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Post by Village Idiot on Mar 2, 2010 22:44:02 GMT -5
Tramp, did you ever have those orange Hot Wheel tracks? We'd race those things down into a crash pile at the bottom.
The backyards in our neighborhood were on a hill. Somehow the "older" kids (about a year older than us) dragged up a big wooden cable spool, leaned it on a tree, cut and hinged a door in its diameter and made a fort out of the inside. We weren't allowed inside and were jealous as hell. One day we put a padlock on the hasp of the door while they were inside, turned it from the tree and sent them rolling down the hill.
No one was killed, and keeping with kid code, no one told their parents. For all the adults knew, the spool fort simply disappeared.
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Post by patrick on Mar 2, 2010 23:06:13 GMT -5
I remember when Sputnik went up and everyone was making rockets. We had all made gunpowder with our Gilbert Chemistry Sets but somewhere I read that Potassium Nitrate and sugar was better. It was--in spades! Needles to say a small flashlight full of that stuff didn't perform like the rocket it was supposed to be. How'd you guys make TNT? Yeah! In high school, we had a rocketry club. We didn't build those little Estes rockets you buy in a kit. We all had copies of this book: written by an Air Force Captain on how to build your own rocket. I still have my copy. We would go to Industrial Metal Supply Corporation and get a 4' piece of seamless steel pipe, about 2" diameter, and a chunk of chrome moly steel. Someone had donated an old metal lathe to the school and we would machine the chunk of chrome moly into a nozzle and a bulkhead (Capt. Brinley gave you the diagram for nozzles) so it would fit into the pipe. The school maintenance guy would weld fins onto the pipe. We hooked up with these guys, the Reaction Research Society, which is where pyromaniacs who don't grow up end up. They had (apparently still do) a piece of land out in the desert not far from China Lake Naval Air Station with racks to fire off rockets and bunkers dug into the ground to hide in while you did it. They also had a license from the fire marshal to buy explosives, so they supplied the zinc and sulpher powder they mixed as fuel. Good times, good times. Today, we would be called terrorists. But a number of us ended up in occupations that are probably related to that experience. I ended up in research science. A friend got his Ph.D. in physics from UCLA and now works at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Another worked for a long time rebuilding space shuttles when they return to earth.
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Post by TKennedy on Mar 2, 2010 23:14:14 GMT -5
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Post by patrick on Mar 2, 2010 23:42:53 GMT -5
Yeah, I really am blessed in where I was raised.
The SF valley at that time was a hotbed of aerospace industries. My father spent his career working for Hughes Aircraft, Missile Systems Division. My friend's fathers all worked for the FAA, Rocketdyne, Lockheed, etc. My wife's father worked at the "Skunk Works" with Kelly Johnson on the U2 and SR71 (though I didn't know it at the time). In the early '70s our high school had a programmable computer in the chemistry lab. One of the fathers worked for a computer company and they were building a computer to try to sell to colleges and universities, so to try it out they loaned one to our school for a year. In 1971 we were doing chemistry experiments and following the reaction with a spectrophotometer and calculating results with a computer not yet available to universities.
While still in high school, we were invited to see a test of an engine for the Space Shuttle. We drove out to the desert near Palmdale, to a place up on a hill overlooking a set of industrial buildings. We couldn't see anything down there, but when the test started, a huge plume of flame and smoke rolled out over the desert floor from a dark speck on a metal tower. The noise was so deafening you could shout in your neighbor's ear and he couldn't hear you. I loved it.
Then I went to a world class university, UCLA, for less per year than my catholic high school cost.
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Post by dradtke on Mar 3, 2010 9:54:32 GMT -5
I'm just starting to find out a few of those. Of course, every so often I'll mention something and my mother will say, "I didn't know that."
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Post by RickW on Mar 3, 2010 11:11:29 GMT -5
Oh yes, explosives. That was a bit later on, junior high school. We use to walk around on halloween and pick up the unexploded firecrackers to get the gunpowder. Then we started to make our own. We made rockets, too.
Had a friend who's dad was a chemist, used to give his kid all kinds of fun stuff, (didn't know him when I was little, unfortunately.) As a teenager, he stuffed a volkswagen bug full of balloons of nitrogen, then shot a flaming arrow into it. Apparently blew the doors right off, and a ways down the street. He did get in some trouble over that.
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 20,386
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Post by Dub on Mar 3, 2010 12:03:21 GMT -5
...We had all made gunpowder with our Gilbert Chemistry Sets but somewhere I read that Potassium Nitrate and sugar was better. It was--in spades! Needles to say a small flashlight full of that stuff didn't perform like the rocket it was supposed to be. How'd you guys make TNT? Oh, yeah, EXPLOSIVES! I'd made gunpowder in the early to mid 1950s. I ran through the little jars in my chemistry set but you could go to the drugstore and buy large bottles of potassium nitrate (saltpeter), sulfer and charcoal. People evidently took the charcoal internally as a way of absorbing excess stomach acid. Anyway it was all cheap and explosive. At some point, I realized that sugar and saltpeter made an explosive mixture. I think I was heating the dry mixture in a spoon over my alcohol lamp when the whole mess turned to liquid and finally flashed into flame. I was really impressed. I decided this would make good rocket fuel so made a tiny rocket from the brass tubing you could buy at hobby shops. The trouble was that the melted mixture of sugar and saltpeter was too viscous to get it into the tube. And as soon as it touch the tube it would cool and harden blocking the tube. So I figured, since the tube was metal, that I could grind up the dry mixture to a fine powder using my mortar and pestel. Then I could fill the tube with the dry powder and just heat the tube over the alcohol lamp, let it cool and I'd be ready to go. Of course the saltpeter is what provides the oxygen and the sugar provides the carbon so the whole thing is pretty unstable to start with. And, as you might expect, the charge reached its flash point pretty quickly turning my little rocket into a mini pipe bomb right (and I mean right) before my eyes. There was a deafening explosion and bits of tubing were embedded int the walls and ceiling of my bedroom. The miracle is that none of it was imbedded in me and somehow my eyes escaped unscathed. I never did that again. And I never made TNT but I always wanted to try it. My parents had a full set of The Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911. It was in a beautiful wooden stand and each volume had its own shelf. It was suede leather bound with gold embossed lettering and very thin pages with gilt edges. I still have the set. Anyway, in this edition of the EB is a very detailed description of exactly how to make nitroglycerin. It has the acid proportions and temperatures that must be maintained along with diagrams showing how to keep the mixture cool enough to remain stable throughout the process. One could really make nitro using the 1911 EB as a guide. I always thought making my own nitroglycerin would be just SO COOL. Never tried it though. - Dub
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Post by Cornflake on Mar 3, 2010 12:13:41 GMT -5
We never grow up entirely. I remember an issue of the Paris Review, edited by the always playful George Plimpton, that contained a series of photographs of a Hostess Twinkie being blown up with firecrackers. It was inspiring.
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Post by Supertramp78 on Mar 3, 2010 12:21:19 GMT -5
'Tramp, did you ever have those orange Hot Wheel tracks?'
Absolutely! And Legos (back when all you got were random blocks that allowed you to make whatever youwanted instead of kits that were only good at making one thing)
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Post by Doug on Mar 3, 2010 13:39:04 GMT -5
Log Cabin syrup cans with the end cut out for use with little cowboys and indians.
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