The Whole Story

I decided to take this multipart saga and put all in one easy to access and read account of my days in the explosive business. I’ve been meaning to do this for several months now. However, it wasn’t until I was telling someone about my frictional impact explosives story and how to find it, that I decided to bite the bullet and get it done.

I found myself saying things like, “I pretty sure it starts back in November of 2004, but then you have to start at the bottom and work your way back up and at some point you’ll need to switch to December to finish all five parts.”

I enjoyed rereading them as I edited and put them all together. I also decided that the last chapter or part needed to be cut in half, so now there are six parts instead of five. As it turns out, putting them all together wasn’t as big a pain as I thought it would be.

If you’re never read this before, I hope you enjoy the story. If you’ve seen this before, but decide to reread it, I hope you enjoy it again.


Frictional Impact Explosives –
The Whole Story


Part 1:
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. All I know is they had hundreds of different books, all waiting to be boxed up and shipped, but the only one I know anything 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, and were going to be a bit harder to get our hands on.

Neither of us were science majors, but we had both had 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 of its weak link. What we found was a lone window that was semi-secluded in a 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 and 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…


Part 2:
Up and Over

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, over the wall and dropping down onto the other side.

Our chemical storage room problem was solved!

After class, I found Dan and filled him in on my ceiling tile discovery. On our way home we made a brief, but thorough, detour through the science building to make a casual inspection of the ceiling tiles. After confirming that the building had the same tiles, and checking to be sure the bathroom window was still unlocked, which it was, we hurried home to organize the evening’s plans.

Using our first mission as a guide, we again set our clocks for 3:00 am. We packed a flashlight, measuring spoons, two jars with lids, scissors and some duct tape in a backpack. Then spent the next few hours finalizing our plans.

The lab classrooms were each about 60-feet x 30-feet. The entrance to the rooms was about in the middle of the long wall. The door to the chemical storage room was on the opposite wall straight across from the entrance. The front of each classroom was at one of the short ends of the room and had the lectern, the professor’s workstation and a pull down screen for slides and movies.

There were rows of workstations with black countertops evenly spaced the length of the room. There were also blacktop workstations built the length of the two long walls, as well as, on the short back wall of the classroom. The only breaks in the countertops that lined the walls were at the door into the classroom and the door into the chemical supply room. We planned to get in the building and the classroom just as we had before, use the workstations against the walls for platforms, remove a ceiling tile and then up and over.

We tucked our floor plans and diagrams into the backpack and tried to get some sleep.

The clocks went off, but we really weren’t asleep. We got up, grabbed the backpack and our disk golf gear and headed out the door. Getting in the building and up to the second floor went without a hitch. That’s when we encountered our next problem.
Up until this point, neither of us had noticed a shelf that circled the room above the workstations about a foot below the ceiling. This shelf housed different kinds of science paraphernalia along with several old science experiments.

We were at first a little disheartened by the discovery of this shelf. It was going to be pretty hard to get over this shelf and through the ceiling tile without breaking something.

To us it was imperative that we be invisible. If we could pull this off without anyone ever even suspecting that unwanted guests had been in the chemical supply room, it would make multiple trips possible, thereby granting us an inexhaustible supply of chemicals. This shelf also presented the possibility that there were similar shelves on the other side of the wall as well, a problem we had failed to plan for.

Attempting to improvise, we sat there discussing what to do next. Then a second unsettling thought occurred to us. It was quite possible that there were boxes, file cabinets or who knows what else stacked against the walls on the inside the storage room. We would be able to look down, but it might not be possible to avoid making a gigantic mess. Suddenly we had a high probability of an unsuccessful mission, and I was beginning to feel more like Inspector Clouseau than James Bond.

We were on the verge of giving it up for the night when one of us noticed that not only did the workstations stop at the doors, but the high shelf stopped as well. In a flash, James Bond was back and the quest was on again.

Balancing on the edges of the workstations with feet propped against the doorframe, we carefully removed the ceiling tile next to the wall that was right above the door. With the tile off, we climbed up and perched ourselves on the wall between the two ceilings. Then we carefully removed the tile above the door on the inside, went over the wall and into the chemical storage room. Up and Over!

The chemical supply room didn’t have any windows, so as long as the doors were closed we could turn the lights on and take our time.

The supply room had row after row of floor to ceiling shelves, each packed with every kind of chemical you could imagine. We quickly discovered that the chemicals were in alphabetical order and finding the ones we needed couldn’t have been easier.

As we were getting our jars out of the backpack we noticed a workroom down at one end. We found bottles, beakers, scales, lids, labels and surgical gloves. Now, it only seemed right that these chemicals should be placed, stored and labeled in their proper containers…so we helped ourselves. Working quickly, but carefully we put on surgical gloves, and gathered the needed chemicals.

The first thing we noticed was that the school had several containers of each chemical. Our first impulse was to take a whole bottle of each, but if we did our “Invisible Thief” theory would be wasted. With the huge amount of chemicals in this lab we were fairly sure that nobody was using any one chemical on a regular basis. If this were true, then a little bit of one chemical missing out of a few bottles would not attract any attention. With each chemical, we took a small amount out of each of the bottles. Small enough so as not to look oddly low, but large enough to give us a good supply to work with at home. We corked the bottles, labeled them and stored them safely in the backpack. We then placed the bottles back on the shelves exactly as we had found them.

As we were getting ready to scale the wall and go back through our hole in the ceiling, we discovered that the door was only locked on the outside, some kind of fire law I guess. This made our exit much easier. We replace the ceiling tiles, took few pairs of surgical gloves and turned off the lights as we walked out the door. We then slowly made our way down the back stairs and out the building.

We got home and went to work on our first batch.


Part 3:
The Big Bang

I’m not sure what time is was, but it had to be late. I don’t think we ever even thought about time. Our minds were focused on one thing and one thing only.

We carefully set up our chemical lab on a coffee table in the living room and worked about an hour making three dime sized little goodies. We wrapped them in wax paper with twisted ends, which made them look like little pieces of cheep Halloween candy. After we finished, we padded a WWII munitions box with toilet paper and carefully placed our creations inside. Then we cleaned up the lab, and fell asleep watching TV.

I don’t remember who woke up first, or even how long we had been asleep, but we sat staring down at three little wax paper blobs nestled safely their toilet paper home, discussing our next move.

We were like parents gazing down at their new baby in awe and wonder. We couldn’t believe that we had made such wonderful little things and that they were ours to take care of, at least until we tried to blow them up.

Our big concern was that they hadn’t had enough time to dry, and that trying to use one prematurely might ruin it. So we decided to wait a couple of hours. However, it didn’t take long for our will power to crumble and we decided if we tried one and it didn’t work, we would just go get it and keep waiting. Besides, if we ruined this one, we had two more as well as the makings for quite a few.

It was cold outside and I put on my jacket and shoes, so I could quickly run out and retrieve anything that failed to combust. At this point we still didn’t have much faith in our frictional impact explosives pamphlet. I mean, you mix two chemicals together with some water and rice and it’s supposed to explode? We were still unbelievers.

Dan carefully lifted the smallest of the three little treasures out of the box. Gingerly cupping it in his hand, we carefully moved to the front porch and he lobbed it out onto the driveway.

Sadly, I don’t remember much about the next few moments. I’m not sure exactly what has clouded or possibly clogged my memory. Maybe it was the deafening sound. Maybe it was the miniature mushroom cloud. Maybe it was the two excited and terrified boys awkwardly stumbling over each other as fell back into the house. Whatever it was, the next thing I remember is sitting in a now dark room, peeking through closed curtains and waiting for the police to show up.

And so we sat. Waiting silently. Listening intently for sirens, neighbors, or any commotion at all from outside.

But there was nothing.

Somehow we had managed to create a fairly significant explosion in a residential neighborhood and nobody noticed or cared. What had we done to deserve this?

Minds racing, we began a verbal reenactment of our first Big Bang, each of us reliving every detail as if the other had not been present. Somewhat automatically, we also began setting our lab up again. Then we got to work making more of our little toys.

It was somewhere in the process that we had the idea for our next test. We decided that to throw another of our babies out into the street from the front door was just asking for trouble. However, if we threw it over the house, from the backyard to the front, then we wouldn’t be seen.

I don’t remember who threw this one, but I do remember being disappointed at the lack of an explosion. Cautiously, we went out to search for our bomb.

We had two theories: One, It landed in the grass and it was too soft of a landing to create the explosion. In which case, we would simply retrieve it and throw it a second time. Two, it wasn’t dry yet and would have to be thrown again later.

We went out and searched, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After searching the entire yard, the driveway and the street without any luck, we headed back into the house. We were a little concerned, for a moment or two, but then returned to our lab. We worked for a while and created half a dozen or so new explosives. Each ranging is size from a pencil eraser to dime-sized ball.

As we cleaned up, we discussed what we were going to do with our new toys. Sure, mushroom clouds and loud noises were fun, but that would only satisfy our mischievous hunger for a short time. It wouldn’t be long before, not unlike a drug addict, we would be hunting for new ways to get a bigger and better demolitions fix.

Then it happened.

Matt, a friend of ours, decided to make an unannounced visit. Now, unannounced visits were more than okay, they were commonplace for us. We didn’t live far from campus and people were always dropping by just to hang out. As he was pulling up, there was this loud explosion. We both jumped up and rushed to the window. Matt was sitting in his car nervously looking around.

It didn’t take us long to figure out that our over the house little gem had landed in the street wet and become a kind of landmine. It sat in the street and dried. Then Matt had run over it with his car.

He ran to the door doing little serpentine, zigzag moves and shouting about someone taking pot shots at him from who knows where. We ushered him in and calmed him down by claiming not to have heard anything and changing the subject.

Later, after Matt had gone, we laughed until we cried about poor Matt’s confusion over being shot at. I’m not sure if I ever told Matt about what really happened. Maybe someday I should, because we owe him a lot.

You see, unknowingly, Matt helped us feed our addiction. Now, we not only had explosives…we had a plan.


Part 4:
Booby Traps and Big Mama

It didn’t take us long to dream up several different fun booby trap scenarios.

Our first, and possibly our best, idea was to put together a huge assortment of tiny landmines. Then, under the cover of night and while they were still wet, we’d toss our little bursts of excitement around campus in some of the high foot traffic areas. (Due to the potential for echo, stairwells were a personal favorite.) They’d have all night to dry and the next morning some poor, unsuspecting pedestrian would get a rather startling wake-up call.

Our next idea was to tie a 20 to 30-foot piece of string to one of the above-mentioned landmines. Once again, while they were still wet, we’d toss them up on roofs or awnings with the string hanging down. The next morning, when some curious passerby came wandering along and pulled the string, BAM! Our only concern was the chance that the now airborne package might land on someone’s head. I wish I could say that our concern was due to some kind of higher moral dedication to keeping the general public safe. However, as I recall, it was more a desire not to get caught. Although, after testing this idea, it became apparent that it didn’t take more than a wee bit movement to create sufficient friction to ignite the package and they would usually detonate long before getting near the edge. So this too became a workable plan.

Over the next few months we came up with quite a few different plans all of which, at the time, seemed like great ideas. I’m not sure how many different little bundles of fun we made, but there were quite a few. My only regret is that I never stuck around to long enough, or got back to the scene early enough, to experience the fun of the actual explosions.

After a while, our fascination with these little bombs began to dwindle. After you’ve heard countless explosions and seen equally as many tiny mushroom clouds, the fun starts to stagnate.

That’s when we had the idea for Big Mama.

Big Mama was the mother of all the frictional impact explosives we had made so far, and Mama, was she BIG!

Using a razor blade, we made an incision in the side of a tennis ball and spooned in the wet mixture. In the interest of chemical conservation, as well as to make sure the water had somewhere to go, we layered Big Mama with healthy supply of rice. Once complete, we parked her in safely in the munitions box with an extra layer or two of toilet paper. Just to be safe.

We really didn’t give much thought to how, or by whom this would be thrown, launched, dropped, or otherwise given flight to. We were living in the moment and seeing as the D-day for Big Mama was several days away at best it didn’t matter yet.

We also didn’t give much thought to how dangerous Big Mama might be. Based on the success of each of our previous home chem-lab experiments, (at least the ones we actually watched) we probably should have been a bit more wary. But we were young and we were immortal and we were stupid.

By this time we fancied ourselves as quite the frictional impact explosives experts. Being experts, it was our professional opinion that if we didn’t wait long enough for her to be dry all the way through, while she would probably blow up, the glorious explosion we were looking forward to would be far less spectacular than what we desired.

The days passed like years as we waited for Big Mama to mature. Unlike all of her predecessors who were packaged in wax paper, a somewhat porous container, the tennis ball she was in was, except for the slit cut by us, quite airtight.

We waited. And then just for good measure, we waited some more.

Waiting for over a week to play with a new toy gives you nothing, if not time to ponder. As the days passed, it seemed that something similar to good sense started to worm its way into our thoughts. The more we thought about it, we began to have visions of ways Big Mama could turn out to be a big disaster. Not the least of which was the two of us getting injured or caught.

Our original plan was to come up with some semi-safe way to detonate Big Mama on campus. After our thought-provoked revelations, we decided that our plan needed to change. And we decided to take her out to a back road somewhere, toss her down the road and just see what we see.

Not quite as spectacular a plan as we had originally had our hearts set on, but our only other option was soaking Big Mama in water and dismantling her.

Roads like we wanted were all too common around our university and it didn’t take more than fifteen minutes to get ourselves pretty far out of town. We pulled over and carefully lifted the munitions box out of the car.

Paco opened the munitions box and with my arm outstretched, I carefully reached in. We really had no idea how fragile Big Mama was going to be, and I was afraid of grabbing it too tightly and setting it off in my hand. I was also afraid of holding it too loosely and dropping it on my foot. As luck would have it, I was able to gently roll it off of the toilet paper padding and into my hand. Then, cradling it gently in my hand with my arm extended and my elbow locked I made a grenade type toss about 20 yards down the road.

The explosion was incredible.

The sound was more than just a loud explosion it was awesome. It was a delayed sound like I had only experienced while watching movies in science class. The kind where you first see a completely silent burst of light and then, just as you begin to wonder about why there’s no sound, the sound hits and echoes through your entire body.

The mushroom cloud was at least ten feet tall, its canopied top had a diameter of four to five feet. It was easily a hundred times the size of anything we had made so far. And it didn’t quickly dissipate into the air like the small ones. Oh no, it slowly drifted off into the darkening sky.

Stupefied by what we had accomplished, we stood frozen for what felt like an eternity. Remembering to breath again, I suddenly gasped for breath as we both ran to the point of impact.

Staring down at the spot where Big Mama had met the road, I couldn’t help but think it looked beautiful. The force of the explosion had embedded bits of tennis ball into the asphalt and created a sunburst pattern with shades of blues and reds mixed in.

Standing there mesmerized by all that had just transpired, suddenly we started being pelted with tiny bits of falling tennis ball. Standing in a tennis ball downpour, I began to have a whole new kind of respect for the power that this stuff had. We weren’t just playing with a bunch of Black Cat firecrackers that we picked up at some roadside stand these were explosives…and they were for real.

The drive home was silent. The ride seemed longer this time, both of us trying to wrap our minds around this new truth about what we were doing. When we finally spoke, we agreed that Big Mama had been fun to make and an intriguing learning experience, but we vowed to never make anything anywhere near that big again.


Part 5:
The Big Mistake(s)

What I didn’t tell you earlier, because it seemed a bit off topic, is that when we made our first visit to the chemical supply room to procure the needed chemicals, we also happened to leave with some additional chemicals that weren’t needed for the Frictional Impact Explosives.

You see, the pamphlet that had the recipe for the explosives also had a couple of other recipes that we thought looked interesting. Besides the explosives, what caught our attention was a recipe for smoke bombs. The smoke bomb recipe seemed more like it might actually work than the other. We decided that it would be nice consolation prize if in fact the main focus of our adventure turned out to be a dud.

I don’t recall much about these, because we really never paid much attention to them after the explosives worked so well. But we had the chemicals at our house, although we quickly forgot about them once the explosives became a reality.

When we came across these chemicals, that we had all but forgot about for several months, we decided that would give the smoke bombs a try. Without using any of our newfound “Big Mama” wisdom regarding the size of our toys, we quickly got to work preparing a gigantic smoke bomb.

Unlike the explosives that had to dry overnight, these babies were ready in an instant. We took it out in the backyard and lit the fuse.

In a matter of seconds our entire backyard was full of greenish-blue smoke. It was so dense that we couldn’t see more that a foot in any direction. Once again, the results were quite impressive. This pamphlet was turning out to be a goldmine.

Seeing as we had used all the chemicals we had on hand to build this one smoke bomb, (I told you it was big) we decided to make a second trip that very night to the chemical supply room to get some more.

This is the point at which our careers as outlaw chemists make a 180-degree turn in the wrong direction. You see, up until this point all of our somewhat shady maneuvers were well thought out and planned with meticulous detail. This mission, however, had several poorly planned elements, as well as, more than its fair share of stupid heat-of-the-moment decisions. For the sake of this story we’ll call them all mistakes.

(Mistake #1)
Call it pride, call it arrogance, call it stupidity, call it whatever you like, but we decided that we didn’t need to wait until the wee hours of the morning to make our chemical run. Oh no, we decided that we could easily sneak into the building at about 10:30 that evening.

Having checked the bathroom every time we were in the science building, we were quite certain that the window in the bathroom would still be unlocked. We packed a bag with the empty chemical containers needed to make the smoke bombs and not the frictional impact explosives. This decision would turn out to be the only good decision we made the entire evening. Then we waited for 10:30.

We entered the building without a hitch and quickly made our way to the second floor. Heading down toward the science classrooms we were passing a second stairwell when down below we heard the sound of jingling keys. It was one of the school’s graduate student security guards. For the most part what they did was make rounds through each of the buildings making sure doors were locked.

The guard looked up and saw two students standing at the top of the stairs glaring down.

(Mistake #2)
We took off running down the hall and around a corner that led into an area of the building that was unfamiliar to either of us. It turned out to be a row of locked offices, a pair of bathrooms and a dead end.

(Mistake #3)
Panicking, we slid into the men’s room.

(Mistake #4)
Realizing that even if the window would unlock, we were on the second floor and staying put meant getting caught for sure, we decided to stash the backpack behind a trashcan, run out past the guard, down the stairs and out the building. Based on the rather large waistline of the security guard, we were both quite sure we could easily outrun him.

We stashed the backpack, peeked cautiously out the bathroom door and took off toward the nearest stairs. It worked like a charm and the guard didn’t even have time to turn around, much less follow us.

We had gotten away again…or so we thought.

Safe at home, we set our clock for 3:00 am, intending to head back and retrieve the backpack and put an end to the night’s fiasco.

However, it wasn’t our clock that woke us up at about midnight, it was the phone.


Part 6:
The End of an Era

Seems the university police had found a backpack in the science building with a name on it, and the chief of police wanted to know if we had time to come have a conversation with him down at the campus police station.

Now there’s a good reason why our university’s police chief was nicknamed Barney Fife. Among other things, this guy was running across the court at a basketball game to break up a fight between spectators when his gun fell out of his holster. If that’s not bad enough, he didn’t even notice that it had happened and a second fight broke out between students who were trying to grab the guy’s gun. It was no big shock that Barney wasn’t taken all that seriously as a law enforcement officer by the students.

All the same, we were terrified.

We told him we’d be there in 15 minutes, but Barney insisted on picking us up. I had never been to, let alone seen the university police station, but as we pulled up in front I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

As it turned out, the police chief and his one deputy were pretty low in the pecking order when it came to office assignments. The university had an old house that used to be the president’s home back in the 1920’s. Being stuck in that old house would be just about the worst location on the entire campus. However, Barney would have given his single bullet to be in the old president’s home. You see, even old textbook storage ranked higher than the sheriff and his posse, because they were stationed, not in the actual house, but out back in the dilapidated old garage.

We walked in and an officer showed us to some chairs and pulled the garage door down with a crash. I felt like I was stuck in a really bad movie, as we just sat there waiting for someone to say something…anything.

The chief took a seat behind his desk, and shuffling though a huge stack of papers he produced a five by seven inch note card. Looking up he said, “I just want to make sure I get this right.”

Clearing his throat he read the card, “You have the right to remain silent, anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law…” and we both snapped to attention.

I’m sure he read the rest but I don’t remember anything more.

When I finally regained my mental composure, he was firing off questions about the contents of the backpack and what we were doing in the science building.

Turns out that the university had been searching, rather unsuccessfully, for the person or persons responsible for leaving tiny bombs, as he called them, all around campus. It evidently had not taken the science department long to determine the ingredients being used to make the explosives, but they had no idea where the culprits were getting the chemicals from, since as far as they could tell, no unauthorized personnel had been in the chemical supply room. (Invisible Thieves Theory)

I don’t remember much about the actual interrogation, seeing as my mind was still spinning from having just been read my rights. I know it was a lengthy discussion, in which we both quite scared and said maybe all of five words.

After what felt like an eternity, we were told not to leave town and that we would be contacted after the science department had determined if the chemicals we had in our backpack were the ones being used to make the bombs. (Which of course they weren’t since we hadn’t brought those containers with us)

The deputy took us home and we immediately washed all the remaining frictional impact explosives chemicals down the drain, got rid of the containers, and burned the pamphlet. We were sad to see it go, because it was the end of an era…a frictional impact era.


Note:
We were contacted about a week later and told that, due to a lack of evidence, nothing more was going to be done regarding the chemicals we had, but we were sternly warned not to be in any building after hours without permission. A warning that took seriously and heeded for the rest of our time at the university…well, kind of.