OT: Exploding pens

Sounds like the old nitrogen tri-iodide trick. Should leave a very noticable orange stain. Some kids in college used to paint it on door knobs. Heat from a hand would set it off. Would be easy to fill a ball point pen cap with it put it on the school grounds to dry. It is only explosive when dry.

Paul

I kind of doubt it. NI3 is REALLY unstable, when dry it will go off just by two crystals bumping into each other. It certainly is easy to make with household chemicals, but lab-grade chemicals make a much more potent material. It is great for painting on doorknoobs, light bulbs, any place somebody puts their hand. But, it is best for use within minutes of drying. There may be a trick to making it stable enough to sit for days and only go off when you want it to, but I don't know it. I also don't know how much more powerful it is when contained, even by a plastic pen or marker body. It does produce heat when set off, but it takes a lot of the stuff to burn you, unless they are talking about the chemical burns from the iodine.

I suspect it is something else, maybe mercury fulminate or one of the azides, which are just a little more controllable. The powder out of an M80 and some kind of friction fuse would also do.

Jon

My Dad told me how to make the stuff. Said don't take it to school. I said OK. Just barely avoided getting in all sorts of trouble with the stuff at school. If the teacher hadn't liked me so much it would have been curtains. ERS

I did actually make it and took to school, but it exploded inside my school bag en route to school. No one besides me noticed (it was a small quantity). That was, I think, my only foray into explosives.

The color of the residue is not orange, it is brown.

How in the hell did we live through it?

I used to make "spoke guns."

I took a spoke from a bicycle. Bent it to make a loop. Turned the nipple around, and screwed it on about 1/4". Packed it full of the center of caps. Remember caps? Came on a red paper strip, with a black dot where the explosive was. We would then heat them up with wooden matches, until they went off. Sounded like a .22 pistol. LOUD!

Well, I had one packed with caps. I was sitting during a boring English class, twisting the nipple. You guessed it. BLAM!

I didn't even get sent to the principle's office. Got a couple of blackened fingertips that hurt like hell.

We used to make match guns. Take a wood clothes pin. Reverse the wood, and put the spring on so you could c*ck it by pushing on the spring with another piece of a wood clothespin. Then insert a wooden kitchen match head first. It would ignite when the spring hit the head.

How did we ever live through it?

I know if I sat here for a minute, I could come up with at least ten REALLY dumb dangerous things I did as a kid.

Thank God for Alzheimers.

Steve

One possible source. Not sure how loud these pens are since I have never bought one.

I made several batches of the stuff at college, just for general amusement. Some dips in the dorm filled an envelope with shaving cream, stuck the open end under our door and stomped on the rest of it. It made quite a mess. My roommate ran out and leaned out the hall window to see who was running away. It turned out to be some guys on the other end of our floor. He came back, we looked at each other with big grins and said, OK, let's go see what we can do to them.

We grabbed the NI3 that I "happened" to have sitting around, and dashed down to their room. To our amazement, we even thought it must be a trap, their room had the door standing wide open. I flipped off the lights, and while the bulbs were cooling, we spread out, smearing the NI3 on the back of the cutout where you pull drawers open, on the back of doorknobs, on the back of closet sliding doors, light switches, anything we could think of. Then, I smeared some on the light bulbs, and we left.

We left our door open a few inches and stayed near the door, listening for the return of a bunch of laughing guys. Sure enough, about 5 minutes later, they return, using the stairs at the far end of the building. They go into their room, probably don't even notice that somebody has turned their lights off, and flip the switch. POP! The stuff on the switch goes off. Then, POP....POP....POP POP all the light bulbs in the room explode with a flash and glass crashing to the floor! Stuff was blowing up in their room for weeks, when they happened to touch a fresh spot of the stuff for the first time.

We didn't get any more tricks at our room the rest of the year.

Jon

The explosion leaves a stain from the iodine freed by the reaction. N I3 --> N + 3I + a lot of noise. The stuff ia ao sensitive that a fly will set it off, but only if it is completely dry. Its very simple to make..

John

Keep it wet. Alcohol works. Use a cork in the bottle, and keep it upsidedown, so the cork stays wet. And, pray.

Joe Gwinn

You are 100% correct. I suspect that a part of brown color is oxidation of whatever is hit by iodine (a strong oxidizer).

Actually, the color is purple. At least the stuff I made was. Brown clumps, purple stains. Unbelievably sensitive. As soon as it was dry even touching it with a hair would set it off. ERS

My Dad told us boys how he and his buddies used to make a bomb with two boltas and a nut. Screw one bolt in just a little, fill with strike anywhere match stuff, screw the other bolt in till it squeezed the match head stuff a little (JEEZ!), and then toss it high into the air. When it came down who knew where the parts went? ERS

Best NI3 prank I ever saw was at a weekend track meet (on an old cinder track). Someone (I was on a visiting team so I never knew who) salted the middle of the 100 yard straight with NI3. It was pretty wet in the morning so nothing happened. They put out the high hurdles for the first event and went and had lunch. Sun came out, beautiful afternoon. Hurdles started and nobody finished! Between hurdles 3 - 5 the track exploded in little purple clouds. The way they tell you there's been a false start is they fire the starting gun a second time, so everybody stopped. For the rest of the meet, every time a race went by there, pop, pop, pop. Officials were furious but us high school kids thought it was great. My high school chemistry teacher got quite a laugh out of it when I told him.

Jim

Oh, when wet it is totally stable. I used to keep a bottle of it around in my dorm room for when it was "needed". When you dab it out of the bottle, it takes long enough to dry that you have plenty of time for the getaway.

Jon

Anyone notice the only type of pen I saw noted was a "marker pen" and one was in a restroom at the school? Why was he opening a marker pen in the restroom................could be a graffiti vigilante.

JohnF