I don’t know that I would describe it as “crazy,” but it was an experiment nonetheless:
Hypothesis: Spiced rum and root beer is an acceptable substitute for a rum and coke.
Method: Add 2 oz. spiced rum, in this case Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum (92 proof), to a highball glass with ice then fill with root beer, in this case Barq’s. Garnish with lime wedge. Drink.
Result: Successfully mixed a tasty cocktail. The spiced rum is a nice element, and works well with the root beer. Kind of made the root beer root-beer-ier, for lack of a better description.
Conclusion: A decent cocktail, but a rum and coke it surely is not.
PSA time though. Folks don’t make these things. You pack things wrong, get some friction in the right place and boom in your face. See my nail in the rocket engine experiment. A little friction is all it took. I got lucky. The hammer got blown out of hand and ejected out the shed door. The nail went through the shed roof and probably took out a passing Russian spy satellite. And this was an engine just the size a shotgun shell at most. And not even fully contained.
If you aren’t very very sure you’ve figured out how to NOT accidentally set one off you probably shouldn’t do it.
Decades ago we got a motel room with a hot tub for some fun times. At one point I walked to a nearby grocery store to buy papers. Also bought some Mr Bubbles. Oh my.
One day I was in the mood for a little soda. We don’t generally keep soda in the house, but we had some mini-cans from a recent party. It was grape, which was fine for the little bit I was in the mood for. It was warm from the pantry so I poured it in a glass over ice.
Watching the soda foam, some of the foam turned bright blue, which was different from the purple surrounding it. Being a good scientist, I knew that many dyes were pH dependent (think litmus paper) and I wondered of the popping carbon dioxide bubbles were making small local changes in pH.
I decided to try it out and add some vinegar to push the pH more acidic and it did turn more blue!
I got excited and called the kids to come see. Opened a new can. Added vinegar. Color change. Since many pH dependent dyes are reversible, I thought I could change the color back to purple by adding a base- baking soda. As I was dumping the baking soda in, years of judging elementary school science fairs came rushing back.
Yes, I made a grape soda volcano explode in my kitchen. :smack:
(and it did turn back to purple and then a muddy brown!)
I was a latchkey kid growing up. We were out of cookies. I wanted cookies.
Recipe:
Combine a box of corn flakes, a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of corn syrup, and a squeezy-bear of honey. Mix and roll into golf ball sizes. Bake at 400F for the amount of time to practice some sweet bike jumps at your friend’s house down the street. Return to flaming obsidian.
13 yrs old. Decided to see how many times I could run and jump off my uncle’s 2 story barn and do a roll when hitting the ground so as not to break anything.
result: 3 times! Broke my ankle
Made my own rockets from scrounged together Estes kits. Wondered what would happen if I attached fins and a nosecone directly to a D-engine.
result: I have no idea where it went or if it simply blew apart. Ignited it and it disappeared. Perhaps I created an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and it will re-emerge soon.
Freshman year of HS (1977), decided during an unsupervised interval in chemistry class to mix various substances in a in a jar being heated by a Bunsen burner.
Result: Thick smoke, noxious fumes, fire alarms sounded, school evacuated, fire dept investigation, 1 week suspension. I don’t know how they knew it was me. I think someone ratted.
I remember a news story from growing up. A local boy had made a bunch of gun powder. Then, he made it into a pipe bomb. Not wanting to hurt any people or property, he decided to set it off in a nearby park. The bomb detonated while he was carrying it and he lost an arm.
This is why I never did any experiments with explosives.
Before undertaking any experiment, I always ask myself “If this kills me, is this the way I want to go?”
Some of my experiemtns had merit but were poorly executed.
I had my snail farm for harvesting snail slime. Only way I could figure out how to harvest was to have them crawl up the glass and then scrape the glass with razor blades to get the powder which I could rehydrate.l Took forever to get less than a tea spoon.
And then my wind operated compost turner, wind mill would wind up the spring with very low gearing until it had enough power to turn compost. Became gear bound and would not operate. I needed a much bigger prop.
Well, he didn’t make me. But in trying to replicate the hot air balloon he made out of large, plastic laundry bags, instead of the only thing I had on hand at 11 years old — brown lunch bags — that when I lit the candle hung by strings from the bottom, in peering over the paper bags to see what that flickering light was, the hot flames consuming the bag seared off my eyebrows.
And almost set the basement, then the house, on fire.
Luckily, I was quick enough to pat out the flames with a rug close by.
My eyebrowless face was enough punishment for playing with fire in the house, my parents thought. The kids at school proved them right.
This was an urban/school legend when I was a kid. Supposedly, a bad kid did this at the local HS- experiment details:
-Light cherry bomb
-toss into toilet
-flush toilet
Result: shattering blast, toilet destroyed, kid sent to reform school.
Everybody seemed to think this was true…has anyone performed this crucial experiment?
An experiment is when you wrap a lump of sodium in tinfoil, flush it, and measure how far down the sewer it gets before exploding.
My experiment was the pressure-containing capability of a 2 litre plastic soft drinks bottle, tested by leaving home made ginger beer at least 2 weeks over the normal fermentation period. Unlike glass bottles, plastic bottles don’t pop or shatter - they just get more pressurized. And go off like a fountain when you carelessly open them in the kitchen. It took some time to clean the ceiling after that episode. Believe me when I say that I wasn’t going to stick my mouth over to spray to prevent waste - I would have lost my head.
I have, in the distant past, while wearing a lab coat and carrying a clipboard, told people in grocery stores “I wouldn’t buy that one” in an low but authoritative voice. It worked surprisingly well as an experiment in social behaviour - I’d say more than 2/3 the targets just put back the item and moved on, without a backwards glance. Only a couple ever asked “Why not?”. I guess the rest saw the joke. Even more interesting is that I never got called on it by any store employees or management, and I must have done it 2 or 3 times, to 15 or more people in total.
I guess it was kind of an experiment. One fine day I got a hold of some European firecrackers, the kind with a match head type igniter instead of a fuse. I took them down the to the Valley (the Emerald Necklace woods around Cleveland), and went looking for a good use for them. I found a large rotting tree that had fallen against a cliff, and decided that this would work. I took the firecrackers (which I knew had a decent amount of time from ignition to explosion from previous experimentation) and stuck them into the log around it in a partial ring. I took a flat rock, and quickly scraped it around the tops of the firecrackers, and after briefly checking to see that they all lit, ran like hell. I was wise to do so. The rotting trunk cracked in half at the blast point and the whole thing came crashing down, knocking over another small tree and bringing down a bunch of shale from the cliff. I considered the experiment a success.
That’s not strictly true; I was making some homemade root beer for my niece and nephews, and it was in our little utility room/computer room.
I’d followed everything to the letter, except let it go an extra day or two, thinking “Plastic bottles don’t explode”. Well, apparently the temp in the room was higher than I’d expected, and the yeast got extra excited.
The 2 2-liter bottles of sugary root beer ended up exploding- they blew completely through a plastic grocery sack that was intended to contain any ruptures, and managed to splatter all 4 walls and the ceiling with root beer, flooded the floor with root beer, and managed to basically drench anything in the room with root beer, except for stuff shielded by other things.
I ended up having to wash the room down and repaint it; it stained the cheap-ass paint the prior owners of the house had used. I had to wipe everything off, and was cleaning sticky things up for a couple months after that.
To this day my mom says “WHY did we let you send away for Chemistry supplies back in 7th grade? We should have known you’d make explosives. You’re just lucky you didn’t burn the house down.”
Should I tell her how close I came to that? About how I tested a tiny little bit of my latest recipe* indoors, and had to jump back as a column of flame shot up to the ceiling and then fanned out in every direction, almost to the walls?
*Aluminum powder (ground until it’s the consistency of sifted flour), potassium chlorate, a pinch of sulfur, and a dash of strontium nitrate to give it that hellish red glow.
Worked as a bright red flash powder, or as a potent explosive (when poured into homemade M-80 casings and sold to friends at school).
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… That’s not strictly true …
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Um…since this is an experiment thread I feel compelled to report that that they “shatter” somewhere between 90 to 125 PSI.
Not that I would have tried this.
And my goofiest experiment occurred when I observed that small model airplane fuel has about the same alcohol content as Jade East Aftershave. Its use as an airplane fuel has the tendency to make the neighborhood smell like a sailor in a cat-house.
