In my mid 20’s, I was going thru the airport security when after the guy asked me about the things I might have in my carryons, I casually said “and oh I can’t forget about my bomb.” The lady who was also there on duty deadpanned the law in question (like it happens every other week for them), and the guy gave me a VERY stern rebuke for c. five minutes, but then let us go on. This was c. 15 years before 9-11, after which I would have been in the hoosegow for sure. That my younger sister was with me probably helped save my ass from my own idiocy.
My experience with model rocketry was similar to your sons, although I was about a year older. My co-conspirators and I would make our own fuel with saltpetre and sugar and craft the rocket bodies out of cardboard tubes with plaster of paris nozzles. The sugar fuel produced a lot of ash and one day I think that we made the throat of the nozzle too narrow. About a second after ignition, there was a brief halt to the exhaust, and then the cardboard tube exploded.
The stupid part of this story was that instead of swearing off model rocketry, we looked at each other and said, “forget about rockets, let’s start making bombs.” Fortunately, no one ever got hurt, or caught.
My brother was the one who did stupid stuff and I sometimes tag along but didn’t for others.
The biggest was he burned down the neighbor’s garage. Behind the building was field and he would start a fire in the bone dry weeds then stomp it out. Little fires got boring so he let them grow a bit first, until finally one got out of hand. Oops. For some reason he escaped any repercussions.
In high school, my friend and I found a cutoff extension cord. One friend straightened out a paper clip and put one end into each wire. He convinced another friend to plug it in. We assumed it would just pop the breaker but instead the paper clip turned bright red then popped little beads of molten steel which made tiny fires in the carpet. The friend who plugged it in then stomped the fires out. The teacher was less than thrilled. The friend even took all the blame for it.
One of stupidest things I did by myself was to touch a downed power line. It had come down during repairs to the house and was hanging above the ground and I touched it to see if it was alive. Fortunately, it wasn’t but that could have been really bad.
Nah, you were fine. You just independently invented the fuse. I once made a magnetizer according to plans in Popular Mechanics. It was a cardboard tube wrapped with many turns of wire. A power cord was attached with one leg interrupted with 2 screws placed in a wood block that had a gap between them about an inch long. You wrapped a piece of thin solder around the bolts. You inserted your screwdriver or whatever in the cardboard tube and plugged 'er in. The solder would explode during a single half cycle of the 60 Hz power which produced a magnetic field that magnetized the tool.
Back in my handyman days, I had to do some plumbing work on a kitchen sink/faucet. To access the incoming pipes, I cut a hole in the wall from the water heater closet on the patio. The closet was about 3’ x 6’.
After I had finished, I thought I would seal the cavity with expanding foam to minimize pests ingress. Since you can’t really store an opened can, I was squirting the whole can in.
Well, I guess the propellant is flammable because just as I was finishing, the whole closet exploded in flames, ignited I presume from the water heater’s pilot light. It blew me about 10’ backwards out onto the patio.
I was, thankfully, pretty much unharmed - minus a little hair here and there.
My freshman year of college a friend needed a ride home to gather some stuff so I drove him. While there I noticed he had a cigar box full of firecrackers. That’ll be fun. We took them and on the ride home were entertaining ourselves behind a slow school bus by lighting them on our cigarettes and tossing them out the window into the rain. I guess they were pretty ancient, because in one of those moments of complete slo-mo I touched one to my cigarette, saw the fuse go “schwipppp” before I could get it 5" from my face and it went off. I kept the car on the road, but neither of us could hear for 10 minutes and there were paper bits throughout the car. Genius.
My high school had a planetarium, which I worked in my sophomore through senior years. It was a class I took, where there were only two students in each period. We helped the director/teacher run shows, do maintenance, and so on.
All along the bottom of the dome were cove lights, similar to this:
There were two rows of lights, one yellow and one blue. The bulbs were florescent tubes about 18 inches long. There were detachable prongs that were seated on each end of the bulb, which was then seated in the dome. So to change a bulb, we’d pull the tube assembly out, remove the prongs on each end, put them on the new bulb, and then seat the assembly back into the dome.
At one point, quite a few bulbs were burnt out, so one day the director set me to changing the bulbs. I was alone that day for some reason. The director left and went out to the lobby. So I began:
Place a ladder near a dark spot, climb up and identify the burnt-out bulb.
Climb down, walk across the room to the console, and power down the dome.
Go back across the room, climb the ladder, and replace the bulb.
Back down the ladder, across the room to the console. Power it back up, and check that the new bulb is working.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. After a changing a couple of bulbs, my addled 16-year-old brain tired of this drawn-out process. Surely if I was careful, I could just change the bulbs without powering down the dome, right? Save myself all these trips back and forth across the room?
I changed a couple of bulbs without incident, and it was so much faster! Then, of course, I managed to stick my finger into one of the empty sockets when pulling out the bulb. Somehow, the jolt I got didn’t knock me off the ladder. My arm was numb for the rest of the day, and hurt for a few days after. I’m lucky that’s all that happened. And of course, I wasn’t about to tell the director about my stupidity, so I managed to finish the job (the proper way!) with a numb arm.
This brought back a memory. I was 17, summer before starting college. I was driving around with my girlfriend while she lit firecrackers and threw them out the window. She’d let the fuse burn down to almost nothing before she threw them, so they’d blow up in mid-air instead of on the road after we had driven aways. Well, she let one fuse burn just a tiny bit too long. Yes, not a pleasant experience to have a firecracker go off in the car. Especially while driving.
I’m impresssed with the number of former Doper Mad Bombers posting in this thread.
Any curiosity one might have had about experimenting with pipe bombs would have been dispelled by a presentation I once saw at a forensic pathology conference. It was a seminar on forensic investigation into victims of bomb explosions, notably featuring individuals who were blown up by bombs they had been constructing. Very graphic (forensic pathologists love showing gruesome photos).
I once knew a radio news reporter in Indianapolis whose head was perhaps not screwed on as tightly as it could have been. One of his misadventures involved trying to start his beater of a car on a really cold winter day. He used starter fluid to spray into the carburetor. He figured that if the recommended one squirt was good, spraying in most of the can would work even better. Starter fluid is highly flammable, and when he cranked the starter, a huge gout of flame came out of the engine compartment and ignited a pile of clean laundry that he had placed on the car’s roof. He wore the same clothes for quite a while afterwards.
Once, years ago, Mrs. J. was away from home and told me to take the Thanksgiving turkey out of the freezer to defrost it. Which I did. She was not pleased when she came back and found the turkey sitting out on the kitchen counter, completely defrosted.
We combined model rocketry and bombs. I drilled out the nose and placed a .22 cartridge with the bullet removed. The primer end was sticking out in front. I added a small bag of black powder. The resulting rocket was fairly heavy so they didn’t go far. If they hit something solid they blew up. The best shot I remember was when we sent one horizontally into the woods and it hit a tree. But the one I remember most was a normal one. We fired it from the standard rod launcher and were probably 100 feet away. But the wind caught it and it weather-vaned towards us. We watched the smoke trail in a graceful arc and realized we were at ground zero. We hit the ground like GIs in a war movie and it exploded about 10 feet in front of us.
Bombers older than their teens typically act out of a desire for revenge or financial gain. Forensic path conferences attract mostly…pathologists, who are unlikely candidates for bombers, though I knew a pathologist who set off explosive devices in hospital trash cans.
When I was 16, I was once playing idly with a Swiss army knife and I decided to run the blade over the bottom of my foot “to see what will happen.” The results were…what you’d expect.
