My mom had a Lou Malnati’s spinach pizza shipped to our house from Chicago. It’s kinda strange getting a pizza in the mail. Also kinda strange to spend $40 so my wife and I can have a small pizza. It was good, although we would have gotten more mileage out of a $40 gift card to Round Table.
Anyway, the pizza came in a Styrofoam box with a small bag of dry ice. I have about 4 or 5 pieces of dry ice, each about the size of my palm. I hate to throw them out or just drop them into a glass of water.
I need some Doper help. In all fairness, I couldn’t buy any dry ice entertainment from Round Table.
Squeeze them with tongs under hot water for good popping. Put a piece in water with liquid soap and watch bubbles form. My son and I used to have a good time with the dry ice that came with the Omaha Steaks my in-laws used to send.
Cut them into pieces about the size of your thumb. Buy a 20-oz soft drink in a plastic bottle, drink the beverage. Put a piece into the bottle, then fill it about 1/10 - 1/5 full of lukewarm tap water (not hot, not cold). Put the lit on the bottle. Shake the bottle. Throw the bottle. Seek cover.
It will sound like a nuclear warhead went off. Seriously, I’ve done this and it’s rattled neighbors’ windows (which is why I recommend you don’t do this in a populated area. Unless you want a visit from your county sheriff. Or Homeland Security.).
Have you tried this recently (with the past year or so?) We used to do it all the time, then hadn’t for a few years. I was telling some buddies about it last year, so decided to show them. Bought some dry ice, procured some soda bottles and… was disappointed.
I’ve thought bottles seemed thinner now than they used to be, and the dry ice seemed to agree with me. Instead of the pleasing kaboom, I got a loud-ish “fzzshhhh” as the bottle split before a good amount of pressure had been built up.
I’ve done it and discovered that the bottle caps leak and had to resort to using duct tape.
I would also recommend that you do not make dry ice bombs. I had one that reached an equilibrium of sorts. It had expanded all the way it was going to expand but had not blown up. I was left with a veritable ticking time bomb. I fired a BB gun at it and it did not explode. I finally ended up throwing it in a burn barrel in which we were burning dead brush and leaves. The bomb exploded and immediately smothered the fire. While extremely interesting, I also realized it was extremely dangerous.
Look up dry ice tricks on youtube. I saw a neat one the other day where the guy put all the ice in a big bowl. He soaped up a strip of towel (dish soap maybe) and rubbed it around the rim of the bowl. Then he stretched out the soapy strip across the top of the bowl and ran it across slowly (but not too slow) to form a huge soap bubble over the top. The ice expanded and it was HUGE before it finally popped and dropped a cloud all over the table.
Making exploding bottles isn’t seen as funny anymore by the cops. This was one of my friends in college. I also had a friend make exploding PVC tubes using dry ice at a quarry and was arrested for making explosives. I wouldn’t recommend doing anything of the sort.
Got any ant hills you want to exterminate? Put the dry ice on the ant hole, and cover it with a bucket, sealing the edge with soil/sand. The resulting heavier-than-air CO2 will sink into the ant nest and smother the little buggers.
Ah, that’s the difference between setting them off in the middle of a populated area and setting them off in the middle of nowhere, which is what we do/did.
They are surprisingly powerful though, as mentioned by another poster. We blew up a cinder block with one.
They’re great for fishing. At night.
WARNING! DO NOT DO THIS! IT IS ILLEGAL!
But I didn’t know that when I was 14. We would take a cinderblock out in a johnboat, with some dry ice and a 2-liter soda bottle. We would tie the bottle to the cinderblock, add the ice and some water to the bottle, cap it, and then sink the bottle and cinderblock over the side of the boat (in about 10 feet of water). We would then shine our flashlights down INTO the water, and bounce the beams off of the bottle. Curious fish investigate the lights…(some of the fish were quite large, including bass, perch, etc). Eventually, bottle explodes, now-dead curious fish float to the surface and you scoop them up with a net. Large fish-fry ensues…
You can still suffer significant penalties for doing that in unpopulated areas. The aforementioned quarry was well outside of city limits and was an inactive one. They got caught because a few weeks later someone noticed the debris and reported it. Apparently the local Lowe’s hadn’t sold much of that pipe lately, except for a small amount to three teenagers.
Wow. We did this in high school (in chemistry class, c. 1990), and I would do similar stuff in my backyard as a kid (in Chicago). It would never have occurred to me that blowing up pop bottles would get me arrested.
Get a 5-gallon bucket and a bottle of dishwashing liquid. Fill the bucket most of the way with hot water, and load it, the dish soap, your dry ice, and yourself in the bed of a pickup truck. While someone else drives around, unscrew the top off the dish soap and dump the whole thing into the water. Then, drop in the dry ice.
The bed of the pickup will fill with bubbles, which will break away and fly merrily off behind as you drive around.
