On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:24:41 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:


Once it had been made, and passed through a filter
paper, we used to put it into corked boiling tubes (bigger than half inch
test tubes), and carry it around the school with us in our inside pockets.
A
good splat of the stuff on the floor in the corridor, would just about dry
in a lesson period, to the point where it was unstable. At the end of the
lesson, let the teacher leave the class first ... Oh the bang, and that
luvverly cloud of purple smoke rising to the ceiling, and the crackles
underfoot for days afterward when walking down that corridor. The fun of
laughing at the caretaker and his assistant trying to remove the purple
stain blasted into the surface of the tiles ... Then there was the joy of
making delayed fuses for tuppeny bangers by soaking string in ....
potassium
nitrate .... was it ? Tape a couple of inches to the top of a banger, then
set light to it and leave it under a seat at the back of the cinema at the
midnight movie. Plenty of time to return to your own seat before it went
off.

NTI is soluble in alcohol and perfectly stable as long as it's "wet".
An artist's paint brush and a classroom lock can generate loads of
fun. My senior year, I also had a master key to the interior locks in
the high school. That was fun too.

We kept it 'wet' by having it corked into the boiling tube as soon as it was
made. I don't know what the carrier liquid in Handy Andy was, but that was
what was keeping it wet. Whatever it was, quite volatile though, as it
didn't stay wet for long once a dollop had been splatted onto the floor.

Don't know what that is either. We always used ammonia water, so the
carrier was - water. Iodine isn't soluble in water but it is in
alcohol. Alcohol replaces the water in the NTI, so...

How bizarre ! I too had a set of keys in my last year. At the end of the
previous year, we had a hot drinks machine installed in an open area under
our physics block, which was built on 'stilts'. By the side of the machine,
was a door which led to a cellar that backed onto the boiler room. The water
supply for the drinks machine came from in there. At the start of the autumn
term after the long summer holiday, myself and my little gang of
'troublemakers' - well, it seemed like we were at the time, but kindergarten
stuff compared to what you see in the papers and on TV now - were not far
away from the machine when the caretaker unlocked the door to go in and turn
on the water supply. He left the keys in the lock, and one of my 'merry men'
, who is now a senior pilot at one of the biggest airlines in the world,
crept up and removed the whole bunch. Afterward, he was terrified of being
caught with them, so he gave them to me for safe keeping. We had a lot of
fun that year, getting into places we shouldn't have been ...

I was the property master for the marching band. One of the previous
PMs was given the task of duplicating some keys for the building when
it was new. The keys were stamped "do not copy", but no one ever
looked. The key was passed down from PM to PM thereafter. Only PMs
ever knew the key existed.

I bet if I looked through all of my junk, I've still got them somewhere !

I "passed it on" when I graduated. I had an outdoor key (had access
to all the indoor keys as part of my job) to our EE building in
college, acquired much the same way. Even though the university
thought it was a "secure" lock, the key blank was identical to a
common house key.


Oh happy happy days. What joyous things we learnt in 'real' schools all
those years ago !

Yeah. Kids today...

Thanks for reminding me of my mis-spent youth. :-))

You forgot?

Well, not really, but it's all been a very long time ago now. You leave
school, go to college, grow up a bit, get married, raise kids, and become a
responsible citizen :-( Then you start to get old, and become a grump,
remembering what a good bloke you were back in the day. Guess I'm close to
slipping into that phase now. Grown up kids look at me like I'm mad when
they see me with an iPod stuck in my lugholes, listening to the likes of
Uriah Heep and Dr John ...

My kid is 30 now. ;-) I usually listen to Bill Bennett on my MP3
player, though Moody Blues, Doors, ELP, and BS&T are on there too. ;-)