Childhood DIY experiments

[ARWadsworth]

I'll bet the schools caretaker loved you.

Adam

[Harry Bloomfield]

The Medway Handyman expressed precisely :

[Tim S]

Harry Bloomfield wibbled:

That mix self ignites fairly quickly (10's seconds to minutes) - not a contact explosive...

Contact bangers sound more like NI3 - but pot.mang isn't used to make this AFAIK. Perhaps there's some extra fun to be had with pot.mang?

[Stuart Noble]

At age 10 or so I was convinced it was possible to light the touch paper of a single banger in a box of assorted fireworks, and have time to snuff it out before the whole lot went up. Wrong of course, but why I carried out the experiment in the bedroom still eludes me. Pig headed and stupid, a deadly combination.

[Tim S]

ARWadsworth wibbled:

Wiring a random transformer from the back of a valve TV to the mains. I knew what it would do, but not which way! Measured 8V with my cheap and crappy Radio Shack meter. I was lucky.

Tried my new 2A/10000-turn electromagnet on the colour TV to see how it bent electron beams. Discovered the joy of inbuilt degaussing coils, about 50 times before my parents came back. Nearly Darwined by that one!

Lots of fund with pot.mang, pot.nitrate, and any reducer to hand. Tried making gunpowder, and drying it in the gas oven...

Electrolysing water + salt direct from mains. That goes pop-ety-pop, a lot...

[brass monkey]

Wasn't it something like ammonium iodide? or something iodide.

[Graham.]

Frame output trany from a valve set was good as a step-dowm

Electrolytic capacitor on long wires out of the window. Plug into mains, metallic confetti everywhere.

I just realised I made an unintentional one word pun in the sentence above. Anyone?

[ARWadsworth]

I thought that electrocution meant "kill or injure" and was not always fatal.

Anyway, you made a Taser. So well done.

Adam

[Tim S]

brass monkey wibbled:

NI3 = Nitrogen Tri-Iodide:

can make Nitrogen Tri-Cloride but that blows up pretty much as soon as you make it, according to our chemistry teacher.

[PeterC]

Ah, memories. Worked in a chemi lab in the mid 60s. Started off with sawn off burettes and nickel balls (not much range but could destroy a winchester quart - stopped that when 2.5li od fluorosicilic acid went walkies), then moved on to explosives. Had various substances to try, so blowpipe-launched was a natural progression. Doing well until an explosion occured part-way down the pipe. The boss decided that we'd had enough fun and he wanted his empire intact :-(

[PeterC]

Nt explosive/electrical: new physics block at school (about 4 storeys IIRC), members of school choir in a corner of the stairwell, find resonant frequency and hold note. Long crack in corner was still there when I left a couple of years later.

[Stephen Howard]

Seems a lot of us were intrigued by explosives and electricity....

I did some incredibly stupid things with ground up Swan Vesta heads ( which in itself was pretty daft - but safety matches didn't have enough 'ooomph' ) and bits of copper pipe.

We used to make our own bangers by getting a couple of large bolts and a nut and screwing them together with a match head inbetween. Tied to a loop of string and hurled against a wall they'd make a pretty decent bang.

I moved onto butane - and found that by squirting a generous amount down the plughole of one of a long line of sinks in the school's chemistry lab and then igniting it, I could get a satisfying 'whoomph' out of almost every sink along the line.

....and then there was the WD40 flame gun...

Regards,

[Lobster]

*wonderful* stuff is here:

the sister-electrocuter named by the OP (and yes, she did survive my ministrations) - as a kid I had a fair amount of experience with home-made explosives, none of which caused any damage or injury, but for some reason the instance which most sticks in my mind was when I was very young and simply left a lit candle in the garage in a plastic pot overnight 'just to see what would happen'. Went down to see next morning and all that was left was a charred circle of about 9" diameter on the wooden shelf and about half-way through its thickness, where the molten wax must have spilled out and soaked in to the timber as it burned.

Must have been a hair's breadth away from the whole lot - garage, house

- going up in flames overnight. I successfully hid the burn mark under old cans etc for years - I owned up to my parents a few years ago, and they never had noticed the burn mark.

David

[The Medway Handyman]

Iodine rings a bell, maybe I was thinking of the colour? And hydrogen peroxide possibly? Long time ago...

[The Medway Handyman]

Prolly my first magic trick, peel the striking paper from a box of matches, place on coin & set fire. It left a greasy evil smelling residue. If you rubbed the coin with your thumb till it warmed up it emmitted smoke! I think phosphorus was involved.

[Broadback]

Acquired a string of Crow scarers, these are big firework bangers set at varying intervals along a piece of thick string, used by farmers who place them in a crop field, light the string, the intermittent bangs chase of the birds. Any way we removed the bangers from the string and carries out three experiments. First we placed one in the middle of the road and covered it with gravel then lit. A satisfactory bang and spreading of gravel. The next we jammed behind a lock on a milking shed door (burglars in training), the resulting explosion did not break the lock, but the farmer was mad, his cows kicked over and wasted several buckets of milk. Finally we placed one in a brick that was blocking a drain outside a house (the type of brick with holes in it). This made a very satisfactory explosion, but it was our last, the house owner reported us to the village bobby, so the remainder were confiscated.

[Tony Bryer]

Our version - when the teacher went off for a cup of tea, leaving us to do the lab work - was to get the bellows and pump air into the gas supply. In due course a teacher from the next lab would come into to ask whether we were having problems with the gas. Why yes, and such a disappointment to us that we couldn't get on with our work.

Now that I know about purging gas pipework this probably wasn't the safest thing to do, but I guess that bunsen burners don't really care.

[Bill]

In message , The Medway Handyman writes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nitrogen triiodide, also called nitrogen iodide, more correctly, triiodine nitride to distinguish it from the triiodide ion, is the chemical compound with the formula NI3. It is an extremely sensitive contact explosive: small quantities explode with a gunpowder-like snap when touched even lightly, releasing a purple cloud of iodine vapor. NI3 has a complex structural chemistry that has required relatively heroic efforts to elucidate because of the instability of the derivatives.

Nitrogen triiodide has no practical commercial value due to its extreme shock sensitivity, making it difficult to store, transport, and utilize for controlled explosions.

I used to make it at school, 40 years ago and carry it home in my pocket in a test tube. One day I went to my locker in the garage and there was no sign of the test tube but there were a lot of fine glass shards every where and the inside of the locker was a yellowy purple colour!! I stopped making it after that.

I was lucky in having a very understanding father, who was a chemist and spent some years working with explosives. He taught me well and let me get away with more than he really should have. I always remember the opening line in one of his manuals, it went some thing along the lines of

"Remember, the purpose of an explosive is to EXPLODE" very true..........

I also had the rather dubious honour of emptying 4 classrooms in a block when I fed a small amount of a tear gas through a gas liquid chromatograph that should have vented to the outside world, but didn't!! Apparently it was quite a sight if only I could have seen it !

( Still alive at 50+ and the shrapnel in my left hand finally worked its way out some years ago now. )

[Richard Skeen]

My guess would be "window", as in

[Clint Sharp]

In message , Harry Bloomfield writes

Icing sugar worked too.

Iodine and ammonia was fun too, nice little clouds of coloured smoke but a tad unstable when it dried out.

Bin bags full of acetylene and a few feet of lit bog roll hanging down from them is apparently fun as well although I'd know nothing about that officer.

Drilling out an ornamental cannon to take ball bearings is probably not a good idea either, especially if you have access to shotgun cartridges and a Stanley knife.

I miss my childhood, I think I may have a second...