Bomb Building 101

[chrisinhouston]

Today the headlines have pictures of a mangled piece of a home kitchen style pressure cooker that may have been what made that horrible explosion in Boston. It got me thinking about when I was younger and my best friend taught me how to build a bomb. I'm 57 now so this was when I was like 15 or so.

My best friend back then was a kid named Bert, had a crazy family so he was a bit strange. His dad had been some kind of machinist so they had an incredible home workshop complete with a welder, a metal lathe and other non typical home shop tools and Bert knew how to use them. We used to go to an old Army/Navy surplus store... the kind you don't see now as this one had real surplus from WWII, Korea and Vietnam and not made in China knockoffs. We used to buy manuals on making booby traps and explosives. I think that's where Bert learned to make really good bombs. We also bought cool helmets, bayonet and other neat things that every teenage boy would like.

His specialty was the pipe bomb and Bert discovered that while pipe bombs made from galvanized plumbing pipe were ok, a seamless pipe with a higher tencile strength was better. He figured out that the best material was bicycle frame tubing which is seamless; the seam is the weak link and will tear apart so having no seam makes the bomb build up greater pressure. Threaded pipe caps are also a weak link so Bert would bend and roll up the ends of his pipe bombs much like the end of half full tube of toothpaste. This is why a pressure cooker did so much damage, probably high strength stainless steel with a tight locking lid. Bert and I were always finding old discarded bicycles and we would cut them up into various size lengths of tubing.

As for what to use to make it explode, it's easier then you think. Gun powder for reloading bullets or shotgun shells is easily obtainable at most gun shops. We came up with a cheaper and easier solution; matches. There was a clearance place that sold things bought up from places going out of business or being rebranded. And back then matches with a hotel's name on them were everywhere, the disposable lighter was not yet on the scene. So, Bert and I bought cases of paper matches. And we would sit at a table tearing the books apart and cutting the stems from the match heads into a container. And that was all we used, we packed the pipe tightly with matches. Oh and the fuses were made from matches. We would take a long piece of masking tape and lay it on a table sticky side up. Then lay the small parcels of matches torn apart from the booklet onto the tape in one long line of match heads. Fold the tape over on itself and trim off the match sticks and you ended up with a long fuse.

So, were we urban terrorists? Well we never blew up anything of consequence. I remember there were some old abandoned cars in the woods near our homes. Cars from the 50's and 60's. We used to put bombs in them and set them off and see the damage. I think we put a big pipe bomb in the hollow of an old tree and blew that up. It's amazing we weren't killed or maimed. We would light the fuse and run like hell. We usually wore our Army helmets for protection.

Later Bert learned how to make nitro glycerin and other more volatile explosives, he also somehow got some blasting caps and figured out that a little bicycle lamp generator (the old kind that had a wheel that was spun by the bike tire) made enough current to detonate the cap.

We never got arrested or blew up mailboxes or anything like that. And what happened to Bert? He became a Christian minister of some kind, I last heard from him about 15 years ago. He was preaching at a little church in Georgia and also restored violins as a hobby. No kidding!

Funny, I've never told any of this to my kids or grand kids or showed them how to make a bomb. Grandpa's secret I guess...