Very high value resistors

Nail polish remover is usually ethyl acetate nowadays, IIRC. They're easy to distinguish by the smell.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I do have to admitt it has been a while from the last time I colored my nails :-)

They probably did change the the chemical, almost everything else that works well has been changed.

In the UK there's an apparently-serious effort to ban kitchen knives. Obviously they believe they're too stupid to be trusted with solvents.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We can get it by the gallon in most any hardware store.

I had heard that TATP is fairly easy to make and hard to detect (at least with conventional sniffers) because it is not a nitrogen based explosive. So I looked it up and found it is pretty easy to make. No free lunch though. As easy as it is to make it is even easier for it to explode. Good thing too. I hope lots of it explodes in the faces of those who would use it to hurt or kill people. Eric

They won't even let us have tincture of iodine antiseptic in case we make our own ammonium-iodide toy snappers.

A couple of years ago there was an "incident" at a block of flats - someone had used H2SO4 as a sink unblocker, it had eaten through the pipes and run through into the flat below. The fire service turned up complete with hazardous materials unit.

When I tipped over my motorcycle battery, it took a fair bit of pleading before the motorcycle shop parted with a liter of it.

My dad told me how to make that when I was 14. Told me not to take it to school. So I promptly did. Painted it on the almost black masonite benches in jewelry class. Boy did I piss the teacher off. Eric

When I was a kid, we could buy anything at a chemical supply store, including crystalline iodine and pure ammonia. They knew what we would do with it.

I bought a big jug of nitrobenzine and made a Kerr cell. Might have killed myself. I never realized it was so toxic until I read about an (improbable) murder in a Nero Wolfe story.

A wad of AI soaked cotton wool in every hole on the golf course..............................

Yup, been there; done that. I made most of the naughty stuff beginning with "nitro-" by the time I was 15. Surprised I'm still here. But that was what boys of that age did back then and it wasn't the least bit frowned upon.

We found a shopping bag full of shotgun shells in an abandoned house. A basically unlimited supply of black powder. Fun summer!

And a local sign company used to give away used neon sign transformers. I had a double-insulator 15KV one that I could barely lift.

Pah - all the big kids are playing with surplus pole-pig transformers.

Big kids with pickup trucks?

With a winch probably.................

Nah, pole pigs are 1600V->240V. Running one backwards from domestic mains here would only get you 800V. Neon sign transformers are _way_ more fun.

Of course, if you're running your California Kilowatt rig, maybe. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

AFAICR: the UK buried cables go up to 33kV for light to medium industry and

But you'd need something bigger than a pickup + winch.

Rural is a little different, high enough voltage for overhead cables are provided for farms and villages. We have pole transformers, but very rarely in towns.

But those aren't pole pigs. Substation gear is of another order.

Lots are generally larger in towns here, so you can't really run 240V all the way from the substation. In my neighbourhood the lots are about

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My town has a huge transformer direct off the 400kV pylons. The substations are dotted around all over town, typically about the same footprint as an old style phone box but not as tall, often 2 to an enclosure. around the industrial estates they can be about the size of a van. The rural ones range from not much bigger than a suitcase to pretty big, depending what they serve. Some farms have a full on substation if they have a lot of grain handling machinery.