Tall tales, narrow escapes, etc

[mkdutchman]

I thought it seemed a little boring lately, so just trying to see what happens  with the type of people on this forum I know there's plenty of the above mentioned stories out there. I'll start off with a mild one



I liked playing with things that went bang years ago when I was younger and dumber (I still do I just don't have the time anymore) and one weekend evening almost went too far.......

where I grew up everyone takes active part in social going ons upon reaching the tender age of 16, which usually consists of getting together in groups ranging anywhere from 20 or so up to (in rare cases) 200+, usually every weekend games are played all afternoon followed by group singing in the evening. So you have a lot of people in one place, and most of them under 20

things were getting boring, it was cold so everyone that could be inside was inside, so the buildings were crowded, etc. I was in the farmer's work shop along with a couple dozen other folk waiting for our turn at the table tennis, when someone found a piece of thinwall 4" sewer pipe 2 foot long or so. Around here all farmers workshops are loaded with lots of fun things, gasoline, diesel fuel, metal junk, and in this case an oxy-propane torch.

The person with the pipe ( no it wasn't me) duct taped one end shut and tried putting a little gasoline in first. It didn't even pop, just made a little flame. Big disappointment. I had been watching and at that point suggested the propane torch, and then put a couple spurts propane in. The other guy was holding the lighter and so naturally was pronounced the elected detonator......

That didn't do much more than the gas did, I happened to think about pure oxygen and it's effects and recharged it again........with equal amounts of propane and oxygen this time......it worked then, you bet it worked......

I was feeling chicken by then and dropped the torch, but the other guy was loving it and decided to do one more grand blast, so he grabbed the torch and put a LOT of propane and oxygen in, a lot....

buddy #1 turned chicken too, and got another guy that should have known better (call him buddy #2) to touch it off, which consisted of touching a lighter flame to a hacksaw slot in the side of the pipe. For good measure buddy #1 stuffed a rag in one end of the pipe and put another layer of duct tape in the other end. buddy #2 couldn't find the slot with his lighter flame because he just turned his eyes away (naturally) so he picked the whole shebang up and jammed it under his arm, and touched it off.........

The fireball and force of the explosion blew the pipe to little pieces and knocked buddy #2 completely out, to this day he declares he was the only one in the room who missed the whole thing. He was very glad when his hearing returned the following week, and the fingers that were holding the pipe regained their feeling. I  know I've never seen a roomful of people evacuate so fast just before the explosion, it would have done a fire drill proud!! The farmer's son still claims to this day that the egg production from the chickenhouse across the lane produced only half the yield the next day, he also told me the unfortunate farm dog was just outside the shop door at the time and never set foot inside the shop again.........

I have always been extra wary of propane since then, especially when mixed with things like oxygen.....

[Tom]

Ok I'll take a stab. I used to build refrigeration systems and we had a lot of rosebud torches around for silfosing the gazillion fittings they are made of. Well one day Mike gets the brite idea to fill his milk container with oxy/acetylene thinking it would just make a little bang. Well he lays the lit torch to the side of the container and BOOM and the entire office evacuates pronto. Surprisingly Mike managed to keep his job there for a few more years. 

[mobile_bob]

surely you guys have heard about my acetylene antics?

its amazing how stupid i was when i wore a younger mans clothes!

oxy/acetylene can be some brutal stuff to say the least.

bob g

[MacGyver]

A 30 gallon garbage bag loosely filled with oxy/acet (2/3 full?) will remove both lids from a large dumpster, hinges and all, and deposit them about 100 feet away.
Rather surprised me... 

Thankfully no one was hurt.

[mobile_bob]

back in the early 70's some of my contemporaries took one of the old romper room puncher balls
if you are over 40 or so you probably know what they are, for the others
they are basically a tough rubber balloon that you blowup that has a large rubberband attached to one end
so that a kid can punch it back and forth.

well with the regulators set high you can blow one up to around 2 foot in diameter easily enough.
tie an oily rag of 3 ft as a fuse, the light and run like hell.

not enough to take out windows,, but enough to shake everything for several blocks around.

a 30 gallon trashbag has similar results,, and if done on a very dark night makes a nice mushroom fireball something like
a mini nuclear bomb.

oh yes,, the cops just loved it! they were convinced kids had gotten ahold of a case of dynamite.

the stuff is exceptionally dangerous, and i have seen a picture of a car that was used to transport such a balloon
static discharge being the ignition source, left the car without windows and the sheet metal bulging
have no idea what happened to the kid driving or anyone else that might have been in the car.
but i suspect they might not have survived, certainly would have had flashburns, blood running out their ears etc.

i cannot even imagine what a weather balloon of 8 ft in diameter might do at 300ft
but my bet is there would be many broken windows and hearing impaired folks being the result.

maybe mythbusters could be pressed into giving it a shot?

after watching my share of terrorist movies, i often thought that an effective defense would be to build a bunch of 4x4x8ft tall cinder block structures
around the perimeter of the property with a oxy/acetylene line run out to each.
i could just see a bunch of gun wielding bad guys taking positions behind the block huts,, never aware they are sitting next to very large handgrenades!

a homeowner (goodguy) sitting behind his ignitor panel, with a smirk on his face , loading in the gas through the feed lines, hitting the red button
and taking out those positions one by one.

don't know if it would kill anyone, but they would be picking cinders out of their asses forever, and would be very stunned to say the least.
i suspect a group of badguys might reconsider their attack on such a place.

and they would forever be very wary of walking up to any small structure, even an outhouse!

bob g

[M61hops]

I consider myself very lucky to have all my body parts still attached and somewhat functional after all the stupid stuff I've done!  I'm living proof that god looks out for fools and idiots!  A few years ago I was cutting some pipe for fenceposts with an oxy-acetylene torch.  I have a lot of gophers or moles in my yard and I'm anoyed by the sheer volume of their tunnels running all under my whole yard.  I was done cutting the steel and ready to put the torch away when I had the bright idea to extract some revenge on the underground critters for the wear and tear their mounds put on my mower.  I started feeding acetylene into the tunnels and lighting it off with a long propane lighter and was getting a small thrill from the explosions.  Cheap thrills are sort of like drugs for me; I want a bigger kick the next time!   After finding the maximum size of blast with just the acetylene combining with the air in the tunnels I decided to try adding oxygen for a bigger thrill!  Oxygen really wakes up the potential of acetylene for sure!!  I nearly lost an eardrum when my last blast opened a hole to the surface that just happened to be in just the right place and at the right angle to direct some energy right at my left ear!!  Well, like the saying goes, "it's all fun and games untill someone gets hurt" !!  That day I quit while I was ahead!         Leland

[zacksstacks]

Nope, no acetylene pranks for me.

Back in high school a buddy and I got hold of some pamphlets on firework manufacture. They also stepped you through common explosives like gunpowder, nitroglycerin, and some funny stuff made with ammonia  and iodine crystals. We took it easy on the more exotic stuff once we made a batch of guncotton and tried using his mom's dryer lint filter to dry it out. A spark of static set it off, blew the door open! Flaming bits flew across the room into the tray of crude gunpowder and whoosh!!! Instant calamity - all smoke and flames, not much damage! I think we learned a valuable lesson, once we settled down...

[oliver90owner]

some funny stuff made with ammonia  and iodine crystals

Nitrogen tri-iodide is very unstable.  We used to carefully dry it in a warming oven and place carefully on window sills/ in door frame where it would detonate when the window/door was closed.  Big trouble when someone looked in the drying oven and then slammed the door.....

Another trick was to 'heat' a large rubber bung in boiling liqiuid nitrogen.  When well 'cooked, it was placed on the floor and hit hard with a large tool.  It would shatter and spread a myriad of small pieces of rubber around the area.  Not dangerous but intersesting.

Ether fumes ignited in the drainage system is also a bit of a hazard, as was the guy who put a naked flame under a large ether reflux flask and wondered how it nearly burned down the college.

Burning off nitro powder to demonstrate it will not explode caught me out once.  They obviously used a much faster burning variety in an industrial application, and a match thrown into a bucket with a relatively small amount of the stuff caused singed eyebrows.

Not tried steel measuring cups in a steel slider on a reloading machine but someone tried to get me to do that once.  Only about 300g of propellant, or so, went in the bottle!

Done lots of stupid things like using long rifle bullet in an old short chambered .22 weapon.  It relied on the hammer to lock the breech on firing (free to open when the hammer was cocked).  It opened the breech.  I was holding it carefully around the other side of a tree when I did it.  Using unsafe guns (barrells parting, double discharging, self discharge on cocking or closing) was a hazard before I realised the inevitability of a serious accident...... sooner or later. 

Especially after a friend exploded a 12 g using cartridges from which he  had removed the lead shot.  He was making bigger bangs in the back garden than the fireworks brought round by friends.  But a wad must have turned or jammed and athe next cartridge blew the barrel at the breech.  He was lucky... only 2 small fragments embedded in his forehead.

Regards, RAB

[SteveU.]

O.K. Here's a k-K-KKa-BOOM!! With a warning.
20 years ago I was out on a sisters farm grind profiling a new wood splitting maul to give it just the right shape/polish for maximum energy transfer and minimum stickin'-in. I was in the small tool shop, you know where they keep the oxi-acetelene torch, stick welder. Had the maul knee clamped to the concrete floor using half upper body weight on a 4"angle grinder to get the steel head roughed into shape.The rollup door was open and I was streaming out a 6-8 foot jet of Hollywood sparks out onto the gravel driveway. Stopped. Wetted down the gravel and pulled down and placed fire extinguished within hands reach. 45 minutes later I had the first side done. But when I flipped the head over to do the other side I couldn't get the right angle /pressure. The only extension cord I'd been able to find was a lightweight 100 footer with a burnt out female end: of course. So I turned every thing around and gave it a try. Now the spark shower was hitting the side of a wooden bench right angling up and bouncing off the sheet rocked ceiling. Stopped. Wetted down an old wool army banket I used out on the farm as a safety cover when doing mechanical working around batteries. Draped the end of the bench with wet blanket hung out on angle iron to create a spark catcher. Is good- hafta' be safe. 30 minutes later, justs as I could see the end of the grinding in sight,. . .  . k-K-KKa-Boom!! SILENCE.  Huh!? Wha??
My head had been snapped around, goggles and percription glasses knocked sideways, I was cut and bleeding at three places on the back of my neck and right cheek. I was surrounded by sharp shards of plastic battery case and dripping with sulfuric acid.
A diesel tractor battery I had put on top the bench three days earlyer on a 2 amp trickle charger to restore it had just suicided out three feet from my head.  The wool blanket had dripped out enough water for the sparks to burn a hole in it.
When I'd hooked up that battery three days earlier to the charger I'd had my 12 year veteran Auto Electric hat on. . . 10-15,000 batteries cleaned, tested, serviced and replaced. Probably another 15-20,000 jumped and charged. I'd already seen three blown apart batteries. This time there was no hydrogen sulfide smell. And it would take another 12 years before I heard/saw the next one blowup. No smell before that one either.
But on this day I was a Wood Chopper all dressed in sweat cooling cotton. And, after a couple of hours of water washing, baking soda nutralizing, rinising down of the shop and tools; and then a long, long personal shower and a  new set of clothes (no two days later burning of privates and eyes due to hand transfer off the old trashed clothes for this momma' boy) I did finished out that day. . . chopping wood.
 
Goggle: Battery Safety. If you only do just half the safety recomendations you too will only endup being half deafened and not blinded when your own 1 in 10,000 battery blowup comes due.      BE SAFE.

SteveU.   

[Stan]

Read an article somewhere, somewhen about a guy who did a lot of grinding aluminum and then switched to grinding steel.  Seems the combination of aluminum powder and iron powder makes a powerful explosive.  burned himself quite badly.  Not too sure what the combination makes, or whether it was true or not.  Seems like my memory cells keep whispering to me that it's something they used in WWII as incindiary bombs???
comments?
Stan

[mike90045]

Take one weather balloon, take one oxy/acet rig adjusted for proper proportions. Blow up the balloon to let's say roughly 8 feet in diameter using the oxy/acet rig.

Gee, I could only get them to about 18" before they self-ignite from static ? How do you get to 8' ?

They are very loud.

Also, Natural Gas, from the gas pipe, is lighter than air, and does not self-deflagrate like OxAcet.

[SteveU.]

Stan probably some magnesium had been ground as aluminum.
Google/Wikpidia. . . "Thermite?" sp
I fought an industrial sized bag type dust collector that lit off twice. It collected off of a 50 cubic foot steel shot blaster used to clean and prep. iron, steel and aluminum castings. The dust in the cotton filter bags once lit off would self oxidze, melt steel and even burn underwater. Very, very nasty.
SteveU.

[sid]

I use to shoot a lot of black powder. took a 50 cal, and loaded it and put it down.had to check the beer supply/ picked it back up and reloaded it.still cannot hear good out of one ear..stock cracked in several places....do not shoot much any more/sid.

[MacGyver]

YEAH!...  Guns & Beer....   

THAT'S a combination that has a habit of making memorable stories. (sometimes told by surviving friends or next of kin)

Years ago, on the way to go camping in the Sierras, I stopped at a gas station that had a huge sign on a pole outside that said:

    GAS
    BEER
   AMMO

Heh! What a fun combination.   
Ain't America grand...

Glad you lived to tell the tale Sid.

[Doug]

One night I had a pillar blow out in a 2.5 rock burst.
I watched heavy things securly bolted to doors and shelving dance and fly off the wall.
I saw 8 foot mechanical rock bolts snap and fire out like hells lawn darts in front of me .
and before the dust came and snuffed out all the light I saw what was a sound structuraly reinforced pillar turn into a bad of gravel and spit stones at me.

Things that go bang and boom be it from explosives or just the presure of 7000 feet of rock trying to take back the drift you are working in aren't cool to me.

I also flatly refuse to guard for anyone blasting after a guy blew off my hard hat and glasses one night ( technicaly this is againts the law to refuse to be a guard for safety reasons  but so what sue me ).