Battery bang

The spanner my colleague (we were both garage mechanics at the time) dropped on the poor customer’s battery was pretty dramatic. Big ring spanner: one ring vanished completely, and a big bite out of the other end. Battery terminals both turned into big blobs. 1967, so no CCTV or anything sadly. Mate’s arm badly burnt, both of us temporarily deafened. Not sure whether that was when my tinnitus started, or perhaps just got worse.

I think for a certain type of person, dropping a spanner across an old car battery is a rite of passage.

Old failing battery from a Mazda. Charged up, but one cell duff so only output about 10V or so.

One shiny spanner, a fairly big one, maybe 9/16 or so?

Balancing the spanner on a long piece of flat wood (that tongue groove stuff), lowered across the terminals.

One extraordinarily loud BANG later (I know what you mean about being deafened), there was no spanner. There were the ends of the spanner welded to the battery terminals, and various little fires that had started from the bits of red hot metal flying around the workshop.

Quite how the 10 year old me and the adult Steve (yup, endless supply of Steves) were neither killed not maimed is a miracle.

Now, say what you want about petrol going up, and in the right conditions it can make an impressive bang. However a battery mistreated will react with the vengeance of the old gods. The Buncefield explosion was serious. But if it had been a battery of that size that blew, it may have been powerful enough to throw debris into orbit.

Treat batteries nicely.

I think for a certain type of person, dropping a spanner across an old car battery is a rite of passage.

My mate did it by accident – and it wasn’t a dud battery, it was a nearly new one. The heavy duty sort you get in big diesel Mercs…but the main shaft of the spanner survived, presumably because the resistance of the ring was higher than the resistance of the shaft, and/or most of the heat was generated at the point of contact with the battery. Big bang and badly burnt arm, whatever. I took him to A&E in the garage’s old Morris Minor pickup, remember that trip very clearly.

The Buncefield explosion was serious. But if it had been a battery of that size that blew, it may have been powerful enough to throw debris into orbit.

Something like that.

Treat batteries nicely.

I do try to.

I think for a certain type of person, dropping a spanner across an old car battery is a rite of passage.

When working on diathermy¹ equipment in the 1980s my then boss had a habit of ensuring the main capacitor² was discharged by rocking a screwdriver across the two terminals, just in case the bleed discharge resistor had gone open circuit. I had suggested that a suitably insulated bench/toolkit alternate bleed would be a better idea.

Anyway, after a large noise in which his screwdriver became permanently welded across the terminals, I escorted my boss to the tearoom for a mug of sugary tea and a quiet sit down.

Quite how the 10 year old me and the adult Steve (yup, endless supply of Steves) were neither killed not maimed is a miracle.

In teen days it was a common “trick” to take the red caps of matches, two bolts, one nut and build a little chamber for the explosion of the match head triggered by dropping the bolt combo onto a rock or paving slab. It goes bang and the bolts usually remain together.

Some people know how to create better explosive mixes, and shoot 6" diameter branches off oaks with the flying bolt.

It seems the potential for shooting oneself also exists. In my timeline it was never eventuated.

¹ Pass a high power modulated RF signal from a point source through flesh, and it cooks or cremates depending upon power level and modulation type.

Some people know how to create better explosive mixes

A little recount from my mis-spent youf, rewritten as someone else’s – and somewhat altered because the book is fiction after all, albeit much of it based on real life…

http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/Penny/Rocketry.html

I’ve probably told the tale of discharging a colour monitor’s CRT that had an open circuit discharge resistor across my fingers here before…exciting…

👍

That’s for the rocket bike.

I never got a chance. Mom sussed me out way too early and made certain that everything even remotely dangerous was discarded, removed, or otherwise hidden.

Except the sockets, which were fitted to the wall.
And a night light, which in those days didn’t have shrouding around the contacts.
And a tea spoon.

Was less explosive than the battery. But I’m probably only here because mom was specific about buying me slippers with rubber soles. Ugly things, but, I wonder now, was she just crazy prepared or was it somehow inevitable?

Penny’s fictional experiences – in this and several other cases – were slightly more dramatic than my real ones…but broadly similar…

Mum sussed me out too, but didn’t have the necessary understanding of Technical Matters; Dad did, but was like Penny’s fictional Dad. He didn’t believe in cottonwooling his kids…

On the subject of Mains electricity – I’ve probably shared this here before:

http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Recounts/ThreeLessons.html

Some people know how to create better explosive mixes

Hmm, the Jolly Roger Cookbook that was doing the rounds in the late eighties and early nineties. I read it, of course, and marvelled at such wondrous things as making nitro glycerine in a frying pan in the kitchen.
Nitro glycerine.
The stuff that is rumoured to be rather explodey if you so much as look at it wrong.

I couldn’t help but think that perhaps the cookbook was actually written by one of the three letter agencies to quietly dispose of (by self inflicted mishap) the sort of cretins that would want to make use of these sorts of “recipes” before they used them against other people for whatever idiotic excuse they think justifies it.

Blowing stuff up chemically just wasn’t my thing.
Three phase across a large capacitor? Now you’re talking! 🙂

I’ve mentioned before my misadventure in helping to “repair” a large TV at school, and me enthusiastically moving that big annoying wire out of the way.

I don’t remember the backflip. Or landing on a wooden table hard enough to break it.

I do remember waking up in the sanatorium with matron completely white, unable to hold a cup of tea without spilling it on the floor, and her dialogue mostly being single syllables and sobbing.

Hurt for ages, like all the muscles, even ones a never knew that I had.

But the strangest thing? It was matron’s reaction that hurt more.

Even to this day, I don’t go near the business end of cathode rays. If a TV or monitor is busted in a way that fiddling with the pots won’t fix, it stays broken. Not touching it.

Oh aye, I remember you telling that tale before!

I think I was lucky: the entry and exit points for my 25kV CRT shock were both on the same hand…

One observation sticks with me to this day: the entry and exit points produced huge blisters, one very noticeably bigger than the other, and both filled with gas not liquid. One full of hydrogen, the other full of oxygen? Didn’t try to investigate the question.

Around 1966 we were building a kit garage. The concrete base was laid, but needed some cutouts for the feet of the girders that were to support the roof. A colleague had produced a Kango electric breaker, wired for 13 amp. The building next door where the power came from was still 15 amp, so another colleague rewired the plug.

I was holding the heavy, metal breaker when he turned it on. I came to in the bushes around 5 yards away.

It turned out the cable was the old colouring – red live, black neutral, green earth. And the person who rewired it had red-green deficient colour-blindness.

You do know that those jolly japes of youth making thing go bang now earns you a place on a terrorist watchlist!

In my youth, i experimented a lot with ammoniumnitrate, and apex.

Also with high voltage on the door-handle of my teachers room.

I guess, nowadays i would get an entry as terrorist?

I still have my school Pocket Oxford Dictionary with instructions for how to make nitrogen tri-iodide in the Notes section at the end in immature handwriting.

That’s the one that’s fine if kept wet, but when dried out after painting onto doorknobs gives a surprising bang!

Nitrogen tri-jodide is known get set off when a fly is landing on it :-)
Or a slight wind-blow can set it off. Even worse as apex.

Don’t try this out. I am lucky to still own my hands and my head!

As a youth i were stupid enough to experiment with that stuff. And lucky enough to not hurt myself.

Nowadays i would not dare to do that anymore.

You are not alone in doing daft things -

Could be that’s why young boys (and these days girls) are sent to War :-(

You do know that those jolly japes of youth making thing go bang now earns you a place on a terrorist watchlist!

Thanks, but I was “introduced” to the top end of the police service in my area by my headmaster. They both “suggested” I employ my intelligence elsewhere and that I must never tell people how to make the interesting combinations.
I might have made a minor, minor ripple doing things right when McDade tried to blow up the central telephone exchange directly across from the central police station, but I’m sure there were far more interesting people even then.

I still have my school Pocket Oxford Dictionary with instructions for how to make nitrogen tri-iodide in the Notes section at the end in immature handwriting.

Read once, never forgotten. The tri-chloride is…

After a chemistry lesson where growing an iodine crystal was demonstrated, resulting in a 2-inch crystal, one of the class took the crystal home, and added ammonia.

He left it drying in a baking tray on top of the stove.

An hour or so later there was a loud bang from the kitchen, where the family discovered a nice all-over purple paint job and a flattened out baking tray.

At school, we used to pack it in the runners of the sliding blackboards before lessons.

My own speciality was taking apart a handful of 3d bangers, and putting the combined gunpowder into a copper pipe, with one of the fuses in a hole near the crimped end. That is, until the time I got creative, and thought adding photographic flash powder should produce a spectacular flash.

Spectacular it was, as bits of the copper pipe flew past us. Flash powder is, it turned out, a high explosive, and the gunpowder acted as the necessary detonator.

An hour or so later there was a loud bang from the kitchen, where the family discovered a nice all-over purple paint job a

Fading to permanent brown?

Flash powder is

Magnesium or Aluminium powder and nitrate or chlorate. IIRC. Been a long time.

You do know that those jolly japes of youth making thing go bang now earns you a place on a terrorist watchlist!

Indeed – as mentioned by Penny in her rocketry story (approximately but not exactly a recount of my own history). I still had quite a lot of that sodium until 1984, when I disposed of most of my stuff in preparation for what was intended to be a permanent emigration to India, but which in the event lasted only six months.

Not so much the making things go bang, and the attempts to acquire the materials that attract the attention of the authorities, I think.

as mentioned by Penny in her rocketry story

Loved that story. It reminded me of two things.

One was one of the stories in the Darwin Awards, rocket propelled car. https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1995-04.html

The other was that when I was in the sixth form the school, in their ?wisdom? offered some of us after-school paid jobs restocking the reagents in the chemistry lab. One result of this was brown fingertips from the nitric acid. (Gloves? never heard of them!) The other was that we had the key to the stock room, which not only held the winchesters of conc nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric acids we were meant to be using, but also the sodium, potassium and phospghorus, held under liquids to prevent fires, and mercury.

The mercury was used to plate pennies, to present as half-crowns on the bus home for our penny-halfpenny fare. Getting two and fourpence halfpenny change from a penny was a good deal. We later discovered that a mixture of mercuric chloride and nickel sulphate, both on the open shelves in the lab, produced a more convincing version of nickel-silver, with the added advantage that it faded away after a couple of hours, removing the evidence.

The sodium was placed in the water trap of the bench drains, just above water level, when we knew the next lesson would be doing distillations. As the water rose, small explosions sounded from the drains.

Clive, I have just clicked through some links on your website to see that in 1967 you started a nuclear engineering course at QMC (now QMUoL). Our paths nearly crossed as I was also at QMC as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate from 1965 to around 1969 with a year away with my PhD supervisor in USA (67-68). When I came back from USA the new Maths block had been built on the Mile End Road next to the Engineering Building.

After I graduated with my first Mathematics degree, the UKAEA offered me a job at their research establishment at or near Warrington in Lancashire. I had passed the security check despite saying I was a pacifist – I didn’t know then the connections between UKAEA and the atomic weapons establishments, but the security bloke must have known. Most people did not know the connections at that time including Tony Benn. Anyway, I didn’t take up the job offer preferring to do Maths research for a PhD.

Someone on a RN ship was asking about the what a nuke bomb looked like – the reply – you are sitting on one.

A form of depth charge – perhaps they want more to defend – the Aircraft carrier on it’s journey out East!

at or near Warrington in Lancashire

That’d probably be Culcheth where I did one of my summer projects ( http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Recounts/Culcheth/Pneu.html ) – the other place near there was the Reactor Design Centre & Apprentice Training School at Risley. Huge offices and workshops where I spent the summer before starting at QMC. I remember the offices there particularly for the paternoster lifts. I preferred the stairs…

I didn’t take up the job offer preferring to do Maths research for a PhD.

Very wise!

I probably should have done Maths instead too, but I’ve had the life I’ve had as a result of the choices I made, and it’s been okay. So far, anyway!

Someone on a RN ship was asking about the what a nuke bomb looked like – the reply – you are sitting on one.

I am allowed to say that RN ships may carry nuclear weapons and that aircrew are trained to use them. Despite that limit on me, there is much more available on the interweb. ;-)

I was a helicopter pilot and it is is not feasible that someone was sitting on a nuke. It is just about possible that they came close to an exercise weapon. Much more likely is that they were being had.