MacGyver

I just saw this video the other day and though of just how much trouble my friends and i would have been in back in our younger years had we ever got our hands on this kind of thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HavMghNEU7o

Has anyone ever seen this stuff for real?

__________________
More is more and less is less,
More is better and twice as much is good too.
Not enough is bad,
And too much is never enough unless it's just about right.

lt1s10

Have never seen that and don't if it's real or not. But from other stuff I've played with I would think that something like this is possible.

Nitrogen Tri-Iodide It's unstable but the ingredients can be obtained easily and it's not hard to produce. We played with some larger amounts as one of my friends had a farm and his father was also our chemistry teacher. We also experimented (read played with) Sodium and water.

It's amazing when we get together and remember the stupidity we lived through and also that we were lucky enough to not get hurt, maimed, or killed.

shakran

it's a fake and a bad one at that. Look at the 3 frames of the actual explosion. The first frame shows a skyline with trees. The sky is a bit orange due to a lowering sun. The explosion frame shows those trees faded out, with blue sky magically in place, and all you see is the explosion, not the chunks of watermelon. In fact if you look real close you can see a ghost image of the still-intact watermelon. The third frame shows a much more advanced sunset and no watermelon.

So what this goober did was to get stock footage of an explosion from somewhere and superimpose it (BADLY) over his watermelon, which he then removed from the pole before shooting more video of the scene.


As for this binary explosive crap - - uhh, MANY explosives are made by combining inert substances. Saltpeter is not explosive (it's used in incense to make the stick burn more evenly), and neither is sulpher, but if you combine them they make gunpowder. Voila, binary explosive.

Oh, and even if the explosion were real, as Gallagher has proven, watermelons aren't exactly hard to destroy.

The_Dunedan

There is one -very- juicy Binary that you can purchase over the Internet, called Tannerite. It's consderably more powerful than 80% dynamite, and is extremely stable. Check out Tannerite.com

MacGyver

I can second that. Looking back, there are so many times that we could/should have been dead for what stupid things we did.

Looking closer, the video does appear to be doctored a bit.

I've seen a few videos of people blowing up stuff (like their old computers)with tannerite but they are usually in large quantities (the purchasable 1 pound containers). All the same, tannerite seems like it would be fun to play with. Then again... most all explosives seem fun to play with to me.

Just doing some looking around, I found a site that has an interesting psudo binary explosive. It has two components, but each is a mixture of components in themselves. The interesting part is that about 2 hours after being mixed, they return to a non-explosive state. The company refers to it as a smart explosive.

Fixor


By the way... thanks for the replies gang.

__________________
More is more and less is less,
More is better and twice as much is good too.
Not enough is bad,
And too much is never enough unless it's just about right.

The_Dunedan

If you want fun, put 1/2lb of Tannerite under or inside a washing-machine/stove/dryer. I saw the motor out of a dryer fly over fifty meters straight up. It's -fun- stuff.

Blinky

That's putting it mildly. Calling Nitrogen triiodide unstable is like saying Genghis Khan was 'a bit angry'.

Ourcrazymodern?

Calling Timothy McVeigh unstable might be putting it more mildly still.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

The_Dunedan

Gentlemen, I do believe we've been gratuitously insulted.

Mauser

Either that's a cut and paste, or the fuse went inside the watermelon to a larger charge.

Also Tannerite is the greatest thing ever introduced into the sport of target shooting since guns.

The_Dunedan

Indeed...who needs spotters? When you can drill a 250 gramme bottle at 400 yards, you know you're in good shape. You feel that shit in your -lungs,- man!

longbough

The concept of inert materials combined to make volatile explosives is not a "new" idea ... it's only the buzzword "binary" that makes it sound new.

IMO it's a fake. It just looks like it was done by teenagers.

The guy's hands look like a kids hands ... even if they aren't it's a blatant attempt to look "professional" because the guy is wearing BDUs. Still, they're just about the cleanest BDUs I've ever seen for someone in the field.

The guy doesn't even know basic chemistry terms for the reagents. He just says "white powder" and "red liquid." Note how he blatantly places a crate in the frame to make it look important. What a laugh.

If it hasn't been mentioned earlier the explosive velocity listed is that of TATP. And it requires more than just a drop of TATP to achieve that type of explosion.

Then again, maybe it WAS done by teenagers who DO have the stuff but are just bad video directors.

Meh ... for this reason and all the ones stated earlier I don't believe the one depicted is real.

__________________
"I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence." - Mahatma Ghandi

Mauser

Binary explosives do not exist as the news and hollywood would have you believe. In order to creat an explosive similar to the results seen you would actually need a bit of laboratory equipment, a few hours to kill, and more skill and brainpower than what these jokers have.

Link to some BE bunking: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08...t_terror_labs/

MacGyver

Mauser... that link was rather cool. Reading it reminded me of the Mythbusters episode where they tested explosive decompression on a junked airplane. Story Overview

__________________
More is more and less is less,
More is better and twice as much is good too.
Not enough is bad,
And too much is never enough unless it's just about right.