Frictional Impact Explosives

When I was a junior in college my brother was working his way through seminary. During his seminary career my brother had many different jobs. I didn’t say “odd” jobs, but I assure you they were.

I don’t know exactly how he found the job at some kind of book shipping warehouse and I don’t even care. This warehouse had hundreds of different books, all waiting to be boxed up and shipped, but the only one I know about is a small eight to ten page pamphlet called, Frictional Impact Explosives.

My roommate Dan and I had spent more time and money on different kind of fireworks throughout our college years than we should have. We had even gone so far as to make some of our own, but when the Frictional Impact Explosives pamphlet arrived at our door we were as giddy as schoolgirls on prom night and couldn’t wait to get started.

Our giddiness, however, soon turned to depression as we realized that two of the four ingredients needed to make these little goodies were not easily available to the general public. The two easily attainable ingredients were water and rice. (The rice was simply used as an absorbing agent for the water) We already had an abundance of both of these items at our house. The other two were chemicals, whose names I can’t remember, but wouldn’t publish here if I could, were going to be a little bit harder to get our hands on.

Neither of us were science majors, but we had both been in and around the science building enough to know the general layout of the building. There were four science lab classrooms on the second floor. This part of the building has a long hall going east and west on the north side of the building and a matching hall on the south side of the building. Between these two halls were the four science lab classrooms, two on the north side and two on the south side. Smashed between the two north classes and the two south classes, like the cream filling in an Oreo, was a chemical storage room that ran the length of the rooms. Although we had never seen inside the chemical storage room, we knew it the answer to our frictional impact quandary.

At this point we had two big problems to solve.

One: How do we get into the science building after dark?
Two: After we are in the science building, how do we get through the locked classroom doors and the locked chemical storage room doors?

As for getting in the building, that didn’t take us long. Using a game of night disk golf for cover, we circled the building in search for its weak link. What we found was a lone window that was semi-secluded in a kind of sunken atrium area that was designed as a kind of professor’s lunch/smoking area.

The atrium was on the back of the building, shaded by trees and unlit at night. This window wasn’t like the rest of the windows on the first floor. This window had shaded glass like you would see on a shower door. If this were in fact a bathroom window, then it would be easy to get in and unlock the window during the day. We marked this window as a possible bathroom window on our map of the building, scouted the rest of the building and finished our disk golf game.

The next day we went into building, found the bathroom and unlocked the window. It was beginning to seem like child’s play as our frictional impact dreams took one giant step towards fruition.

That night we set our alarm clocks for 3:00 am. We dressed in camouflage and black, and snuck in science building through the bathroom window. We slowly made our way up to the science lab classrooms and were pleasantly surprised to find the classroom doors unlocked. However, just as we suspected, all four doors to the chemical storage room were locked tight.

Working around cars as much as I had in my life, I had used clothes hangers and even a special tool I’d made to jimmy locked car doors to free stranded keys for friends. But these bad-boys were locked tight. We tried everything we could think, but it quickly became apparent that our frictional impact dreams were behind locked doors.

Or so it seemed…

A few days later, I was sitting in class when I noticed something about the ceiling. It was one of those ceilings with the big white square ceiling tiles. You know the ones, every school, of every district, of every city, of every state has the exact same ones. What grabbed my attention on this particular day was a missing tile. Now a missing tile in the ceiling of a classroom was nothing new, except that this particular tile just happened to be right next to the wall.

Undistracted by the monotone voice of my American History professor, I stared up through the space left by the missing tile and was intrigued by the fact that the wall stopped only inches above the tiles. I quickly deduced that, if I were so inclined, there was nothing to prevent me from climbing through the hole and dropping down onto the other side.

Our chemical storage room problem was solved!


Coming Soon…
Part 2: Up and Over