the anode and cathode.

It was a long time ago, but it worked. So maybe HO DC kit. I recall my Mom asking what we were doing. "Science Fair project Mom...."

My Dad had only one piece of advice for me in life: "Be good, or don't get caught." I live by those word of wisdom.

The employment forms say "Have you ever been arrested? Describe below". I write: "No"; "Never been caught". Always gets attention.
 
ilwttig.jpg
 
Chem grad students at my college used to fill weather balloons with hydrogen, tie them off with a string soaked in alcohol and release them after setting the string on fire. Lit up the whole sky like daylight.

Worked with a guy that did stuff like that. One of their weather balloon bombs took way longer that usual to ignite. In fact they had given up on it, thinking the ignition source had gone out. Then, at some incredible altitude the thing went boom.

The next day, in the newspaper, a story talked about how the FAA was investigating a high altitude explosion that caused alarm among several pilots flying in the area. This was decades ago, so I imagine the statute of limitations has passed...

Yeah, he was a gun guy too.
 
I take it you never worked in a shop that had welding tanks?

Acetylene and 55 gallon trash bags.....

Right under Hanscom Field's final for runway 23.....
 
The typical Lionel transformer outputs AC so your electrolysis wouldn't have worked. You probably used an HO powerpack (yes Lionel did make a few of them too) to produce DC current with the separated gasses rising from the anode and cathode.

We had an HO transformer with AC and DC outputs. I know b/c my brother and I hooked up the train to the wrong terminals and smoked the motor, literally. Needless to say Dad wasn't happy but installed a new motor and we were up an running again.
 
Hell, dry ice and water in a 2-liter bottle is now a big no-no.....[crying]

A lot of the fun things are a "problem" these days.

remember the first 4th after 9/11? There was worry that new rules would prevent commercial fireworks from being transported by rail and West Treestump Nebraska would not have a display on the 4th! That was fixed, but there were other things that were endangered too. Apparently, "finely divided metals" were suddenly considered a problem, and the roll-your-own fireworks people were all feeling like gun owners in a non-free state!

Somewhere, I have a book that has a line along the lines of, "Not too long ago, every real American boy knew how to make fulminate of mercury."

Wonder how THAT backyard project would play these days? [laugh]
 
We used to make "napalm" all the time, fun stuff! Through some very bad trial and error, the safest method (OUTDOORS!!):

1) take a few bars of Ivory soap and grate up the soap using a cheese grater (you can use soap flakes if you can find them, saves the grating process)
2) fill a 1lb coffee can with gas about 2/3rd full
3) keep the gas far away from any flame source
4) boil a large container (3 lb coffee can) full of water
5) place the small coffee can of gas in the hot water, the gas has a slightly lower boiling point than water, so it will boil
6) as the gas is boiling, slowly stir in the grated up soap
7) add enough soap to make the mixture thick (about 2 bars of Ivory soap)
8) let it cool completely
9) carefully tip can and slowly shake jelly out, if you have the soap/gas mixture right you have a nice firm solid jelly gas
10) Ignite or explode in various entertaining ways!

oh, and
11) run fast when Shorty from the Wilson County PD chases you and Jacky down farmer Ligon's dirt road for igniting a haystack with homemade napalm! [wink]
 
Lol, I think this is where we start discussing deisel, fertilizer and the 95:5 ratio? [devil2]

The fertilizer that you speak of is now coated in sulfur/polymer to prevent it from being used as an oxidizer.

Plus, you want to add a sensitizer to that mix.
 
It's crazy how fast things have changed. I graduated high school in '97. My senior project for my AP Chemistry class was contact explosive based from 18 M ammonium hydroxide. Easy to handle when wet, very volatile when dry. You can paint in on things, scatter it on the floor and wait for it to dry, etc... Pretty sure someone would end up in jail for that now...

Fitz
 
Do I really have to post it.......ATF? who brought the real weapons,... WMD, launchers, .... burgers, n chips? NKorea and Irans waiting![wink]
 
Back in the mid 70's the high school library had on its shelves "The US Army Book of Demolitions". I had a friend who's older brother worked part time as a custodian while he went to college. We used to send him to work with a shopping list of materials we needed from the Chemistry classroom. The Army had very good instructions in that book. My friend's youngest brother used to watch us and I'm guessing we must have been good at what we built because we had to influence his career. He just retired from NYPD as a bomb squad detective.
 
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