How To Blow Something Up
12:02, Friday, 7 August 2009
Here is a recipe that teaches you how to make your own C4 at home.
Apparatus: Pyrex bowl, Hot plate, Hydrometer, Pestle and Mortar, Measuring cylinder, Electronic balance (or any other weighing scale), Thermometer, Filter paper, Funnel, Evaporating dish, Blasting cap.
Materials: 3%-6% Sodium hypochlorite solution (also known as common household bleach), Potassium chloride (can be found in some health food stores or pharmacies as a table salt substitute), Distilled water, Vaseline, Wax, White gasoline (camp stove gasoline).
Procedure:
- Fill the Pyrex bowl three-quarters full with the bleach. Heat the bleach with the hot plate.
- Weigh out 63 grams of potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check the solution with the hydrometer and boil until a reading of 1.3 is obtained.
- Remove the solution from the hot plate and cool it in a refrigerator until it is roughly at around room temperature to allow crystallization to take place. Filter out the crystals that form.
- Mix the crystals with distilled water in the ratio 56 grams of crystals to 100 millilitres of water. Heat the solution to a boil and allow to cool as before. This is known as fractional crystallization.
- Filter out the crystals, pure potassium chlorate. Grind the crystals to the consistency of powder and heat gently to dry, but be careful not to drive off the water of crystallization.
- Now melt 5 parts Vaseline with 5 parts wax. Dissolve in white gasoline and pour the liquid mixture onto 90 parts potassium chlorate crystals in a bowl. Knead the liquid into the potassium chlorate.
- Allow the gasoline to evaporate and mold the solid into the desired shape. Dip in liquid wax to waterproof it. This explosive requires a blasting cap of at least A3 for use.
Warning: Do not store the explosive over long periods of time. Avoid friction, sulphur, sulphides and phosphorous compounds. Extreme caution must be observed whenever preparing explosive materials like the one mentioned above. But hey, what do I know?
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Who says I didn't learn anything from doing SPA? Then again, I wouldn't try it. Forget all that time-consuming, potentially dangerous effort, let's just place our trust in the old-fashioned hydrochloric acid in a glass bottle with a piece of aluminium foil and a gasoline-soaked rag plugging the bottle.