Weird stuff you did as a brat?

Lots of playing with high voltages... TV power transformers, neon sign transformers, big oil caps, flashtubes.

A buddy and I were prowling an empty house and found a shopping bag full of shotgun shells. We spent the summer peeling them open, and using the powder for insane things.

I once made a Kerr cell using nitrobenzene, and got the stuff all over me. I later read a Nero Wolfe mystery where a small dish of the stuff was placed to spill on someone and killed them.

Huge lead exposure, of course.

John

I did that with the carbon rods from 2 D cells in an old mustard tin, running off 120V with a teakettle in series for a ballast. In the kitchen. WITH my parents in the room. They were pretty cool about that stuff. Man, that sucker was _bright_.

I had two rooms in the attic full of old surplus radio gear and the guts of tube TVs. My frustration at age 13 or so at not being able to design stuff that actually worked properly was the main thing that got me really working at learning electronic design. One of these days I'll be done, but not yet. ;)

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I made bombs with my chemistry set, "bang" and smoke...

Smoked out (emptied) a restaurant across the alley from my junior high school ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I made bombs too- steel tubes + 2 chemicals. I was 16 at the time. Eventually I did myself serious injury and spent 3 weeks in hospital and 6 months recovering. God said it was my lucky day so he let me live.

Probably the most stupid thing we did was mount a small motorcycle engine onto a tiny RC boat. Basically the whole boat consisted of engine. Took off like a rocket and sped out of RC range in a jiffy, crashed into the other end of the lake.

Jim Thompson wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I decided to make a Jacob's ladder,using a 12V auto ignition coil...

Sunday morning at the breakfast table,have two copper wires screwed onto a board,arranged as the 'ladder',connected to the coil secondary,have an extension cord running past my mom who's reading the Sunday paper,NO idea of what I'm doing.... connected 120VAC across the coil primary(the 12v primary...),BIG snap and flash,giant spark,room goes dark.

Mom leapt about two feet in the air,screaming at me,scared nearly to death. Blew a fuse in the mains panel,cutting off power to half the kitchen. It was awhile before I learned why it didn't work as planned.

I once was heating a test tube containing a concoction of sulfur, powered magnesium, and (IIRC) potassium nitrate over a Bunsen burner... never mind the comments... I was like 10 years old.

It began to glow oddly. I jumped back and turned to run up the basement stairs... ka-boom... my back was filled with glass fragments.

It always amazes me that males make it to 20 years old ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Does the Gym mistress count?

martin

Mixed red lead and red phosphorus. Never got to grind it with the pestle. When it went off with an echoing bang that cracked the mortar, it embedded lead and phosphorus in my finger and brought a search party through the high school.

They never figured it out.

I also made one of those "Arc furances" using the carbon from 2 D cells. I managed to somehow drill two opposing holes in a ceramic flowerpot, and stuck the rods into it. I used two big bolts in a jar of saltwater as a rheostat (easy to adjust, just reach in and move the bolts farther or closer together).

I had the whole thing wired with some really thin cheap extension cord wire. after running for a minute or two it would trip the 20 amp breaker, the extension cord wire was hot enough to smolder the insulation by then. All this without wearing gloves or safety glasses, standing barefoot on a cement floor. Its quite I wonder I didn't electrocute or blind myself.

I made a Jacob's ladder also. But being raised in a radio/TV repair shop made it easy to get HV ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I filled my boarding school with hydrogen sulphide :-)

Got caned, but it was worth it.

Did the arc lamp thing too - with a water filled kilner jar and two plates to limit the current (230V). It would boil in no time.

Trying to dissolve a lump of sulphur in about a thimbleful of CS2 in a test tube. It wasn't dissolving fast enough for me, so I decided to warm it up over the bunsen burner.

When the CS2 flashed, the whole world turned blue. I wasn't burned noticeably presumably because the flash was so quick, but the SO2 was pretty obnoxious to breathe.

CHeers! Rich

I got a car ignition coil from a junkyard, one of the old oil-filled metal can types. I charged a few uF of oil cap to about 600 volts and dumped it into the coil with a surplus thyratron. The spark crawled up out of the insulator and hit the low-voltage terminals. Next step was to make a tube out of paper and electrical tape, extend the hv wire up, and fill the tube with motor oil. I eventually got 4" sparks.

I use to make huge banks of motley electrolytic caps, charge them up, and short. Bang. A 4-turn coil of #12 wire would magnetize anything to saturation.

Surplus runway landing-light xenon flashtubes used to be cheap. So were big oil caps. The tubes fire themselves at 7 or 8 KV, no trigger needed.

I used to play with propane a lot too, both as a cryogenic cooler and as an explosive. Nitrogen tri-iodide was fun too.

I knew a guy who was into nitroglycerine. He made small batches and blew them up in empty lots. The batches got bigger. One day he made a quart, and then realized what he did, panicked, and called the fire department.

John

At a place of higher education I attended, there was a chemist with a glass eye

- a victim of KClO3 and red phosphorus mixed in a plastic spoon. He had grown cautious and limited himself to stoneware jars of ammonium perchlorate and aluminium powder.

These had a 1 minute fuse and would be ignited at 3am, causing lights to go on around the quadrangle. It was the sixties and not something to get paranoid about.

Just explosives, bombs and rockets, although I did once try to make a binary poison gas device. Fortunately it didn't work. Also invented the electric motor when I was 10, and thought that if I connected output to input I could generate excess energy.

That happened in the Baker House dormitory at MIT while I was a student. Two jerks made a quart, then panicked. Panicked most of Cambridge also... you should have seen the fire department turn-out ;-)

...Jim Thompson

And we haven't even got to motorcycles.

John

my brother tried to get the lead out of a 22 bullit with a hammer, and it fired.

i plugged a tv speaker in to a radiograms