My cousin and I found an old crate of TNT, with 10 sticks left in it, sweating nitroglycerine, at Grandpa’s work shed, and we gingerly carried it to the back field, and used a 30.06 to blow it up. Took 3 shots; was the biggest explosion I’d ever heard or seen.
Police and fire depts showed-up, and gave us hell. We had to pay for a lot of blown-out/cracked farmhouse windows at nearby farms. I couldn’t hear squat for 2 days. It was fun, though.
When I was a kid there was still a lot of personal small mining going on in our area. You could still just go to the hardware store and buy TNT with a permit for mining use. Never used it myself but got the opportunity to be around quite a bit of TNT use as a kid.
As kid back in the 50’s & 60’s, I would help my grandfather and father dynamite tree stumps, rocks, beaver dams, etc. I remember my grandfather pick up a sweating stick of DuPont 40% Red Cross dynamite and wipe up a drop of nitro then flick it onto our concrete driveway. It would pop like a firecracker. He would also crimp the caps onto the fuse with his teeth. I thought this was a little extreme, but he was 70+ years old so he must have known what he was doing.