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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.
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