On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:41:52 GMT, "Toller" wrote:


40 years ago I read you could make napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. I
haven't any idea why I wanted to make napalm, but it didn't work anyhow; the
foam just floated in the gasoline.
Maybe it works better now that the lead is out of the gas. Or maybe the
foam I was using wasn't styrofoam.

No, it works. I used to do a lot of construction work for a very
eccentric wealthy fellow several years ago, and he had a huge quantity
of styrofoam in one of his garages, of the type you'd normally find in
packaging. He didn't want to pay to rent a dumpster for it, so he
handed me a civil-war replica sword, and asked me to chop it up and
dissolve it in gasoline to make it smaller. I got paid the same rate
either way, so I went ahead and did it. Turns out you can fit a
garage worth of foam into a 5 gallon can that way.

Afterwards, he mentioned the napalm thing, and we burned about a 1/2
cup of the stuff on in an old tire rim on the parking lot. It burned,
but it certainly wasn't all that exciting- you didn't miss out on
much.

I would think that in the case of the "home made plastic", the
gasoline would evaporate quickly enough, and it wouldn't be much more
flammable than regular foam.

BTW, if you still want to make napalm for some rediculous reason (and
sometimes the reason is just for the sheer hell of it- I know. It's
hard to resist goofing with things just to see if they really work,)
I've heard that a better way to do it is to float a tub of gasoline in
a hot-water bath so that it works like a double-boiler and stir in
glycerine soap flakes. Sounds dangerous to me, but if I ever actually
needed napalm for something, it seems more credible than adding foam.