Kaye.

These sorts of threads are the funniest ones to sit back and read

Bill_S

I'm glad I wandered into this thread... Mike and Iain are quite right. I was in high school in the 1970s - long before the internet was invented. There was no trouble getting detailed information about explosives and pyrotechnics. My high school's library had plenty of encylopedias and other reference books full of data and formulae. I found myself amused when the big bad internet started getting the blame for teens experimenting with pyrotechnics... the necessary information has been widely available free for decades, but nobody was blaming libraries for having too many books.

Butch Cassidy

< Butch

/\/\<Mark

<><point were we would consider someone was overstepping said mark.

Good job for me, eh.

Novocastrian

Oooh! A chemistry thread!

I recall mixing the ingredients for gunpowder in a rather large mortar and pestle thingy during a chemistry lab at school. My mate (honest guv, wasn't me) decided we needed a bit more carbon but unfortunately the bottle was empty. Being highly edumacated we decided to make our own carbon by burning a wooden ruler.

That part worked.

However, being impetuous youf, we neglected to assure that the newly minted carbon had sufficiently cooled down before adding it to the mix.

The result was a particularly impressive volcano of spitting fire which did not improve the decoration in the lab one iota and caused the mortar to decease with astonishing abruptness.

The teacher (Mr. MacDonald god rest his soul) raised his eyes and observed the carnage wryly.

"Castrian", he said, "Please use more moderate quantities in the future".

And returned to his reading.

The rest is history. I was smitten.

<True Story>.

Pammy

My Chemistry teacher said when he first met me I was a shrinking violet but by the time I left I was a blooming nuisance

Oh well, I passed anyway

Bill_S

Well done!

I have plenty of true stories, but I don't think I'll be sharing many of them on a public forum... it's a wonder I and my best mate from those days still have 10 fingers each. I'll allow that we discovered the thermite reaction works just as well with chromic oxide as it does with ferric.

Novocastrian

And of course even better with half Al and half Mg.

<we'll be getting a knock on the door later I expect >

Bill_S

Yep, much easier to light that way. Salting the blend with Grignard reaction pieces made for quite a show.

Novocastrian

Bugger. Grignard reaction would have to be googled these days. You know what I do.

<it has something to do with Mg, I remember that much>

Bill_S

I only did an actual Grignard reaction once, in an organic chem lab. Found lots of other uses for those big lumps of Mg, though

Novocastrian

I have the impression that I did it twice, but at least 35 years ago.

Mg ribbon, though, whoar!! Not to mention lumps of Na lobbed out of the lab window on snowy days.

On a sombrer note, I bet you did all those retrospectively daft things with Hg just like I did. Some may think the effects are already obvious from my posts on here.

Bill_S

Of course I did... still wound up overeducated, though.

The "mercury beating heart" is a pretty cool demo.

Bill_S

Watching Mg ribbon burn in a pure CO2 atmosphere was pretty wild.

MikeUK

I seem to think that was the reaction I was holding inside the fume cupboard whist trying to slow it down using a ice bath........

I was adding a organic ligand to some transition metal

the reaction went critical, I got 100% addition in less than a second (honest it worked I'm sure) and most of the rest of the reactants on the fume cupboard window

and a handful of broken glass

googled Grignard reaction.. that wasn't it........ but it did produce an amazingly fast reaction at about 0 deg C

Novocastrian

Well yes, but when I lived in a baked bean tin at Uni, there was a framed fragment of a pyrex stopcock left by a previous grad student who had been working with ozone.

The caption was, "Lest We Forget".