I was something of a “pyro” as a child. Back in the 1960’s, this was nothing particularly unusual. Most of my friends played with plastic toys, and we all quickly discovered that they would burn in interesting ways if combined with common household products like Lysol disinfectant spray, WD40, lighter fluid, or just good old fashioned gasoline. Certain kinds of plastic would stay alight by itself, particularly polyethylene or polypropylene. Toy models were made of styrene, which would burn, but with a nasty, sooty flame.
My interest in fire took a great leap forward by discovering that Potassium Nitrate was an effective and easily obtainable oxidizer. I learned this from watching the Star Trek episode “Arena”, in which Captain Kirk defeats his reptilian monster adversary, the Gorn, using an improvised cannon. The propellant used was crude black powder. Spock moves the story along by advising the TV audience that the mysterious white powder is Potassium Nitrate. From there, I think I looked up “gunpowder” in either the Encyclopedia Britannica, or my brother’s “junior” Encyclopedia Britannica. Gunpowder was dead easy to make as far as proportions go; 75% Potassium Nitrate, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur.
Now here comes the part that I’m sure some will find hard to believe: Both the Potassium Nitrate and the Sulfur were sold at the local drug store! Indeed, they sat on the shelf, side by side. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what the “legitimate” use is for Potassium Nitrate, and this is somewhat embarrassing, having been a pharmacist! My best guess is for burning stumps, but it might have some sort of veterinary use… But suffice it to say that back in 1972 Skaggs drug store, located in a strip mall on Brooks Street in Missoula did indeed sell the stuff.
About this time, my friend Steve brought into the fourth grade class a “science experiment” which consisted of a block of wood, a steel food can, a charcoal briquette, and some lighter fluid. To this day, I’m not sure what the point of the “experiment” was, but he was allowed to light his fire in the classroom and let it burn away. During the question and answer portion of his demonstration, I bragged that I knew the formula for gunpowder. I could sense that Steve and I had a mutual interest in burning things.
A bit of nastiness ensued when Steve went to put the flame out. He put his head directly over the flame coming out of the steel can, and blew straight down. The flame had nowhere to go but up, and went right into Steve’s face, singing and burning off his eyebrows.
From there, Steve and I rode our bikes out to Skaggs, and bought our Potassium Nitrate and Sulfur. Indeed, two 9 or 10 year old children buying two of the components of black powder was NO BIG DEAL. No one ever stopped us, or questioned us. Such was life back in Montana in the early 1970’s…
Steve and I made crude black powder on numerous occasions. Looking back, we did one thing very right, and one thing very wrong. The right thing is that we never contained our incendiary mixture. To this day, I have 10 fingers, 10 toes, and two eyes. I think we had an intuitive sense not to “go there”. The spectacle of fire and voluminous smoke was enough to keep us entertained. This was all done right in Steve’s back yard, and his neighbors never seemed to notice or complain…The one thing we did very wrong was grinding our three part mixture together using a mortar and pestle. This is a gigantic no-no, as the components should be ground separately then ever so gently mixed together.
I lost touch with Steve after high school, but I understand he went on to become a lawyer. Our pyro experiments together came and went.
But you can’t keep something fun like this a secret forever, and soon my friend Mike and I were at it. At first we set off our incendiary mixtures in an alleyway a block or two from Mike’s house, but we soon realized that we should obtain much more privacy for this sort of thing. We took our pyromania to Hellgate Canyon, specifically a talus slope just to the west of the Milwaukee railroad tracks on the east slope of Mt. Sentinel. With nothing but rocks all around, there was no chance of catching anything on fire.
Again, at this point, we did not contain our mixtures. We were simply trying to optimize our big flames, and not make genuine bombs. As with Steve, this phase with Mike and me came and went. But by high school, something novel entered the picture, namely Paladin Press. I don’t remember how I learned about Paladin Press, probably an ad in the back of a magazine. I ordered their catalog, which was delivered to my house. One book in particular stuck out. This was “George Hayduke’s” original Get Even. By this time Mike and I were seniors in high school. We ordered the book, and found it endlessly amusing. Hayduke included a recipe for a “smoke bomb” which was to melt together potassium nitrate and ordinary sugar. Thankfully Mike and I had enough common sense to realize that this procedure was best done outdoors. Mike bought an electric hot plate, and indeed if you added heat slowly, the sucrose would caramelize together with the Potassium Nitrate to create a brown solid. Sugar was much cheaper than sulfur, and obviously more available.
But by this time we were about 18, and we were ready to kick it up a notch. Somewhere along the line we had obtained genuine green water-resistant fuse, which made our operations much safer and more reliable. We just had to start containing our incendiary mixtures.
I think Mike and I started out with simple cardboard or even paper tubes, stuffed with our sugar “smoke bomb” mixture. Indeed, crude as it was, the stuff would explode if confined.
At some point, the critical decision was made: We had to make a real pipe bomb. We obtained the obligatory iron pipe and two threaded caps. I think it was probably a 6” by 2” pipe. Again, we made a crucial mistake, in that we poured our incendiary mixture directly into the pipe then screwed the threaded cap on. This was a bad idea, because in theory the friction of the cap against the pipe could create a spark. We should have contained our mixture in a plastic bag before putting in the pipe. But at least we were cautious about our fuse length. It must have been 3 feet long!
Mike and I took our “IED” as they are now called, to our Mt. Sentinel talus slope. We went higher up the slope this time, and found a sort of “corner” indentation in the mountainside. To make things more interesting, we piled on several hundred pounds of rocks on top of the bomb. Being that the bomb was placed in a crevasse of sorts, we were able to get behind it, in the sense that there was a significant part of the mountain between where we placed the bomb and where we hid, waiting for detonation.
We lit the fuse. We scrambled to our hiding spot. I covered my ears; I don’t remember if Mike did or not. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, both because we used such a long section of fuse and because of the psychological tension of the moment. And then it went off.
The only way I can describe the sound is like this; if you think of a firecracker as sounding like a snare drum, then our bomb was like a John Bonham bass drum. The blast wave traveled across the Clark Fork River, across Hellgate Canyon, echoed off Mt. Jumbo and came back to us.
Mike and I went to investigate. Certain rocks that weighed perhaps 50 or more pounds had been blown 30 or 40 feet down the hill. But the pipe was still there! Indeed, one cap was still threaded on, although a chunk at the end about the size of a 50 cent piece had been blown out. We hunted around, and amazingly found the other end cap!
Now here is where the story becomes rather fantastic, and I understand if some people don’t believe me, but I guarantee it’s true. Both the male threads on the pipe and the female threads on the cap were more or less undamaged! The only way I can conceive of how this might have occurred is that the gas pressure expanded the cap more than the pipe and literally lifted the cap’s threads over the pipe’s threads. I could almost thread the cap back onto the pipe by hand, but not quite. Mike and I marveled at this strange phenomenon for some time, but eventually decide that we must rid ourselves of this incriminating evidence, and so we threw the pipe and cap into the Clark Fork River.
At this point I had a decision to make. What we had just done was big time fun, but deep down I knew that to keep going in this direction would likely lead to one of two outcomes; being arrested by the police, or blowing myself up.
Yes, I’ve played with firecrackers and bottle rockets since then, but I’ve never again made a genuine “bomb”. I guess for me making one functional pipe bomb was enough, and served as something of a rite of passage.
Mike and I stayed in touch throughout college, mostly by drinking on the weekends. He went on to law school, and currently practices law in Montana.
