This thread is serving a useful purpose for me - it has tickled my memory. I’m going to make enquires and find out what happened to that stuff. As I recall, it was most of a crate of Dynamite, which would make a very large boom I expect if it went off. I hate to think that this stuff may yet be moldering away in a shed somewhere, getting more unstable by the year, but it is certainly possible.
They also had a small box of detonators and a hand-crank for setting them off.
Any thoughts on what to do if it still exists? I imagine I’d want to hire some professionals to dispose of it.
Yeah, I’d definitely recommend getting some experts in to do the job. It would probably be some kind of EOD crew. Do you live near a military base? They might be able to help. Altogether aside from the dynamite, the thought of 30+ year old detonators gives me the creeps. Those things could be real unstable by now.
The Dynamite was already old when I was a child - it must have been purchased in the early 1950s. If it is still around. Not sure about the detonators though - they could have been “new” at the time, but that was 30 years ago now …
I sure hope somebody in my family knows. I’ll ask my dad tonight. If no-one knows, there may be trouble - my granny’s old cottage is filled to the ceiling with assorted old junk of every discription (much of it heavy - old farm equipment, cans of turpentine and paint, rusty old axes and tools, cardboard boxes of musty old account books …). I haven’t even seen the inside of the place for years - last I heard, families of racoons were living in there. I sure don’t relish the thought of searching through piles of heavy, rusty old crap (inhabited by racoons) to find out whether a possibly unstable crate of Dynamite and/or unstable detonators exists in there. :smack:
This is probably exactly the sort of situation that US EOD guy you were talking to described as “a pain”.
Yeah, it sounds like the same kind of thing. I know the EOD guy was also worried about the dirt floor of the shack. If your dad doesn’t know, it’s going to be tough to know whether there is anything in there or not.
I’ve read that miners back in the old days used to do things with dynamite that seem suicidal – they’d heat it up in a pan to get it prepared to blow up. They’d drill holes in it and “lace” it with detonator cord. Although it may have been unstable, there was also the balancing fear that it might not go off when you wanted it to, and they wanted to be sure that it would explode “on command” and completely, and not “hang fire”. This makes me very suspicious of people setting it off with bullets.
When I was a kid, I had a book of pop science that showed a criminal (obviously not a very intelligent one) shooting a machine gun into a barrel of TNT (Which, as SoaT has pointed out isn’t dynamite, but is still a sangeerous explosive, and a notrated one). The caption read that you couldn’t set TNT off by shooting into it – you required some sort of detonator.
I don’t know about heating it. That sounds hellishly dangerous to me. You mentioned lacing it with detonator cord. Back then, AFAIK, they didn’t have det cord. It was just cotton fuse with (I think) gunpowder encapsulated inside. I wonder what they thought that would accomplish.
We used to poke a hole in it to insert the cap and then there was a sort of knot you used when you ran the fuse out away from the charge. The knot, plus some friction tape, held the whole thing together and kept the cap from being pulled out of the charge.
Hang fires are nasty and I don’t blame the people back then for trying to avoid them. I had that happen with ANFO once and wound up spending the afternoon and a part of the night waiting for something to happen. We wound up digging the whole thing up the next day which was very tense.
Yes, I remember that fact from an interesting book on explosives, about WW2 vintage or just after. TNT is really percussion-insensitive and hence quite a bit safer than dynamite (and many times safer than nitroglycerine). Also from the same book, corroboration for “nitroglycerine headache” as mentioned above and the use of small doses as cardiac medicine.
If you see any real-world footage of really sooty explosions, chances are it’s TNT. Nitroglycerine contains enough oxygen for complete combustion of the hydrogen and oxygen, but TNT is deficient by some way and so leaves lots of unburned carbon. TNT-filled shells in WW1 were nicknamed “Jack Johnsons”.
Mythbusters shattered that UL. They rigged up a defibrillator and couldn’t get any patches to pop no matter how they were oriented. They even put both defib paddles on patches and could not get a pop. Later, they went out and got a guy to make actual old-style nitroglycerin and could not get that to pop either. They had to detonate it with conventional means. Made quite a mess of the ballistic gel torso.
Well, another UL bites the dust. I’m surprised the patches made a mess of the torso. I wouldn’t think the patches had that much nitro in them. The info I looked up showed the patches as having .015 grams or a little bit more. If anything made a mess of the dummy I’d bet it was the detonator they used to set the thing off. I know for sure that a blasting cap will make a serious wound.
I can absolutely guarantee that one can detonate dynamite by shooting it.
How do I know?
I’ve been a participant at a “Dynamite Shoot”, where someone wanted to get rid of a case of dynamite.
To set up, they folded a paper pie plate into a “taco” containing 2 sticks, then stapled them to stakes set around 300’ away. There were people shooting everything from handguns to .50cal full-auto machine-guns.
It was great fun.
I believe that there is a minimum concentration of Nitroglycerine necessary before a bullet will detonate dynamite. If memory serves, it’s 60%
