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Comment by sb8244 | Hacker News Reader

I used this to make NI3 (feather explosive) in high school as part of my senior project. It was somehow blessed by the teacher.

The book very specifically says to not make this due to how volatile it is.

We made it in the morning and put it in the undisturbed back room to dry for the afternoon.

We got news of it exploding during a silent study hall and scaring the crap outta everyone there, especially since it was a different teacher in the room. The air current from the AC set it off.

We were again (somehow) given permission to remake it since it went off.

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I, similarly, had a high school chemistry teacher who allowed me to experiment with recipes from the book.

Before we touched any chemicals, we would go through the reaction on paper and calculate what would happen (eg ΔH) for education and safety.

That’s actually the origin of my username.

I decided that I could make the fulminate recipe, and asked my grandfather —- who had taught me to make cap gun material —- to get the stuff I would need. He asked me again, to make sure he heard me right, and then flatly told me no. He said he loaded shells for WWII, and that’s what they put in the detonating tip. He said it was so sensitive, they tested it by shooting shells through PAPER. I gave up on my dreams of making anything from the book after that.

Could you explain the “through paper” bit? I can’t picture this.

I suspect it’s that the tips of the shell are intended to be pressure sensitive and trigger an explosion that then detonated the main payload. The explosive in the tip was so sensitive that tearing through paper was enough to detonate it.

I wonder how the stress of shooting the munition from the gun did not set it off.

Must have something to do with the direction of acceleration, but I can't see how exactly.

Yeah, and foam at several hundred kph was also enough the damage the wing of a space shuttle. Not sure the paper thing is terribly relevant. The shells were fired after all.

Neither the foam or the shuttle wing detonated. It's about testing volatility, not doing damage.

If the ammunition touches paper when shot, it detonated

Oh, got it. Thanks!

Assuming you did this in the past 30 years, it’s doubly worrisome that you got this blessed, because the book is absolutely notorious for being dangerously inaccurate.

Supposedly the “The Terrorist Handbook” series of filez from Usenet corrected the errors, but I’m not a chemist, so I can’t judge either’s reputation.

> the book is absolutely notorious for being dangerously inaccurate

I always wondered if that was propaganda in order to discourage people from trying things out in it. I've also wondered if the corrections were also propaganda in a malicious way.

I wouldn't touch any of that stuff without being a trained chemist.

A friend of a friend blew his guts out with a homemade pipe bomb. My friend had the dubious pleasure of driving him to the hospital with him bleeding out all over the car.

A few years ahead of me in high school, the wrestling team had a one-handed wrestler. A friend of mine on the wrestling team told me it was because the guy was helping a guy make a pipe bomb, using a hammer and a wooden dowel to pack match heads in a pipe. One guy was holding the pipe, and the other was swinging the hammer.

That seems unlikely to explode and more likely to push the dowel and hammer back while creating a fountain. But I guess it might explode.

Depends on how snug the dowel was / how fatigued the pipe was.

I can hardly think of a more certain way to get matchheads to explode. The guy's lucky he only lost a hand.

it depends if they're strike anywhere or safety matches. making them with strike anywhere will probably just blow up while you're making it. safety matches can be compressed like crazy, I heard.

They can be compressed like crazy, but that sensitivises them for strikes. My father told me about this method - get some match heads into a nut, screw it tightly with two screws, tie a string and use that string to accelerate into some hard object. Luckily, no one got hit by exploding screws.

Supposedly a wild strike caused the steel hammer to strike the steel pipe and spark, and there was a narrow flammable channel next to the dowel leading to the main charge.

The reliable counterpart to the Anarchist Cookbook is TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook, which is also freely available without copyright by virtue of being an unclassified US Army technical manual subject to FOIA.

The IMH contains a whole host of instructions that may lead to loss of digits.

Its kind of a "safety third" document for really shitty situations, lol.

Is there a safer way to make IED’s? I would assume that guerrilla warfare is inherently a “safety third” type of situation anyway.

There are relatively safer ways to achieve the same objectives. A lot of the safer ways to do things are also a lot more efficient.

Safety is quite relative when it comes to anything that explodes.

That was a classic that got passed around our high school... My favorites were the ones that started with practically nothing. IIRC, they made gunpowder from campfire ashes, a 5 gallon bucket, and a t-shirt filter. Another one - was it rocket fuel? - was made from urine! I think you could even progress that one from urea nitrate to nitric acid, and with the improvised sulfuric acid from elsewhere in the book, make actual dynamite! but our high school teacher warned us that many high school geniuses had blown themselves up making dynamite. Anyway we actually didn't care about blowing things up, really.... we were into fireworks!!!! So we enjoyed concentrating the powder from zillions of sparklers to make an "artificial sun." We also made humungous smoke bombs that went on for a long time making the neighbors antsy.

We did not say that we got the idea / recipe from this book of course. We actually got the idea from our previous chem teacher who retired the year before. (Meaning first year for the new teacher.)

This was in 2010.

In ~2006 a group in my brother's AP Chemistry class got permission to make thetmite for their class project. Set it off in a fume hood which I believe was already scheduled to be replaced that summer.

In 2010 my AP Physics teacher gave us all really long leashes in terms of how much we could. One fellow made what equated to a water bottle capacitor, charged on a Van de Graff generator. After playing with it for a few days, trying to get the practicum teacher to touch it, and various other shenanigans, he felt a shock across his chest and was writhing in pain on the ground for a few minutes. We all lost Van de Graff privileges after that.

Somehow that happened in 2010-2011 and there wasn't really concern to call for medical supervision. He's still doing great today thankfully.

NI3 isn't hard to make, there are only two ingredients and I also made it in chemistry class by pouring ammonia on the crystals which we left on filter paper. The real 'trick' is not to use that much iodine crystal so you don't get a huge bang. You want to stay under 0.1g of crystal.

There's precious little you can do wrong with the synthesis other than using too much iodine to make too much of it. It won't become particularly unstable until it dries a bit, but after that, yes, it may just go off on its own.

A lot of the Usenet/BBS files are equally ... Well, let's just say you will lose your fingers probably.

I get the impression that most people's chemistry experience was much different than mine. Ours was about rote memorization, period. I kind of feel like I missed out.

I think this is the tragic reality of everyone wanting to get their hands in education. Government oversight, district oversight, parent oversight. There’s a fear kids won’t learn enough of the right things, and won’t be competitive. Or will be exposed to “dangerous” information. Or some will get access to better teaching than others. Also chemicals are expensive, budgets are thin, and class sizes are large.

I feel your pain though. I didn’t get to see any of this cool stuff until I was in college.

> Also chemicals are expensive, budgets are thin, and class sizes are large.

This was my experience (growing up outside of the US). I'm not sure I'd call our schools lab a "lab". Oversized closet for 30 year old bunsen burners would be a better descriptor.

In my middle-school and highschool science courses, we sat at tables that had gas feeds to them. I don't recall what they were marked - probably oxygen and nitrogen or hydrogen or something. There had barbed ends, so as to connect to a flexible hose.

I never used them. Not once. I never saw them used. They were a feature of hopeful design, or vestigial hands-on activities.

It's much easier to create stability and equity by making sure nobody gets an exceptionally good education than to make sure nobody gets an exceptionally bad one.

My chemistry teacher taught like this.

Same teacher told stories about how he nearly killed a student with explosives he made in his home country of britain where he is no longer a practicing teacher.

I'm guessing this is primarily a generational thing. Boomers got a very different education in practice than Millennials.

I'm an older GenX and can state that my high school chem teacher was more about checking how we kept our lab notebooks (neat handwriting, correct spelling and notation, no doodles) than about doing any cool practicums. I got a C minus.

I did try making the tear gas recipe from Anarchists Cookbook in the crawlspace under a friend's house. Gas of some sort escaped from a stoppered flask midway through the process - I don't know if it was anything close to actual teargas, but the stench was memorable! We rolled out from under the house gagging and laughing, very happy his mom wasn't home.

We utterly failed in our subsequent attempt to make thermite. In retrospect, maybe that C minus was generous.

I'm very early (old) millennial. One of my high school chemistry classes stands out as a favorite course of all high school. The teacher was good (likable, engaging, smart) but also did open book tests that had some new never-before-seen problem.

Many people, even those that were "top students" in other STEM classes, complained about how hard his tests were. As someone terrible at memorizing, I not only enjoyed the challenge but aced that course, despite not really being that interested in chemistry.

The remainder of high school and a lot of university was just memorization. If you knew the formula you could do great, but I had such a hard time remembering that type of detail. I did ok, but on many occasions I remember wishing more courses were like that Chem class, and it still stands out over 20 years later.

We were still doing that stuff in my generation (80's)

It was not until the 00's that the schools went crazy

> We were again (somehow) given permission to remake it since it went off.

That's insane

Nitrogen triiodide really isn't very dangerous as it doesn't generate a lot of gas upon detonation, and its unlikely that you'll ever get enough of it in one place at one time to cause a large explosion. It's really just a chemistry novelty. It DOES make a mess, though.

Nowadays they lockdown for peanut butter.

Some secondary school mates made this and spread it in the corridor. We heard the explosions as the head science teacher stamped through to detonate it all before the classes were allowed out.

We also tried to do this...

But it turned out that our chem teacher wore open-toed shoes that day (not a lab day for her) so she made us detonate it all ourselves.

Can I ask what age are you are and what country you lived in? No way that would happen now in most Western countries.

This happened in 2010 in USA high school.

Wow I was expecting this to have happened in the 70s or 80s.

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