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Explosives and Rocket-Making: 1960 and Today

By: Viet71 (Diary)  |  March 16th, 2010 at 12:53 PM  | 

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Autumn 1960

My 15-year-old friends and I were deeply into rocket-making and explosives. Girls were much more complicated, but very interesting as well.

We experimented (with rockets) daily — before, during, and after school and on the weekends.

Most experiments were duds. But my friend Herb and I made some breakthroughs.

Breakthrough #1

The first breakthrough was to discover that a very powerful rocket fuel could be made by adding certain light medal powders to our gunpowder mixture. From this point on, we could shoot our homemade rockets hundreds of feet into the air.

Where did we get our chemicals? Five places, principally:

1) pharmacies

2) doctors and dentists offices (we just asked)

3) factories where our dads worked

4) the high school chemical room (yeah, we were little thieves)

5) the Stansi Scientific Company of Chicago (I posed as a mail-order PhD)

Breakthrough #2

Now that we had mastered basic rocket science, our goals became (a) to aim our rockets, and (b) to tip our rockets with explosives. The Soviets, after all, weren’t shy about all this.

The aiming part didn’t require a breakthrough. Just some fiddling with with fins and exhaust apertures.

The breakthrough came in the area of contact explosives — explosives that go boom on mere contact.

Herb and I pored over chemistry texts at the local library (funded by Andrew Carnegie) and learned the chemical structures and recipes for various contact explosives.

We made, for example, a certain harmless purple liquid and drenched a piece of notebook paper in it. We placed a piece of juicy candy on the paper and ever so gently fanned it dry. Presently, a large fly buzzed down to snack on the candy. BOOM!

Truth is, I should not be writing this. I should have died in the Fall of 1960. It is only by the Grace of God that I survived, and others around me survived, that time period.

Some other guys I knew weren’t so lucky. They blew off hands or parts of hands.

Parting Shot

I have to wonder about the Detroit underwear bomber. Here’s why.

A guy with my knowledge could get past airport security carrying what would appear to be a box of cereal and a plastic bag full of powdered milk.

And I guarantee you the consequences would be devastating.

Is al qaeda that stupid?

COMMENTS

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  • http://www.houston-pos.net geotex

    You betcha they are. When all your training is designed to prepare yourself to go out and blow your way into “heaven”, you don’t need skills, just some one to strap some dynamite to you and press the button when you get close to the target.

    I did same as you, but in the 50′s. All compliments of a “deluxe” chemical set easily bought at a toy store, and fill-ins from the local pharmacy.

    • Viet71

      Thanks!

    • Viet71

      Whenever I go to a pharmacy today, I check out what chemicals are available.

      I could cook up a few recipes, but the days of easy picken’s are long since gone.

  • Achance

    without parole. We, too, quickly discovered the effect of “light metals” and tweaks to the basic gunpowder formula. And turning those little cotton balls, the ones about an eighth of an inch in diameter, into nitrocellulose balls and scattering them around was always good fun.

    Yeah, I’d just walk into the drug store and order nitric, sulfuric, or hydrocloric acid or potassium nitrate or chlorate and powdered magnesium. The guy at the electronics repair shop would sell me anything I needed to ignite bombs or rockets, guess you can still get most of that stuff at Radio Shack. And there was always Edmunds Scientific and places like that and the Army-Navy store had real military surplus. I bought my first non-.22 rifle there when I was about 12; just walked in, plunked down my money, $12, IIRC, and walked out with a military surplus British Endfield .303.

    • Viet71

      Powdered magnesium did the trick. Powdered aluminum was not quite as good.

      I played around with powdered zinc, but never got very good results.

    • Viet71

      it is possible to buy ONLINE such items as

      – potassium chlorate and perchlorate,

      – sodium chlorate and perchlorate,

      – powdered magnesium,

      – and other such goodies.

      I don’t think the acids can be shipped through the mail.

      BTW, I’ve still got a piece of a beaker buried in my right palm.

      • Achance

        several times. I got a call at work a few years back from a neighbor telling me there’d been an explosion at my house with a “mushroom cloud.” Well, even I never built a nuke. Youngest stepson, who knew NOTHING about chemistry or explosives but did know that my black powder supply was good for making a bang. He and his buddy fill an empty Pepsi can with black powder, that’s about the same amount you’d use to fire a 12# Napoleon cannon, and set it off, I still don’t know how they fused it, and it made one Helluva bang and lots smoke but sent the buddy to the ER with a nasty gash from aluminum schrapnel. Some things don’t change! Boys will be boys.

        • Viet71

          I got burned too — by explosive fire and by acid. Never deterred me.

          Too bad kids today are not free to experiment as we were. It was dangerous, but life doesn’t come with a safety certificate.

  • JSobieski

    Up the sulfur if you want more flame.

    God I miss being 12, old enough to get into trouble, young enough to get out of it.

    • Viet71

      My favorite oxidizer became potassium chlorate, though. Just barely stable. Lots of oxidizing power.

      Thanks, J.

      • JSobieski

        and your diary makes me want to relive “the good old days” and take the rest of the week off

        • Viet71

          n/t

  • http://UnitedConservativesofVirginia Cargosquid

    They used to sell all that stuff in the “toy” chemistry sets back then.

    I blew up my bathroom by accident. I don’t even know what I was mixing and heating…..

    …..good times…………

    • Viet71

      Wish I knew you back then.

      Thanks. Sorry for your bathroom.

  • oblio

    Messing with potassium chlorate and various adulterants making smoke bombs and homemade canons. Very lucky that a bad load only flamed my face out the touchhole of a canon rather than going boom. This is where I learned that chlorate and sugar (IIRC) is unstable when being tamped down. Of course we had red phosphorus and who knows what else mixed with it ….

    We would get the chemicals from Jr. High lab, taped the room door bolt open (it was the 70′s guess who taught us that :) ) and had a priori removed the hinge from the locked lab supply cabinets so we could get the good after we ‘broke in’ during lunch.

    To be at that too old/too young age again ….

    • oblio

      Too excited re-living my wild youth to proofread :)

      • Viet71

        but mixing red phosphorus and potassium chlorate is VERY DANGEROUS.

        • Achance

          If I’d grown up under the laws and rules my kid and stepkids have, I’d have never gotten out of jail or I’d be dumb, dependent, and an Obama voter.

          • Viet71

            You are so wise.

          • JSobieski

            In the post-modern wussified world, many “educated men” can do about1 thing well, and are otherwise generally incompetent.

            My father, in contrast, could build a house from the ground up, fix a car with duct tape and WD40, and finish off the day by getting into a heated political argument with a 60s weenie.

            I feel pretty weak compared to the old man, but the kids that I see for the most part make me feel like superman.

          • Viet71

            Just wow.

          • Achance

            unless you have a totally urban existence here, you actually have to know how to do stuff. I’m not a good mechanic but I can keep my boat and cars running no matter what. I’m not a good carpenter, but I can fix my house well enogh to get by. I’m not a good hunter or fisherman, but I can keep meat in my freezer. I know what the weather is going to be by looking out the Accuweather Window. I really don’t need all that crap to help me get through the day; I can make it on my own.

          • Viet71

            One of my great regrets is that upon getting back from Viet Nam in September 1972, I dd not go to Alaska. I needed to hide out.

            In a way, I’m still hiding out.

  • hickorystick

    but your making me realize how many the explosives I grew up around.. An older kid would bring railroad caps home. We’d drop the largest rocks we could lift onto them. Pretty hard to set off, but what a h*ll of a sound when they did. Dumb, dumb kids.

    • Viet71

      It led to electrical engineering, law, language school

      • hickorystick

        with all the technical stuff you learned making the rockets. I didn’t mean it was for dumb kids, I meant it was more dangerous than you probably realized. I was thinking more about watching my cousin making a pipe bomb ot of a 5″ nipple of galvanized pipe, and powder he pulled out of a skyrocket plus who knows what else. He was a smart kid. He was going to Lakeside High School at the same time as Bill Gates. I’m just saying.

  • conservative_faction

    my favorite diarist here.

    And would you agree that Robert Brent’s, “The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments”, is just one of the best books that a 12 year old kid could get his hands on, like ever? Man, that was some great stuff!