Chemistry class gets a call by the bomb squad

[Dr Mordrid]

http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/ap_060610_tnt.html

WALLED LAKE, Mich. (AP)

The state police bomb squad had to be called to a high school after a chemistry student made suspected TNT as part of a class project.

The squad removed and detonated the material. The three beakers reportedly went off with a big bang Thursday. No one was injured.

"We still have to analyze the material to determine if it even was TNT,'' Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe told The Detroit News.

Sheriffs deputies and officials at Walled Lake Central High School said the 17-year-old junior made the material as part of his final experiment for the class.

He told the teacher he would make the TNT at school under close supervision, they said. He found a TNT recipe on the Internet and planned to make enough to blow up a watermelon, investigators said.

"The teacher, unfortunately, did not take the student's comments about his intentions seriously,'' Principal David Barry wrote in a letter to parents.

Give him an "A" for effort

When I was in high school something similar happened, but it was nitroglycerine. Kid let a drop hit the floor, blowing several tiles to hell

Dr. Mordrid

[Claymonkey]

when you're a teenager you have no concept of concequence. You're more concerned about it being neat. This doesn't surprise me in the least. Nor does the teacher's doubt. A teenager is every bit as intelligent and can do this easily.

[Technoid]

The only problem I had in chemistry was a substitute teacher and his obsession with demonstrating the effect of mixing water and litium

[Brian Ellis]

We made all sorts of explosives and fulminates when I was at school. I still have the scars to prove it. Aluminium powder and potassium chlorate was wicked (it is the the basis of the fuel used in the shuttle boosters) but my favourite was nitrogen triiodide: take some powdered crystals of elemental iodine and pour some 0.88 ammonia on them. Harmless when wet, but let it dry out and it will explode at the lightest touch. On one occasion, we spread some very thinly round the headmaster's chair in the Assembly Hall, so that there were loud cracks every time he moved his feet. It is said that a fly landing on the stuff would blow itself to wherever flies go when they die, but that may be apocryphal, but it is mighty fulminant.

We never did TNT, but did nitroglycerine (minute quantity), guncotton, gunpowder, picric acid (another fulminant) etc.

[Dr Mordrid]

As noted before I grew up on a farm. We had to blow stumps & large rocks at times, so some of my 'playthings' were dynamite, ANFO (explosive grade ammonium nitrate + a fuel (often fuel oil, gas or 50/50 nitromethane + methanol)), small shaped charges, primer cord, picric acid etc.

I had a fun childhood

Brian: picric acid using ASA formula?

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Can't remember exactly how we did it, but I think we treated phenol with sulfuric acid and then nitrated it with a nitric/sulfuric acid mix. Bloody hell, it was 60 years ago! Can't even remember the proportions of the three components of gunpowder, although I could still calculate them if push came to shove.

Another mix we used for rockets was finely ground sugar, kept in a dessicator with calcium chloride for a few days, mixed with potassium permanganate as oxidant. We tamped this mix into cigar tubes, screwed on the cap and pierced a small hole in the cap. Ignited by a drop of glycerine through the hole, giving us enough time to get the hell away from it! The problem was that the aluminium of the tube melted long before combustion was complete, so trajectory was totally unpredictable with side-burning. Later experiments, we added a small amount of paraffin wax to bind the mix. We tried other tubes, but they were too heavy for the small thrust we got.

[Fluff]

I guess chemistry classes have got progressively more tame over the years.

Burn a bit of magmesium tape, do a titration, and learn from text book.

Maybe due to schools being paranoid that they will get sued.

Best chemistry lecture I ever went to was one on pyrotechnics by the guy who did sfx on James Bond

[Brian Ellis]

None of what we did was in the school chemmy classes, which were comapatively tame. Was all done in the garage at home. I had a lot of apparatus and reagents, and so did some of my peers. I won't recount how many times I had my eyebrows burnt off We had no safety equipment, not even goggles. If we were nitrating something, we simply took it outside because of the NO2 fumes being rather unpleasant. We also had very toxic substances including mercury and some of its compounds, strong bases and acids. It's a wonder none of us did ourselves any harm. I got hell once because a rather large release of SO2 caused all my father's tools to rust (that was when I went outside - fast )!

[Admiral]

He told the teacher he would make the TNT at school under close supervision, they said. He found a TNT recipe on the Internet and planned to make enough to blow up a watermelon, investigators said.

Hmm, maybe they should consider investing in his education and giving him a job (mining, construction, army...) rather than discipline him.

[Gurm]

When I was doing organic chemistry in high school, as a diversion from the fact that he was NOT going to allow us to make mescaline (relatively simple when you have the spectrometer to separate out the junk compounds, and enough benzene), our teacher offered to let us make thermite instead. Not strictly speaking an organic reaction, but all the same the fire department and bomb squad showed up.

Poor guy got a first-rate ass-reaming from the administration.

[KRSESQ]

Geez...I thought I was hardcore for tamping empty CO2 cartridges full of matchheads to make model rocket engines. Thank God I discovered Estes before I blew a hand off!

My brother tried to make gunpowder once. He was grinding it with a mortar and pestel when it flashed on him. If he hadn't been wearing his glasses he would almost certainly have been permanently blinded. As it was he was badly burned on his hands and face. I remember how ghoulish he looked wearing the orange goop the doctors smeared on his face.

Another brother made a cannon out of a piece of steel pipe. I think he over-estimated the amount of powder and it exploded nicely, sending a chunk of metal into his left eye, detaching his retina. To this day his vision in that eye is only about 40% or so.

(We weren't very bright as kids...)

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

Most of the farm boys in my class had at least a working knowledge of explosives, and many could mix ANFO and rudimentary plastiques & detonator primer compounds of various formulations. Just a few household ingredients in the proper proportions

We also used thermite to do emergency welds on things like engine blocks, WW-II style.

Worst trouble I got into was when my dad asked me to tear down an old outhouse. He meant using a crowbar & sledgehammer. I used 1/2 stick of dynamite and a wheelbarrow

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

We also used thermite to do emergency welds on things like engine blocks, WW-II style.

OH YEAH! My grandfather used to do that before he had a portable arc-welder. They made all their own cranberry bog equipment (except the pickers) and if they broke in the field...