You betcha they are. When all your training is designed to prepare yourself to go out and blow your way into “heaven”, you don’t need skills, just some one to strap some dynamite to you and press the button when you get close to the target.

I did same as you, but in the 50′s. All compliments of a “deluxe” chemical set easily bought at a toy store, and fill-ins from the local pharmacy.

without parole. We, too, quickly discovered the effect of “light metals” and tweaks to the basic gunpowder formula. And turning those little cotton balls, the ones about an eighth of an inch in diameter, into nitrocellulose balls and scattering them around was always good fun.

Yeah, I’d just walk into the drug store and order nitric, sulfuric, or hydrocloric acid or potassium nitrate or chlorate and powdered magnesium. The guy at the electronics repair shop would sell me anything I needed to ignite bombs or rockets, guess you can still get most of that stuff at Radio Shack. And there was always Edmunds Scientific and places like that and the Army-Navy store had real military surplus. I bought my first non-.22 rifle there when I was about 12; just walked in, plunked down my money, $12, IIRC, and walked out with a military surplus British Endfield .303.

Up the sulfur if you want more flame.

God I miss being 12, old enough to get into trouble, young enough to get out of it.

They used to sell all that stuff in the “toy” chemistry sets back then.

I blew up my bathroom by accident. I don’t even know what I was mixing and heating…..

…..good times…………

Messing with potassium chlorate and various adulterants making smoke bombs and homemade canons. Very lucky that a bad load only flamed my face out the touchhole of a canon rather than going boom. This is where I learned that chlorate and sugar (IIRC) is unstable when being tamped down. Of course we had red phosphorus and who knows what else mixed with it ….

We would get the chemicals from Jr. High lab, taped the room door bolt open (it was the 70′s guess who taught us that ) and had a priori removed the hinge from the locked lab supply cabinets so we could get the good after we ‘broke in’ during lunch.

To be at that too old/too young age again ….

but your making me realize how many the explosives I grew up around.. An older kid would bring railroad caps home. We’d drop the largest rocks we could lift onto them. Pretty hard to set off, but what a h*ll of a sound when they did. Dumb, dumb kids.

my favorite diarist here.

And would you agree that Robert Brent’s, “The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments”, is just one of the best books that a 12 year old kid could get his hands on, like ever? Man, that was some great stuff!