reminds me, in the mid 80s, of my friend and I who made a lot of gun powder when we were young, we pretty much got all the things we needed out of the encyclopedia. The potassium nitrate was easily available, in bulk, at the garden store, as well as Sulphur. We'd use lumps of charcoal on sandpaper and got a fantastically fine powder. We made various kinds of fireworks, then we started putting it in pipes and folding the ends over and we started getting "booms". We kept doing this until we made things that we started getting too scare to set off. We had quite a few close calls where pieces of shrapnel went wizzing by. We did this in my backyard, it was odd my parents were kind of ok with this (up until a point....) my dad who was a research physicist worked at a large scientific institute and must of talking to his friends at work about our adventures, and someone there gave him all these old chemicals, metals, and all kinds to take home. Things like magnesium which makes for great fireworks like things. Some iodine, which we turned into a super shock sensitive explosive (by mixing it with ammonia). Then there was a can of sodium pellets. Our experience with sodium had been what we had seen in class, you put a bit in water, and you get this pretty good fizz/fire reaction. Sort of was expecting this, these pellets were much bigger than anything we'd seen been put in water, so we just popped one in a bucket of water expecting a massive fizzing and buzzing around of the pellet..... but ..... nope, it did a bit of fizzing for half a second before it exploded sending burning sodium all over the back yard....luckily it didn't set anything on fire, but my parents weren't at impressed at this experiment and banned all further experiments. Now looking back on it, I just keep thinking... WHAT THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?