Pyrotechnic Adventures

I guess I never quite grew up. Most young boys love fireworks and firecrackers. They go through a phase of blowing things up or inventing ways to use fire and explosives for good fun and excitement. Then they move on to more serious and less destructive forms of entertainment. I just never outgrew the phase.

When I think back of all the crazy stuff we used to do as kids with various forms of explosives, I marvel that I survived my childhood with all my eyes and fingers still functional. There were no such things as terrorists and una-bombers, yet, so it was relatively easy to get a hold of dangerous chemicals and compounds. There weren't so many safety regulations and liability lawyers in those days. Besides, most parents were willing to let their children go unsupervised for most of the day. As long as we checked in occasionally when we got hungry, we could do just about anything we wanted to without fear of getting in big trouble.

Home-made Bullets

My first memories of dangerous experiments come from the time when our family lived in the flat roofed house in Vancouver. I was about 11 years old and the house was located just off St. John's Road on the edge of the city. There were lots of fields and forests, a lake and a train track.

Dad always had ammunition in the house, mostly boxes of .22 shells, but they weren't available for us to experiment with. My brother and I got it into our heads that we could make our own bullets. I had a small chemistry set that contained the chemicals we needed to make the old fashioned black-powder that was used by mountain men in their flint-lock rifles. We mixed potassium nitrate, sulfur and charcoal together in a cup. We would then use the metal tube from discarded ball point pens and remove the ink. We then closed off one end of the tube and filled it up with gun powder. Finally, we used a rock to pound a shot gun shell pellet into the open end of the tube. The finished product was essentially a very crude attempt to make a bullet. We then placed the small tube in the crack of a telephone pole so the end with the pellet stuck in it pointed toward some target. Then, with our bare hands, we held a lit candle under the tube to cause the gun power to ignite. Usually, we only managed to achieve a little pop. The only thing that saved us from serious injury was our ignorance about the proper way to make traditional gun powder. Had we only known how to properly make the gun powder, it might have been powerful enough to do some serious damage to exposed hands and faces. In this case, the failure was actually a blessing.

This saga will require many more writing sessions. I will describe the heart-wrenching episodes in following articles. I advise all readers to be prepared with a large box of industrial-grade Kleenex tissues.