hehe, alas, the days of childhood. Charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur with
assorted other chemicals. We made some dandy fireworks during the
summer. I would spend days grinding charcoal briquettes into fine powder
and mix it in the proper proportions. Add a little copper and you get a
get green. Some magnesium and get a brilliant white. A little zinc and
get blue-green, and just plain makes a nice yellow.

We would take rice and break it up, and put it in a rock tumbler with a
little wet powder mix to make the stars. A piece of 3 inch water pipe
for a mortar, and kraft paper from the butcher and potato paste glue to
make the shells.

My friend and I would light up the sky over the lake on the 4th and
Labor Day.

Of course the government had to get involved and make homemade fireworks
illegal.


Capt. Frank
Parallax wrote:

bb wrote in message . ..

On 21 Nov 2003 17:46:48 GMT, (LaBomba182) wrote:


A while
later he is running the boat with his wife from the bridge and they hear a loud
explosive bang!

I did the same thing as a kid. We snuck into a neighbor's garage and
were fooling aroung with whatever we could make trouble with. I mixed
a couple of jars of something into a bigger jar and left with it.
Rummaging around a friends garage tends to make a young un hungry so I
headed home with my jar of "stuff" to raid the refrigerator. I put
the jar on the counter, made a snack, and headed off to my room. A
little while later I hear a loud bang. I finally sound the source in
the kitchen. What a frickin mess it made. Some kind of chemical glop
with granules blown all over the kitchen. I'm sure glad I didn't have
that jar sitting in my lap when it went.

Thanks for the memories.

bb


Mixing Comet and Bleach will produce a vigorous reaction and a yellow
cloud of chlorine gas. I did this as a kid (I forget why, but I had a
non-terrorist reason) and mixed them at the bottom of a deep hole and
crept too close to watch and got a good whiff of chlorine gas. It
felt as if my chest was on fire. I had read that a good antidote was
to get a whiff of ammonia which I rapidly did. I have also read that
soldiers in WW1 would **** into a handkerchief and hold this over
their noses because the ammonia in the pee would help neutraqlize the
chlorine.
Of course, I also burned all my hair off by trying to melt a mixture
od sugar and saltpeter for casting rocket fuel pellets, burned down
the azaleas when my ramjet engine (an old coleman stove fuel tank and
atomizer feeding the kerosene fuel, and an old vacuum cleaner running
in reverse to mimic airflow) expelled a huge cloud of flame, and drove
the neighbors nuts by screwing up all TV reception for blocks by
trying to make a plasma rocket engine with an arc in a glass tube fed
with propane. The arc was made from carbon rods from D cells and my
rheostat was copper rods immersed into salt water connected to 120V.
It produced enough light to turn night into day and freak the
neighbors. By comparison, how dangerous are the computer games my son
plays constantly? Kids these days got no interest in cool stuff.