Pyromania, we've all been there

I used to visit my dad for a month in the summer. After the age of 13 he would leave me unsupervised all day while he was at work. During this time I would light whatever I could on fire, make psuedo napalm and the like.

When I was around 14 I learned about an interesting chemical reaction. As it turns out, the main ingredient in Drano would combine with pure aluminum, and release the hydrogen atoms from the Drano as a free gas.

Well, I of course was ready to go out and make my own Hindenburg, but I noticed that my dad's house was remarkable free of balloons. I figured I could just drop some aluminum foil in the bottle, let it puff up, open the lid and light it. This worked, and I got a nice jet of flame.

But of course, this was not enough, so I dropped in shards of a soda can. This sped up the reaction for some reason, and the bottle puffed up and looked like it was ready to explode. So I went over, opened the top, lit it, and ran back and watched the jet of flame rise. However the lack of air pressure in the bottle cause the bottle to quickly contract, ejecting a single, noticeable drop of Drano.

I watched the drop. I had no choice, as it was moving fast, right to my eye. Before I had time to close it, the drop hit my eye.

Man that shit burned, but as soon as it hit, my first aid training kicked in and said, get to a fucking shower and wash your eyes.

So I ran, crying like a little bitch from pain, and stood under the shower fully clothed rinsing out my eye for 15 minutes.

That was the end of the Drano experiment.

Edit:
However, I still haven't moved on. I have just moved on to radioactive shit. I have these two items on order as a start:
https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_13&products_id=508
https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=27_38&products_id=459
Then, with a few connections, I can make a low level x-ray machine. Why? I have too much free time.

 

I think there's just a lot of things about it that appeal to young boys. #1 being that it's usually forbidden. Beyond that, it has this interesting dynamic where you're both creating something and destroying another. As young men we engage in plenty of activities where we build things (forts, Legos, etc) and destroy others (take your pick). Making a fire just seems like the best of both worlds.
Or you can just take a Freudian explanation.

Focus: We were quite partial to cans of WD40 and lighters. Then we decided to tape a bunch of matches to a can and shoot it with a gun. Nothing as explosive as we wished for. Just a stream of flame. We also tried "homemade napalm" where you mix... well look it up for yourself if you're so inclined. Regardless, it wasn't that cool either. Just very sticky (to the point where it was kind of a pain in the ass) and burned for a pretty long period of time.

At one point fire no longer did it for us. We had to move onto bigger and better things, like electricity. I remember my friend stripping an extension cord and dunking it into a vat of water. I think our goal was to collect hydrogen gas. Again, not much happened. We started adding stuff to the water (I remember salt at the very least) and saw some sparks, but that was it. Ah to be 13 and stupid all over again.

Soon after we discovered women and a whole new way to get burned.

 

Fire is warm, welcoming, exciting, and it smells good. Hell, the only difference that I can think of between fire and pussy is that when a pussy gets wet, things are just getting started.

 

In college, our suite had a private bathroom that was covered in tile. On slow nights, we would have Axe Races, wherein we would spray lines of the foul-smelling substance from one end of the bathroom to the other, across the mirror, over stall, etc., and then light them up to see whose line would burn out first. One day, we got a note from the cleaning lady that read something like, "You don't stop with mirror mess, we not clean bathroom anymore."

Helpful Hint: If you're going to light a calendar on fire, be sure to take it off the wall first. Also, spraying it down with keyboard duster is not necessary. Paper burns just fine on its own. Once it's on fire, don't rip it down, flail it around, and scream "Fuck, fuck, fuck" as the flames build. Finally, once the fire goes out, be sure not to accidentally inhale the fumes coming off the charred remains. You will dry heave, your head will hurt, and a whole room full of people will laugh at you.

That school saw fit to give me two degrees.

 

One of my neighbors who was a few years older than me discovered a pretty cool "experiment" that would give us neighborhood boys countless hours of entertainment.

He would crush 3 pop cans, then form a pyramid with them, with the top can upside down. He would make sure to leave a gap between the bottom two, so that there was room to slide a candle underneath the upside down top can. He would put some wax into the top can, in the bottom which had formed a mini dish, and light the candle underneath it all.

When heated, the wax first melts, then starts to boil, and would finally actually produce a flame once it got hot enough. Once the flame appeared, for reasons unbeknownst to me, if you poured water onto the flame it would produce a fireball 3-6 feet high and 1-3 feet wide. I have no idea of the chemistry or physics behind it, but I do know that it was flippin' awesome.

Eventually his parents had to keep all the candles in the house locked away with the liquor.

Reminds me of the time my mom almost set my kitchen on fire on Christmas. We had a candle that the wax would just pool up in the top of after a while and put the flame out. I showed my mom that if you simply stuck a napkin in there, it would absorb all the melted wax, and you could re-light it. She tried doing this ... while the candle was lit. Ran through the kitchen screaming, while a chunk of the napkin fell onto the hardwood floor, still lit.

Just one instance in a streak of alcohol-related Christmas night events, that included my sister having Festivus "Feats of Strength" in the kitchen with a friend at 1 am one year, and me being cut off because my Crown and Cokes turned into triples by the end of the night.

 

Back in the day, my friends and I were walking home from elementry school, where we found a childs sled (it was winter time). It wasnt a wooden sled though, it was one of those plastic rectulanger dish type sleds. It was a gay purple color and we wanted to paint it balck. Next thing we know lighters came out, and we were burning this thing, using the spray paint can as a flame thrower. That got old fast, so my brother grabbed a 20L jerrycan of gasoline. He poured the gas in the sled until there it was about 3 inches of gas in the whole thing (the sled was about 4 feet long by 2 feet wide). I threw in a lit sheet of paper towel and the flames instantly shot up atleast 20 feet. We were panicking so my friend thought it would be a good idea to kick the flaming sled over, setting my whole driveway on fire, the flames only being 5 feet high. There was nothing we could do but let it burn itself out. Scary as hell though.

 

IF? Who are you kiddin'?

 

Man, I just wish I didn't have the good sense that some of you lacked as children.

The best I would do was take ping pong balls and fill them with strike-anywhere match heads and cotton balls soaked with some rubbing alcohol (but not enough to dampen the match heads) and just throw those bombs around. That and make mini planes with the matches, toothpicks, pennies for weights, and books of fire-crackers. Sometimes we would tape our action figures on the planes to enjoy the kamikaze missions.

You never seem to grow out of it though. Went camping a few weeks ago and we wound up burning all the wood we had brought in for 2 nights after the first night. We could vaguely remember staying up late after polishing off a bottle of Bulleit Bourbon and for whatever reason deciding to just burn all of the wood and the empty cans. We wanted that fire to be as big as possible.

 

I don't have any good stories besides lighting pens on fire with a magnifying glass, but my dad hung out with some really crazy kids when he was younger. Back then, nitric acid was sold to just about anyone; you could even buy it by the fifty-gallon drum. When you combine any alcohol with nitric acid in an acidic environment, you produce an explosive. Ethanol, methanol, glycerol, (nitroglycerine) mannitol, whatever.

He and his friends would go over to their friend's garage, where the kid's parents were busy, clueless, and proud of "their scientist son."

They got glycerol, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid to use as the acidic environment. The first time they did it, they forgot the ice bath (the reaction produces a lot of heat - not good when you're making explosives). It's a good thing they weren't making much, because a small cloud of nitrogen dioxide gas started coming up (very toxic - it's brown, so you can see it). They ran away from said garage, got the stuff they needed for an ice bath, came back, and started making it again.

They ended up with a test tube of the stuff. That doesn't seem like much, but they found out how explosive it was when they squeezed out half a drop of it and hit it with a hammer. He told me, "It was LOUD. We really didn't know what we were fucking with."

Later on, that same kid made lead azide (lead and nitric acid) and blew a huge crater in his backyard. His parents put a stop to his garage chemistry after that. For such a smart kid, he wasn't very bright.

To all aspiring terrorists - they don't sell nitric acid to random people any more because of that. If you want to make it for yourself, use sulfuric acid and calcium nitrate.

 

Sadly, none of my stories were done as a child.

I had a friend that owned a service station and had a metric fuck ton of old tires stacked out back and one night me and another buddy decided to clean up the mess for him. We grabbed about 40-50 tires in our trucks, bought a beer can full of gas, and stacked them up in an abandon gravel pit in the pouring rain. The resulting fire was reaching about 50 feet into the sky, blacked out the sky, and we had to back about 200 feet away from it. It was glorious.

I'm sure I have my own personal hole in the ozone layer after that one.

Another time me and a friend were down on the beach when the woods were incredibly dry and there was a fire ban in effect. We figured "What the hell. were in the middle of nowhere and it's a nice calm night. What could possibly go wrong?"

It turns out plenty.

We built a small fire by the lake, but we forgot we were on the shores of what amounts to an inland sea where storms can flair up out of nowhere. One moment we standing there BS'ing and enjoying our little fire and the next there was a 50 mph wind coming off the lake blowing embers from our fire into the tender box that the woods had become. I still don't know how we put that thing out and didn't manage to burn the woods down. We had no buckets or shovels, all I remember is pissing on the fire, throwing wet gravel from the shore on it using my bare hands, grabbing burning wood and throwing it into the lake, and stomping on flames until every last ember was gone.

Another time in the dead of winter we got about 15 4x4's together and decided it was a good night to head up into the mountains. It was about 15 degrees outside and we came upon a clearing and everyone decided a bon fire would be really nice. Kind of like summer in February. A couple of the guys grabbed chainsaws and took down a couple of trees and started sawing them up. I decided to be the official fire starter and went rooting around for pine cones, pine needles and anything else I could find that was dry and burnable in the donut hole around tree bases. It took about an hour or so to really get it going, but by God we had an awesome fire.

People don't even question smoke and fire coming from my property anymore, they know I'm somewhere near by with a beer in my hand admiring my handiwork.

 

8th grade, I had to take the city bus to school. My city's public transit system sucking, I usually had to wait half an hour or so in the cold. I discovered something quite handy: if you get a small box of kitchen matches, take two matches out, leaving the box open with the phosphorous tips exposed, light the two, and drop 'em back in, you got a nice FWOOSH and, if you closed it within a few seconds, a good handwarmer. Buying these things in bulk, this left me with some entertainment while waiting for the bus.

I began to explore other uses for the matches, and found they're great for trimming spare threads at the bottom of your jeans' leg. Sharing this knowledge with a friend, he asked me to take care of this huge bundle at the bottom of his pants leg. I lit it, and looked away, confident he could take care of it.
A second later, I hear "HOLY SHIT DUDE" and turn back to see what looks like the lower half of his shin engulfed in flames. Stomping on his shin didn't put out the fire quite as quickly as we wanted, but it worked, and his pant leg was thread-free. Mission accomplished!

What I'm really looking forward to is getting out on a call, it's been pretty wet here so I haven't been able to put my wildland firefighter certification to use.

 

In middle school my neighborhood went through a serious mail box purchasing spree. Add foil and Drano in a 20oz soda bottle, screw the cap on tight, drop in a mailbox, move away quickly.


In college I was pissed off at our pledges. So I took the loft-ladders out of all their rooms and made a pyre of 15 ladders. It blazed for a long time, long enough for some of my friends to get black out drunk and steal a couch from the Phi Psi house across the street. That made it 15 ladders and 1 couch. One of the pledges then added his spare tire for some god awful reason. All of this was done on a concrete patio not even 75 feet from our goddamn house. To say we were idiots is quite the understatement.

 

I had a friend in high school whose family owned about 10,000 acres of land in my county. Hanging out with this guy usually involved some sort of danger or illegal activity, explosives and fire included. One night we made a fire outside of the hunting camp. After some beers we decided it should be bigger, much bigger. We were dumping anything we could get our teenage hands on it, when shots rang out. Somebody, SOMEBODY threw the trash in which somehow included about 20-30 bullets. Learned a few lessons that day.

 

The best thing I've ever set fire to was an old Christmas tree. We "planted" it in the ground, poured a little gasoline on it, and lighted it. It took less than two seconds before there was a 15 foot column of flame shooting out of the ground. Nothing bad happened, but in hindsight we were much, much too close to some dry trees and brush. Fortunately old trees don't burn for very long.

 

I have always had the tendency to be friends with guys so I've had a lot of experience with pyromania. We spent most of our youth seeing what we could set on fire and how big of a boom would ensue. There was a very memorable time that involved a bonfire and a can of binaca. That fireball had to have gone 4 feet in the air. That was fantastic...

I've mostly stopped doing that.

Of course there was the time my best friend and my boyfriend (at the time) got really drunk and thought it would be really fun to spray WD-40 on the bottoms of our feet and then run on the driveway lighting the footprints we left behind on fire... Seemed like a great idea at the time... and frankly it looked really cool...