Primers in a vise was one of my childhood favorites.
Hey, it’s just a brass firecracker, right?
Hold muh juice box and watch this?
That sounds almost as stupid as a few things I did as a kid.
A pretty dumb thing to do. A smart kid would have found a way to not hold the round in his hand while he torched it.
That said, kids do dumb stuff. I remember when my son was about 5 or 6. We heard him screaming and crying in the kitchen and holding his thumb and forefinger. Imprinted on each digit was the outline of the head of a bobby pin burned into the skin. He had spread the ends and poked it in a kitchen island electrical outlet that just happened to be right at his chest level. As he stood there crying I said, “I bet you won’t do that again, will you.” He stood there sobbing and shaking his head “no”.
Years later I asked him what in the heck possessed him to do that. He said he saw something in a Science Fiction movie that he wanted to recreate. It was a mad scientist’s “Jacob’s Ladder”.........well, he got what he went for, but it was just too fast for him to see it.
Will the mother now sue the store stating that their was no signage warning not to put a flame source under a cartridge?
The real question here is where did he find enough .22lr to waste any?
Actually it’s sort of a miracle that I have all my body parts in working order. Speaking of my childhood, it’s also sort of astounding what 6” of copper pipe, black powder, lamp cord and pencil lead can do in response to a 9v battery
We used to take cases apart and collect a bunch of powder, to light.
Then we tried this with model rocket engines.
WOW!
When I was a kid there was always plenty of 22 ammo around. I used to throw them on the pavement and make them go off, and sometimes I’d put them in the woodstove.
Crazy as could be, but no one ever got hurt.
And don’t smash blanks with rocks!
I don’t get why was the police involved at all?
A kid was playing with a bullet like he shouldn’t have been doing. It went off. He got some shrapnel.
Whats it the police’s business?
“You know, you put a bullet in the furnace, that reflects on your parents...”
Flash powder, black powder, smokeless powder, match heads, potassium nitrate, all sold at hobby stores or grocery stores back in the day. And thermite components.
It is a wonder there aren’t bunches of one armed, one eyed 60 something men around these days.
I’ll confess I did some stupid things in my youth. But dude that was like 40 years ago. :)
When I was 5, I tried to set one off by throwing it on the sidewalk - even at that age I knew enough to try to hide behind a tree in case it went off....Thankfully it didn’t go off after two throws so I tossed it in a sewer.
The following 10 items come from a coworker of my dad who works in the lab for a major AG CHEM Corporation.
(1) Burning down a snowman with calcium carbide. The carbide granules react with the water in the snow to release acetylene gas. Ignite it – and watch Frosty go up in flames! This one brought tears to the eyes of the children that created him.
(2) React aluminum foil with muriatic acid. Violent reaction that liberates hydrogen gas (which you can collect in a balloon and ignite) along with hydrogen chloride – an extremely irritating gas. Do this in a closed area and people flee!
(3) Generating hydrogen sulfide in a movie theater. Do this by heating iron fillings with sulfur. Collect the resulting iron sulfide granules and simply add dilute acid to them. Rxn produces the putrid smell of rotten eggs. We actually emptied a movie theater doing this one. Make sure that it is a movie that you don’t like.
(4) Of course – homemade pipe bombs based on sodium chlorate (which we could buy as a weed killer) and sugar. Cheap – powerful explosive, but very dangerous mixture. It is a wonder that I made it through that phase. We blew up everything from incinerators to Barbie dolls. With some of the explosions you could even feel the concussion! We actually created craters with some of the larger devices.
(5) Home-made thermite. A mixture of ferric oxide and powdered aluminum. Tough to ignite – but get it going and the reaction actually produces molten iron with sparks! The pentagon use to drop thermite bombs on the VC. It was cool to duplicate one of the governments tools of destruction!
(6) Fun with stench. Butyric acid is a constituent of vomit that provides the smell. In vomit it is present at levels less than .5%. Imagine what happens if you disperse some of the 100% stuff in a place frequented by people! This is the same compound that some of the radical anti-abortionists where throwing into abortion clinics back in the 80’s. Do this in an enclosed area and you make said area uninhabitable for people.
(7) Nitrogen Triiodide. Make this by pouring concentrated ammonia over iodine crystals. The result is an extremely sensitive explosive compound that makes lots of noise – minus the power. Spread the mixture over a floor and watch what happens when people step on the small particles they cannot see. Even more fun is to spread some around (non-explosive when liquid) on a side walk or garage floor. Let it dry – then introduce the family dog or cat. They go berserk when their paws detonate the crystals. Doesn’t physically hurt them – but the noise makes them psychotic!
(8) Aceylene gas explosions. Take calcium carbide and place in a 2 liter soda container. Add water – then stretch one of those giant balloons over the mouth of the bottle. The balloon fills with acetylene gas. Once full – STAND WAY BACK AND TROW A MATCH. The resulting flash (not so much an explosion) will turn night into day. People freak and dogs begin to bark. We did this one night while camping out in a field behind the subdivision. People thought a plane had crashed. They sent the cops – but we vanished into the night
(9) Molotov Cocktails – not the stupid gasoline in the bottle stuff that moronic hippies do – but the original one. A real Molotov cocktail is made by filling a wine bottle with gasoline then slowly adding concentrated sulfuric acid (no reaction) and tightly sealing the bottle. Then – you wrap the bottle in a rag and secure with duct tape. Soak the rag with potassium or sodium chlorate solution. Now you have the real thing! No need to light with a rage like some idiot. Simply throw it at your target. When the bottle breaks – the concentrated sulfuric acid reacts with chlorate creating an instant spark. This in turn ignites the gasoline which spews flames and concentrated acid all over your target. Rock and roll!
(10) Flash powder that is ignited by water. Mix ammonium nitrate, ammonium chloride, and zinc dust. Simply add a few drops of water and you will get a brilliant flash and fire. Even today – chemists have not been able to explain why this reaction occurs. We used it to start campfires. Simply spread the powder over the wood and add water – bingo a fire! IF you really want to freak people out – stand back and pee on it and a fire will start. Those lacking knowledge of what is happening freak out! Some may even start worshiping you. I did this once at Scout camp and from that point forward I enjoyed respect from the many Red necks that I had to mingle with (all much bigger than me).
It is a wonder me and my fellow vandals and alchemists survived all of this . It pretty much ended by age 16 – the pursuit of Estrogen and fast cars took over by then. I did have some close calls and one trip to the emergency room doing (10). But – I did make it because the Gods needed me to work on Proprietary Products!
JRR
Future Darwin Award recipient?
I actually succeeded in making gun-cotton (smokeless powder or cellulose trinitrate) by soaking tampons in a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids. Once the nitration was complete, I neutralized the acids with dilute NaOH, then washed the pulp thoroughly.
The next step would have been to leave the gelatinous mass out to air dry, but I was impatient and decided to dry it using heat ... from a Bunsen burner.
Let’s just say that the drying step was also the proving step, and that all my hard work — and much of my forearm hair — vanished in a flash.