Incendiary moments - reprise

[Black Country Ste]

These are brilliant.

Best I ever managed was to get a little too close to a Bunsen burner at school when I was 14. "Tssssss...", and a nasty great smell: I'd managed to singe my hair. Surprisingly nobody seemed to notice.

 

[Globalti]

Garage pits and petrol vapour used to be a common cause of disaster until they started using lifting ramps. The garage man in our village in the sixties burned himself badly in this very way.

 

[vernon]

Garage pits and petrol vapour used to be a common cause of disaster until they started using lifting ramps. The garage man in our village in the sixties burned himself badly in this very way.

Every day's a school day.

I never made the connection with the disappearance of pits and the emergence of lifting ramps.

 

[gbb]

Lighter fuel was my preferred incendiary as a kid...
As a circa 13 yr old i found a metal gallon can, open, with a hole punched in it. ....so squirt some fluid in it, then light it through the open end. It burns lightly, then you got a whoopmph, like a slow burn, then a sudden ignition. Never did figure out how this was....anyway, one day i did it and nothing seemed to happen....i bent down ...looked in the open hole of the can ....blew in the hole......WHOOMPH ...and singed all my eyebrows and fringe . Honestly, even a 13 yr old shoulda figured that was going to happen .

 

[Dayvo]

Not so much an incendiary moment, more an act of naive minor terrorism.

Back in the mid 1970s (at the height of IRA activity on the mainland), me and a few friends (aged about 13/14) found out about the magic of sugar and weedkiller mixtures.

Having had zero interest in metalwork at school, we suddenly set out feversihly to 'design' the body of our 'bombs': a length of steel tubing hammered down at each end with a hole drilled in the middle to pour the sugar/weedkiller mix into. Armed with six or seven of these, we decided to experiment at the sports ground up the road from the school, near the High St. and backing onto the BT building.

We loaded the mix into the tubes, lit the fuse and ran for cover. An incredible noise echoed around the sports ground, followed immediately by the sound of hundreds of windows breaking (from the BT building). We were terrified and legged it back to school.

The next morning there was a school assembly where the headmaster said that four boys were seen leaving the sports ground (in an easily identifiable school uniform). Any information leading to their being identified would be most welcome as the police were eager to 'talk' to us!

Our fear and panic was only known to us, but did we suffer inside, dreading every phone call at home or doorbell ringing.

The good old days, eh!

 

[Globalti]

Oh yes, sodium chlorate weedkiller and sugar... my best explosion was a Maxwell House coffee jar full of the mix - it blew the lid about 50 feet into the air and vapourised the glass jar.

Some mates of mine found a lineside hut full of green metal pods with lead strips on them, which turned out to be detonators. They were supposed to be attached to the line in a pattern so they would explode when a train ran over them and warn the driver of a hazard ahead. They proved remarkably difficult to detonate simply by hitting them with a big hammer so in the end my mates resorted to hoisting a very heavy wooden chopping block into a tree then dropping it on the detonator, which blew a hole in the concrete yard and broke a couple of panes of glass in the nearby shed. This was the same mate who reversed his Dad's brand new jaguar up the drive with the door open and failed to remember the tree, which removed the door.

 

[MontyVeda]

I may have mentioned this before...

A couple of years ago my PC started playing up, and discovering the power pack was full of dust, decided to remove said dust with an airduster can (it didn't work due to lack of 'blow')... but on inverting the airduster can, i managed to spray the liquid propellant into the power pack. I'm not a thicko, so i gave the propellant plenty of time to evaporate before turning my PC on... Ok, maybe i am a thicko because after a couple of minutes, I got bored of waiting and figured the propellant might have evaporated by BANG! No sooner had i touched to power button, a beach-ball sized fireball appeared and burnt out just as quickly. I singed half the hairs off my arm, the nylon carpet singed in a 15" radius of my PC (and still is), fortunately i kept my eye brows.... and all the dust in the powerpack had burnt away and the PC worked perfectly

I do not recommend this as a means of removing excess dust from your PSU

 

[goo_mason]

[QUOTE 2504353, member: 45"]I have a friend. A very successful solicitor friend with his own legal practice on two sites.

We used to do the annual families' get-together on bonfire night around his house, with everyone bringing one or two decent fireworks rather than us having loads of those packs of little dribbling things.

One year someone came with a couple of big rockets, very big rockets, which were added to the pile. I was cold and I had a toddler who didn't like the noises and so we sat in the conservatory, overlooking the very small garden, while my lawyer friend managed the show outside accompanied by about 20 people of different ages. He set up one of the rockets a small distance from the conservatory, lit it and then walked back a few feet. That was when I noticed that, rather than slide the rocket into a launch tube, he'd just rammed the stick of the rocket into the ground. The outsiders also noticed, but only when the rocket fired and started swaying from side to side trying to release itself from the grip of the lawn. It failed, and there was a moment of helpless panic when the whooshing stopped and everyone knew what was coming next. The explosion of pretty burning chemicals filled the garden through the smoke and the bang hid the screams. Thankfully no-one was hurt and there followed 5 minutes of nervous-relief jokes and berating of the friend for his stupidity for not using a launch tube.

Ten minutes later he picked up the second very big rocket from the pile and did exactly the same thing again.[/quote]
Is this the friend that I may know through my hobby?

 

[swee'pea99]

Back in the infamous Winter of Discontent (ask yer parents) I adapted to the power cuts using tealight candles, ingeniously 'improved' through additional wicks made of burned out matches and the like. I had one of these on a chair which was resting up against my bed.

During one 20 minute absence, one of my improvised wicks somehow overbalanced out of the tealight, coming to rest touching my quilt, which I spotted as I re-entered the room. Between me spotting it and crossing to the bed, the flame on the quilt grew swiftly from the size of a penny to a 10p, which is when I patted it out with my hand. Needless to say, another minute or so and the entire quilt - and my bedroom with it - would have been ablaze. Don't remember mentioning that one to anyone at the time...

 

[MontyVeda]

Back in the infamous Winter of Discontent (ask yer parents) I adapted to the power cuts using tealight candles...

surely they were still called 'nightlights' back then?

Tealights! It's health and safety gown maaaad

 

[tyred]

Memo to self: Don't lend my lighter to anyone on this forum, they'll burn the place down.

 

[green1]

We had a beach party once and my dad decided to light a fire on the rocks rather then on the sand. Seemed like a good idea until the rocks started singing then started going off like bombs. If your going to light a fire on rocks kids, make sure that they are impervious first.

As a teenager I had countless hours of fun making tennis ball bombs and napalm.

 

[asterix]

Years ago when my brother bought his first house, it was necessary to replace the timber ground floor with a concrete one. One weekend we busied ourselves ripping up the rotten of floor and stacking it in the corner ready for the skip.

Satisfied with our work we decided to round it off with some beers. After a few jars one of us (not me of course) had the idea of disposing of as much timber as possible by burning it in the fireplace. It was a cold winter's evening and soon we had a good blaze roaring up the chimney. After a while it occurred to us that there was a bit too much roaring going on and almost at the same time there was a violent hammering on the door. When we opened it there was a very agitated neighbour on the step inviting us outside to look at the chimney. Fighting our way through the crowd that had mysteriously gathered we stood back from the house to see it doing an excellent impression of Vesuvius or maybe Mt. Etna. We were reassured that the fire brigade were already on the way.

It wasn't all bad. My brother's insurance co. got the end wall rendered and as it seems the washing machine was terminally damaged by the fire-fighting operation they bought him a brand new one.

 

[goo_mason]

[QUOTE 2506862, member: 45"]Yes! I'd forgotten that you know him![/quote]
Heh heh. He gets up to a few things. Some of his recent Facebook postings have been hilarious!