Ooookay. I was a child from hell and truly fascinated by anything that would explosively deconstruct itself. This is a tale about an exploit that I emphatically didn’t get away with. In the early '70s I was in my mid teens and swiped an entire can of metallic sodium under oil from the HS chem lab. The can was rusty as hell and had obviously been there for years. I knew nothing about sodium except what was on the can in large red letters:
“Caution. Reacts violently with water!”
Just the stuff! No need for all that grinding and mixing required for black powder, just add water.
Anyway, I stashed my new toy in the garage and waited for Sunday when I knew my parents would be going to church.
OK, as I said, I knew nothing about sodium except for the information on the label and was unsure just how “violent” the reaction might be. I decided to start cautiously and used some tongs to remove a greasy chunk of sodium fom the can. It was about two inches in diameter and an inch thick.
I chucked my piece of sodium into the gravel driveway, got behind a corner of the garage, and sprayed a hose at it. When the water hit the oily sodium I started to see little sparks and hear a popping noise. I though “Shit! They call that a “violent” reaction?” and stepped out from behind the garage. . .just in time for the last of the oil to wash away and expose that enormous piece of sodium to the water. The neighbors later said it sounded like I had fired a shotgun in the back yard.
Yours-truly was suddenly covered in small sprinkles of metallic sodium, vigorously reacting with the moisture on my skin. What to do? Think quickly! Wash it off? I think not.
I ran into the kitchen, stripped hurredly, and dumped an entire bottle of corn oil over my head, using the oil and paper towels to sluice this damnable chemical off me before it ate into me any further.
It was at this point my parents came home to find their teenage son standing in the kitchen, stark naked, and covered in Mazola oil.
I couldn’t even think of a lie that would do me any good.
grade 10… out with some buddies in the woods playing with pellet guns. one buddy takes aim at a tree – he hits the tree, but the riccochet catches another buddy between the eyebrow & temple. half an inch off, and it would have put his eye out. we carry/drag hurting buddy to my parents house (after taking time to bury the pellet guns in the woods) and my mom drives us to the hospital. buddy gets the bb removed from his head, and a cop (who i believe just happened to be there in emerg, but either way was directed to talk to us) starts asking questions about how buddy got shot. shot buddy pipes up, “we were walking through the woods, and some guy started shooting at us with a bb gun from across the creek” he goes on to describe the fictional dude in the vaguest terms possible, and the rest of us (about a half dozen 15 - 16 year olds) just go along with the story; even so far as to take the cops to the spot where the shooting supposedly occurred – though about a half klick from where it actually occurred.
the next day, and for the next week, the “random shooting” was on the news, and three of us even went so far as to dig up the pellet guns (with one as a scout keeping eye in case) and move them to another burial site about a klick away.
when i was in grade 13, i ran into my grade 11 english teacher (she was by far the hottest teacher at my highschool, and only eight years older than me) while partying downtown on new years eve. she had just had a fight with her long term boyfriend, and after a short time reminiscing all the bullshit i put her through when i was her student, we went back to her apartment and yadda yadda yadda… (by that i mean lots of weird, fun, and nasty sex.) i told my mom i passed out drunk at my buddy’s place.
and at least three or four times while i was still living with the folks, i drove to detroit to party with friends, while telling mom i was just gonna be on the other side of town. nothing especially stupid ever happenned on those trips, but i guess leaving the country and lying about it might qualify as a valid story for this thread.
It must have been a seriously revolting sight for a pair of staunch Baptists to confront directly after church. I remember being actually glad to tell them that I had just blown myself up and wasn’t doing anything . . .you know . . .weird.
Yeah, I saw much the same thing demonstrated in college chem and was amazed at the tiny piece of sodium the guy used.
Hillibillys should never play with explosives. Sooner or later you always hear; “Hey y’all. Watch This!” Just before something really bad happens.
This reminds me of the Chem teacher I had in HS. We (dorks) used to hang out in his class during breaks because… you guessed it, he let us blow stuff up. Thermite was the fav (as well as calcium carb. in water [which led to the aforementioned porch destroying oxy-acetalene bomb]) and we even let the molten metal fall into a vat of water. The instructions in the lab book something like ‘don’t let molten thermite fall into water as it may cause an explosive Hydrogen/Oxygen situation.’ So of course, with the teach’s suggestion we did it, it was perfect. get thousands of degrees of molten fun that is so hot it splits the H and O into gas form and sets them off, its perfect. I am still surprised at how I NEVER hear of any teen pranks with Thermite, it is just so easy to make…
Secondly, I just recalled the time I was out camping wiht the guys (were we good little outdoorsmen, just some bb guns, didnt even start any ginormo fires) and, while not trying to brag, I shot my buddy from ~175 ft. with the 10 pump bb gun(thanks Cardinal for the bb gun). Aimed just enough above him to hit him smack dab on the ear in the center of the side of his head. Later I shot him from MUCH closer point blank range RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES. It was a perfect shot, the bridge of his nose was bleeding good, he shot back at me, I ran to him striped off my shirt and applied pressure till the bleeding stopped. He was a good bloke about it after it was all said and done, but man, I could have put out his eye. Needless to say even though my kids are too young to handle even a .22 they know as a mantra: “guns are tools not toys, never point them at people.”
My first year in college, my family lived in a little subdivision outside a small town in Minnesota. There was another subdivision about half a mile up the road toward the town. Both subdivisions had road signs announcing their presence (like someone’s gonna get lost out there, yeah right).
One summer night when we had nothing better to do, someone (and it might have been me, I don’t really remember) suggested that we go swap the two signs around. So we all piled in the car (I definitely was driving) and pulled up to one sign and one of my brothers’ friends stood on the trunk of the car and took all the bolts out of the sign and took it down. We put it on top of the car and two guys hung on to it and we drove off down the road to the other sign. Got three of the four bolts out and the fourth one jammed. Now, this was after dark on a summer night and traffic was pretty light, but we were all getting antsier and antsier about getting caught. Finally got the bolt out, got the sign down, and that’s when we discovered that while the two signs looked like they were the same size–they weren’t. So there we were with two big road signs that were not interchangeable.
We had just managed to get both of the signs back in their proper places and I’d started driving back toward our subdivision when a cop car went by going the other way with its lights on. I went whipping into our garage (which was under the house) so fast I almost hit the back wall, and we all piled out of the car and ran inside the house and told my mom to tell the cops we weren’t there. You can imagine her reaction to that.
The cops did actually stop by about an hour later and unfortunately my brothers had decided the coast was clear and were sitting around in the living room. No escape. They got a big lecture and a warning. Good thing our parents were “pillars of the community” or we’d all probably have gotten arrested.
Needless to say, nobody but our parents drove the car for the rest of the summer.
In 8th grade I blew an enormous hole in the roof of my high school chemistry lab via the reliable medium of sodium and water. I was officially, at least for a short time, the coolest kid inthe class after that!
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A classmate of mine found out how to make NI[sub]3[/sub]. That stuff is seriously pressure-sensitive. He went around making bangs with little lumps of it for some time to come
Nearest I ever got was a mixture of powdered starch and some kind of oxidiser (sodium nitrate or similar). My idea of testing it was to take a small pile of it outside and put a light to it. Fortunately for me, all it did was burn nice and fast and make a huge cloud of smoke, I mean, for all the quality control I’d done it might have made a big enough bang to discount the fact that I was lighting it at arm’s length.
Never managed to pilfer any sodium though. (If you think that stuff’s vicious, you should have tried it with potassium.)
Once, when I was about 10, I overheard my mom complaining about how a maurading skunk was coming by at night and tearing up the backyard lawn, looking for grubs. Being the enterprising little kid I was, I built a skunk trap. I pilfered some plywood boards from my dad’s workroom and hot-glued them together. A couple years prior I had seen how lobster traps were built, so the critters could get in but not out, so I tried to construct my trap the same way, angling the entrance boards. I then placed the trap in the backyard and stuck a cookie inside. My mom must have seen it, but doubtless thought that it was some kind of fort I had made for my action figures and didn’t bother to check it out.
Let me tell you, that sumbitch actually worked. The very next morning we were woken up by horrible squalls coming from the backyard. My dad went to investigate and as soon as he opened the door, the unmistakable stench wafted in. I was quite excited and boasted that I’d made this trap, and yay, we caught a skunk! My pride was squashed when my mom responded with, “What were you thinking?? we can’t get near that skunk, how are we going to get it out of there??” Long story short, animal control was called, and they came and flipped the trap over with a couple big long pole things. The unhappy skunk gave one more burst of mist from his rear and waddled as fast as he could into the hedge and disappeared.
My mom grounded me for the weekend but my dad told me he was proud that I’d built the trap all by myself. Just not to do it again.
About a year ago my boyfriend of awhile had just broken up and I decided to set fire to every letter he ever wrote me when I was in rehab and I forgot to get some water or something in case said fire got out of control, I was doing this in my room by the way. I was talking on the phone with a good friend when I ended up dropping the phone yelling obscenities cuz I couldn’t drop the fire ball that was in my hand, I had to run down the hall to the bathroom and get rid of the ball of fire in the toilet. I still have a scar covering my entire left thumb
Sodium and water is some fun stuff, but potassium will actually work even better, if you can get a hold of it. NI3 is one of the best things on earth, too.
As for my weekend, let me just state that my local hardware store sells 11 molar HCL for four bucks a gallon, and leave it at that.
He saw said husband playing with his Zippo, so he wanted to try. Somehow he caught a stack of papers on fire. So the kid(who I pray is adopted, because my children will get these genes) sticks the papers in his backpack and under my husband’s bed. Well this causes the mattress to catch fire. Mom comes home to find a smoldering mattress in the yard and the nephew hiding in the attic. To this day she still blames my husband.
