When I was a kid, I made gunpowder and fireworks often. Drove my mother nuts, she often yelling that I was gonna “blow up the house.” Sulfur and Potassium Nitrate (salt peter) were easily purchased, and my father always had charcoal briquetts ... I would crush the charcoal into a fine talcum-like powder ... Did that one time in the basement, where my mom had just hung freshly washed white sheets to dry ... Man, was she pissed!
I discovered that it is more important to get the individual ingredients ground as fine as possible, else - even if you have the correct mix ratios - you’ll have poor results.
So, we had an old gas stove in the basement, where one side had burners, and the other half had a cast iron top, with concentric round plates of decreasing size, with slots, that you could remove with a lifer tool. We typically had that stove lit to help keep the basement dry, even during the summer.
I had a steel cased ballpoint pen, to which I removed the internals, leaving just the hollow steel jacket. I filled this with my mixture of homemade gunpowder, then used the pocket clip to brace it on top of one of the removable plates on the stove, having the writing tip end buried in the lifting slot.
I crouched down in front of the stove, waiting for my “rocket” pen to “launch” .... 1 minute, 2, 3, 5 minutes ... Nothing! I kept sticking my head up above the stove to view what was going on. At about the sixth minute, just seconds after ducking back down, the thing went off with a loud bang! It punched a hole through the nearby door that led to the bulkhead stairs out of the basement.
My mom was right - “One of these days you’re gonna blow up the house!”
Every one in our neighborhood had a trash incinerator in the basement. I was tasked with operating ours. After the blaze began I’d add fuel to see if I could get flames to lap the ceiling. All the kids did it.
The incinerator was where I learned plastic would drip flames when on fire.
My father was a firefighter and house fires were all but unheard of. Maybe playing with fire was safer then.