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+---
+title: Pyrotechnic Adventures
+---
+
+I guess I never quite grew up. Most young boys love fireworks and
+firecrackers. They go through a phase of blowing things up or inventing
+ways to use fire and explosives for good fun and excitement. Then they
+move on to more serious and less destructive forms of entertainment. I
+just never outgrew the phase.
+
+When I think back of all the crazy stuff we used to do as kids with
+various forms of explosives, I marvel that I survived my childhood with
+all my eyes and fingers still functional. There were no such things as
+terrorists and una-bombers, yet, so it was relatively easy to get a hold
+of dangerous chemicals and compounds. There weren\'t so many safety
+regulations and liability lawyers in those days. Besides, most parents
+were willing to let their children go unsupervised for most of the day.
+As long as we checked in occasionally when we got hungry, we could do
+just about anything we wanted to without fear of getting in big trouble.
+
+## Home-made Bullets
+
+My first memories of dangerous experiments come from the time when our
+family lived in the flat roofed house in Vancouver. I was about 11 years
+old and the house was located just off St. John\'s Road on the edge of
+the city. There were lots of fields and forests, a lake and a train
+track.
+
+Dad always had ammunition in the house, mostly boxes of .22 shells, but
+they weren\'t available for us to experiment with. My brother and I got
+it into our heads that we could make our own bullets. I had a small
+chemistry set that contained the chemicals we needed to make the old
+fashioned black-powder that was used by mountain men in their flint-lock
+rifles. We mixed potassium nitrate, sulfur and charcoal together in a
+cup. We would then use the metal tube from discarded ball point pens and
+remove the ink. We then closed off one end of the tube and filled it up
+with gun powder. Finally, we used a rock to pound a shot gun shell
+pellet into the open end of the tube. The finished product was
+essentially a very crude attempt to make a bullet. We then placed the
+small tube in the crack of a telephone pole so the end with the pellet
+stuck in it pointed toward some target. Then, with our bare hands, we
+held a lit candle under the tube to cause the gun power to ignite.
+Usually, we only managed to achieve a little pop. The only thing that
+saved us from serious injury was our ignorance about the proper way to
+make traditional gun powder. Had we only known how to properly make the
+gun powder, it might have been powerful enough to do some serious damage
+to exposed hands and faces. In this case, the failure was actually a
+blessing.
+
+This saga will require many more writing sessions. I will describe the
+heart-wrenching episodes in following articles. I advise all readers to
+be prepared with a large box of industrial-grade Kleenex tissues.