Nanny stateism

[Roger Dewhurst]

I remember being able to buy saltpetre AND sulphur at a chemist shop in Alton which is not that far from Winchester. No questions at all. But that was in the 1950s. I made my own charcoal!

I bought a small sack of ammonium nitrate in Rotorua (New Zealand) a few years ago. I wanted it for hydroponics but if I had mixed it with an oxygen acceptor such as sugar, flour or diesel fuel, I could have made quite a nice bang. I suspect that I would be asked why I want it now.

100 grams of saltpetre would make a piss poor bomb anyway. If you sat on it, and the other necessaries, it would blow your arse off but that is about all. R

[Andy Dingley]

Make it by solution from black powder?

Know any horses, with an old brick midden?

[Stuart Noble]

So why refuse him then?

[Andrew Gabriel]

When I was at school, someone bought me a chemistry set as a present. The chemicals in that (about 15 test tube fulls, IIRC) didn't last long, and I regularly bought all sorts of things from the local chemist. They had two deliveries a day (I presume intended for urgent but unstocked prescriptions), so I could pop in in the morning and order something, and go back in the afternoon and collect it. Got bored with the home chemistry after a few years, and eventually I was just buying ferric chloride for etching PCBs. Still seem to have half a litre of 30 year old ferric chloride in the garage, but you can now buy that at loads of places, although wouldn't surpise me if a chemist wouldn't sell it nowadays.

Do kids today actually handle chemicals at all (without booking into schools in Asia)?

[Steve Firth]

I think they are allowed baking soda and vinegar. Or at least they wil be until some H&S nazi realises that those two compounds can be used to create an effective bomb.

As far as I can see, the nanny state idiots have made the teaching of science next to impossible and have turned chemistry from one of the few lessons worth attending for the entertainment factor alone, into the dullest subject on the face of the earth.

Of course most kids don't even get that, they get "Science" which means "Pseudoscience and indoctrination taught by people who are dumber than an X-factor contestant."

[Andy Dingley]

Undergrad chemistry students at a well-known UK university (and not a post-Mandelson 2-year Dipl. Attend. outfit) are already reduced to recycling their own acetone by distillation, as they can't afford adequate stocks of basic lab supplies to run the place.

[Stuart Noble]

Whatever today's kids plan to do with their lives, they'd better get on and do it on their own. School is just somewhere you turn up every day to discuss ringtones.

[Gordon Henderson]

We get ours at a local butchers. You only need about 10g for a bucket of brine cure for a leg of ham... Which went in 3 weeks ago and was soaked overnight last night and boiled and baked up this morning and it's lovely :-)

Nice and pink inside - which is what the saltpetre is (mostly) for!

Gordon

[Owain]

My local toyshop used to sell refills for chemistry sets.

The only thing I ever really used out of it was, IIRC, copper sulphate for 'invisible writing'

Owain

[Steve Firth]

Yes, no doubt it's killing me with nitrosamines when I cook it, but I love the taste and neither salt beef nor preserved sausage are right without it. Sadly I've tried all the usual suspects and no one stocks/sells it. I'll order by mail next year.

[Bernard Peek]

That depends on how you use it. It would make enough black powder to demolish a house.

[DavidM]

Same problem when I tried to buy some isopropyl alcohol a couple of years ago for cleaning the heads on my VCR*. Chemist gave me quite a grilling to make sure I wasn't going to drink the 25mL bottle he was prepared to sell me.

• - if anyone remembers them!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Seems strange that you can buy such things from Maplin - but a chemist refuses. Had the same with IPA.

[ARWadsworth]

But the chemist would sell you enough paracetamol to kill yourself without any questions.

Adam

[Ron Lowe]

The big bushy beard, hooked hand and wild staring eyes, perhaps? :-)

[Pete Verdon]

I believe the proportion of potassium nitrate in black powder is about two thirds. So with your 100g of sausage seasoning you could make 150g of powder. That doesn't strike me as very much. A big charge in a gunbarrel, certainly, but just burning as a lump it seems more like a big flash and not a lot of house-demolishing power. Similarly, you could pack it in a metal casing and make some nasty shrapnel, but that's not going to knock a house down.

All finger-in-the-air intuition, of course - I haven't blown anything up since I was a kid.

Pete

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Andrew Gabriel writes

I have a litre or so of Benzene I'd like to get rid of. Acquired at a farm sale so no provenance. Free to sensible home:-)

regards

[Steve Firth]

I'd tip it in the petrol tank.

[geoff]

Guano ?

mind you in Rotarua you could crack a lump of sulphur off a rock

[Heliotrope Smith]

A litre!!

WOW!

A Table spoon of that stuff on a flooded road or a pond and a match put to it caused mayhem for a few seconds. Cars driving into a wall of fire, and the amount of monofilament fishing line that got melted................(We needed to be quick on our heels 50 years ago)

Think we paid about 10d for a small bottle (probably around 40-50 ml)

Oh to be a young teen again.

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