Eleven Year Old Boys Making Explosives
(Keep this article away from your kid.)
When I was 11, we created our own fun. We didn’t sit around on the couch all day poking buttons. No siree, we did things that were a lot more fun than that. Almost getting killed or almost getting arrested is more exciting than any Game Boy. When I was a little kid it seemed like there wasn’t much danger in anything. The world was my playground. I had an inquiring mind and so did my friend Bill who lived down the street. Bill adored his grandpa who was a gunsmith. He was the kind a gunsmith that did everything. He loaded bullets and made guns. It was fun. Combine that with my dad being a science teacher that loved to show students science experiments and you will see that nothing of what you are about to read is my fault
I’d like to take a moment out to apologize to my parents who are in heaven. It couldn’t have been easy raising me and putting up with all of my shenanigans so let me apologize in advance for the things that I did that you may not yet know about. My parents didn’t have a clue about what I was doing because I learned early on that if you want to do anything in this household, you do it secretly so Mom and Dad don’t know.
Mom especially never wanted me to have any fun. What you are about to read will probably make you gasp for air and will horrify you. Be forewarned.
When I was a child I was not aware if there was any laws in place about what I was doing. I was a kid and I realized that as a kid, if I got caught the law would go easy on me. I had no frontal lobe, I was just a dumb kid. We both watched a lot of movies so we knew our rights. My friend Bill and I talked about if we got arrested for any of these things we did, we are under 18 so they’ll go easy on us. We probably won’t go to prison for the rest of our life, so we are good to go. Thanks to Bill’s grandpa we learned the chemical formula for making gunpowder. . Every child should know how to make gunpowder. It’s a tremendous source of entertainment. We played with gunpowder all the time in cap guns and firecrackers. I’m amazed I can still hear out of my right ear.
We originally were trying to make a rocket but it never flew, it just sort of burned instead. We decided that we would have more luck making a firecracker than a rocket. Yeah, that’s the ticket. We will make a huge firecracker. I should be a lot of fun. We needed to get ahold of saltpeter. We were smart enough to know that saltpeter was given to men in World War II so they didn’t try to mate with everything in France. We also knew that they gave it to livestock so bulls wouldn’t constantly trying to be jumping on cows. We decided to go to the corner drugstore and tell the pharmacist that my dad had a bunch of cattle and he needed to have some saltpeter. Considering what saltpeter does, it’s rather funny name. Anyway I digress. Now pharmacist is a chemist of course and he knew exactly what we were going to do but he figured maybe it’ll be okay just this once so he sold us a big can of saltpeter. It could’ve been the truth and it’s possible we were not lying. Yeah right, huh? So we took the saltpeter home and mixed it with a bunch of dad’s garden sulfur, the stuff you sprinkled on roses to kill aphids. And then we took a bunch of briquettes and smashed them up with a hammer and ground them up into a powder as best as we could. We mixed it altogether and made crude raw dog gunpowder. It actually worked pretty good when we lit a match to it. So now we had lots of gunpowder and we need to figure out how to make a casing that’s strong enough to make a big bang when it bursts. We tried a toilet paper tube and that was no good.. It just burned.
In writing this article, I just got an idea how I could make a really good firecracker but again, a tad dangerous. I am too old to think like this and much too pretty for prison..If you read this and decide to go to the coppers and tell them everything you know they are not going to give you a big fat reward. And, if ya think I am telling bad people how to make gunpowder, don’t worry. If you look up gunpowder, the chemical ingredients are shown right there in the dictionary.
This happened so long ago, so if you turn me in to the coppers for a big juicy reward, they are not going to give you doodily squat so I say to you — -, neener neener neener .
This is where my story starts getting illegal by today’s standards but keep in mind that I was 11 years old, I was just an innocent country boy that knew nothing about nothing , and nothing was dangerous and everything was perfectly legal. — — -and safe……
Not finding a suitable casing for our homemade firecracker, I had a brilliant idea. Dad had a piece of pipe in the tool room that was threaded on both ends and he had caps that screwed onto that pipe. We decided that we could screw a cap on one end with Dad’s pipe wrenches and fill the thing with home made gunpowder. I think I remember that a fuse would not be a good idea because fuses don’t burn at a consistent speed and the whole thing might blow up in our faces. I had that happen with a firecracker one time and that was not fun. We decided to head over the to the river which was miles away from any populated area and make a fire and lay our firecracker on the fire and that would give us plenty of time to run like hell. So we hopped on a little bicycles and rode over to the river and dug a big hole in the sand. We got leaves and twigs and larger pieces of wood and made quite a little bonfire in the hole. Then we laid our firecracker on the fire and just like in our plan, we ran like hell. We were pretty sure the fire was going to burn long enough to do the job. I don’t remember what we hid behind but it was a great firecracker and I’m glad we hid behind something. Something flew up into the sky and gained such altitude that I was totally impressed to have done that. We watched it come down, whatever it was. We ran over to Ground Zero and there was a strip of metal about as long as the pipe was. It was about an inch wide and it was ripped on both sides. Oh I remember the pride that Bill and I had that we had made such a magnificent firecracker that could only be talked about to close friends. I think we felt kind of empowered, like we discovered our own version of the atomic bomb.
But we needed more saltpeter because we used all the old stuff up. The next day we went back to the pharmacist and told him that Dad needed more saltpeter for his cattle. How dare the pharmacists say that he thought we were making gunpowder and he wasn’t going to sell us any more saltpeter. That dirty rat was taking away all of our fun.
We were very disappointed but are little brains were working. Saltpeter is white powder so maybe any white powder will do. Dad had all kinds of junk in the tool room that he used for various things. He had a 5 gallon bucket of some white powder. I don’t remember what it was but I think he might’ve used it to kill weeds. No, that wasn’t it, It was for something else but it was white and powdery. Don’t you dare think cocaine, that is today thinking. At this point I’d like to say that I really hope you are trying to see this through the eyes of an inquisitive 11-year-old boy. You can remember that far back can’t you ? Little girls know nothing of the wierd things boys do. Maybe this is quite an education for you girls, and you boys did “things”, didn’t you ? We tried mixing whatever this powder was with sulfur and charcoal and it burned very well. I remember being quite impressed that it seemed to behave like real gunpowder. Except this gunpowder had an evil secret. It could self ignite after a few hours. Not realizing this I mixed up a couple of quarts of homemade Frankenstein gunpowder and gave a quart jar to my friend Ron and I kept a quart for myself. A day later in the evening, I got a frantic call from Ron. He seemed angry and he said that the gunpowder had started burning and set his closet on fire. He demanded that I show up with a can of white paint and a paintbrush pronto. He was so fussy, it didn’t burn the house down so that made this whole thing funny. I was laughing at his anger which I love to do with Ron. I remember laughing at his charred closet shelves and teasing him saying, your mom probably won’t notice this at all, while laughing. And then I remembered the homemade gunpowder sitting on the workbench at home. I rushed home and to my dismay, sure enough, the gunpowder caught on fire and burst through the jar and the contents burned the workbench which was 2 inch thick plank redwood. Redwood doesn’t burn very well, so I got really lucky that I didn’t burn down the house. My gunpowder didn’t explode the jar. The heat just cracked the jar and the fiery contents spilled out. I remember doing some really fierce sanding with some very coarse sandpaper to remove the char on the workbench and try to make it look passable before Dad saw it . I admire Dad for not seeing many things. Oh he saw everything but he had the patience to let me learn things the hard way. However, if he knew the extent of my escapades he would’ve not looked the other way. He never saw what happened next. Quite frankly, when I started writing this story I don’t think I fully realized how many times I could’ve gotten killed by what I was doing. I’m sitting here right now with age-old chills and a feeling of how lucky I am to be sitting at all and writing this story.
We realized, Bill and I, that we were just little kids and we are not going to get away with this very much longer for many reasons so we decided to make the biggest firecracker in the world and than retire forever. Across the street they were building a new house and I went over there with my pipe wrench and I procured a piece of pipe from the new construction. It was about 2 feet long and maybe 3 inches across. That sounds about right. There were caps there as well which I needed because my pipe was threaded on both ends. So, I had all of the basics for a mammoth firecracker.
We screwed the cap on one end and we filled the pipe up with this Frankenstein gunpowder that self ignites all willy nilly. We knew that we would be in danger if we screwed the other end before we got to our secret detonation spot. Thank God we put rags in the pipe to hold the gunpowder in place while we rode our little bikes over the river. You see something we didn’t plan on was that if gunpowder gets in pipe threads the pressure and friction of screwing on the other cap could have set the whole thing off and we would’ve most likely gotten killed. Phooey on that sissy thinking. We are men and adrenelin is so much fun. Well we made it to the river safely and I guess we brought a couple of pipe wrenches to screw the other cap onto this huge thing. At the same time a little fire was roaring so we placed it on the fire and we ran like our little butts were on fire. We hid behind some rocks or an embankment or something. It was our swansong in making firecrackers and it was magnificent. I don’t think the picture at the top of this article is sufficient to show the force that we witnessed.
Dad always said that he was pretty sure I had a guardian angel. When I look back at all the dangerous things I did, I am absolutely positive that I have a guardian angel.
The explosion but Bill and I created with our “firecracker” would have impressed John Wayne. I am sure that the shockwave we created is still reverberating around the globe. This is a true story.
