Clever, my dear Renster
Well done.
I remember a few moments in my second spesh school where some of my inventions, I just WISH I had brought with me, such as when the lab teacher decided to show us a thermite reaction (thermite is a mixture of an oxide of a less reactive metal's oxide, with a more reactive metal, both in fine powder form, intimately mixed, when ignited, the more reactive metal abstracts oxygen from the metal oxide, in a redox reaction, forming the metal from the less reactive metal's oxide, and the oxide of the more reactive metal, which competes successfully for the oxygen and rips it off of the less reactive metal. Used for welding, for cutting metal, for casting, and as a military incendiary. Very stable, difficult to ignite, even with a blowtorch, but once it IS lit, it is next to impossible to put it out until the quantity of thermite composition burning has completed reacting and exhausted itself. It'll burn straight through thick steel, and if there is enough, carry on going. About the only way to put it out is to disperse the charge physically, so that any particles are separated from one another sufficiently as to be unable to ignite each other and continue the burn. Even throwing it into deep water won't do, because it burns so damn hot (thousands of degrees), that the temperature is easily enough to split water into it's component elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which themselves ignite or explode, and a CO2 extinguisher will have the same thing happen, the CO2 being split into carbon and O2, providing flammable fuel and pure oxygen to ignite it with.)
But difficult to light, and my science teacher had difficulty doing it until I gave her a few tips, having made thermites from E.g aluminium or magnesium metal mixed with iron oxide, which forms aluminium oxide or magnesium oxide and white hot molten iron. They use this mixture for welding train tracks together apparently, it burns so hot, and the molten steel produced acts as filler for the weld. Needs magnesium ribbon, lithium strips or a prolonged roasting from a propane torch can just about do it as well, as can incendiary mixtures like sodium chlorate mixed with sugar, plus some table salt to slow down the burn, so it burns slow and steady but intense, rather than going off like gunpowder)
But I'd come up with, a while back at the time, a plasticized incendiary mixture that could b safely cast into desired shapes, bound with wax and softened with a little petroleum jelly, based on potassium perchlorate, a very small amount of sulfur to aid ignition (NEVER use sulfur with chlorates, the residual acid in the sulfur could cause ClO2, chlorine dioxide to form with a chlorate, which is both a powerful oxidizer, and explosive, unstable gas; the combination if used in explosives can autoignite), magnesium powder, and some potassium permangnate, bound with wax and vaseline to plasticize it. That was the base recipe at least.
Difficult to light rather than have he wax melt first, so I'd come up with a phlegmatized chlorate based igniter composition, with aluminium dust and a few other things, that could be packed into drinking straws as a powder, one end of the straw being sealed with a blob of wax, that could be cast, whole, as a fuse, into the blocks of castable incendiary mixture. Would burn super-hot, and easily enough to light thermites, the very top of the straw given a little potassium permangnate filling and topped by a wax disk to stop it falling out. To use, the wax top was pinched to break it and glycerin poured in to soak the KMnO4, which gave about 5-6 seconds before an automatic oxidation reaction took place which would then spontaneously ignite, setting light to the rest of the composition in the macdonalds straw fuse.
Wish I'd have had some of those brought to school with me, because those were easy to light, just break the wax top seal, and pour in glycerine enough to wet the permanganate. Would ignite thermites easily and reliably and a lot easier to set light to than magnesium ribbon strips. For some reason though I didn't bring my explosives and incendiaries kit to boarding school with me, an unfortunate oversight on my part.
Also as a kid, invented a compact little grenade pistol as well, that fired a concussion grenade that had considerable range and detonated with a hefty shockwave, but without producing fragmentation, the effects being solely from the concussive shockwave. Used to go harvesting 'conkers'
like many kids did (horse chestnut tree seeds, used when mounted threaded on a string, in a traditional english kid's game). Most kids threw sticks repeatedly up at the tree, hoping to knock a few conkers down. All I had to do was pull back the locking catch on the grenade pistol's barrel, insert a shell, aim and fire, and the concussion shell would go flying up into the tree, detonate, and send down a huge rain of conkers, blasted from their stalks
Got quite a few astonished looks from other kids for some reason, but it sure as shit was effective. And blasting the conkers down with a grenade launcher was SO much fun at that age, as a preteen to young teen, The fzzzzzzzzz-----bang-WHUUMP! noise, the cloud of smoke rising from the muzzle of my pistol and the concussive shockwave, you could feel it in your chest, when at a safe range such as up in the trees. Super satisfying
Invented and built that all by myself. Using black powder (usually nitrocellulose as coarse granulated guncotton) as propellant, a primary HE as an initiator for the less sensitive main charge, of TNT or nitrated xylene. Was a real pleasure to play with that when I was a nipper. Not to mention the lovely marzipan like sweet scent left in the room after finishing making the TNT, presumably from some toluene being oxidized to benzaldehyde. Made my whole bedroom smell deliciously of freshly cooked cherry bakewell tarts. Almost good enough to eat, the smell of the bits of yellow oil that
got left as a byproduct from nitrating the toluene with nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid mixture smelled soooooooo damn good, it'd fill the whole room with this sweet cherry bakewell pie perfume, like cyanide, marzipan, benzaldehyde, nitrobenzene or either nitromethane or nitroethane.
A lovely change from horrible acrid choking stenches
And I've also invented a custom spice blend for chili con carne and steaks, based on fly agaric and peppery boletus mushrooms, the former always listed as poisonous in guidebooks, but in truth they just need special preparation to use them safely. I never cook meat dishes without it.
