Via email from antitango:
At Boomershoot we use Potassium Chlorate by the 200 pound drum. You can get it from the heads of matches or make it with bleach and electricity.
As you can tell from the video in larger quantities gummy bears could be dangerous. They could be used for everything from smoke bombs to incendiary devices.
Where is the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gummy Bear Violence? They should be calling for the banning of gummy bears.
Oxidizers … what do they do?
Let you make sugar rocket motors, for one thing.
I guess a lot of people these days don’t know just how little knowledge of chemistry it takes to make something go bang. Of course, it takes a bit more to make that happen without blowing yourself up in the process. š (Or having it happen in a defined and controlled way)
So how many kilograms will we be going through during production for BoomerShoot 2013? Will I need a GBEP (Gummy-Bear Employee Possessor) cert too? Boomer Bears?.. ;p
Now THAT is the kind of chemistry class that keep the kids interested.
Too bad they don’t allow that any more.
Black powder and gun cotton aren’t exactly modern high tech either.
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=103852
Black powder is what– 500 years old? Let’s see; charcoal, saltpeter (which can be extracted from animal dung among other things) and sulfur. I’ve known people to make it work satisfactorily without the sulfur too.
Black powder closer to 1,000 years in use, Lyle.
As far as the potassium Chlorate goes, the consumer product safety commission has been doing their best to put all the pyro chemical small retailers out of business for the last 7-8 years. They’ve driven FireFox out of the majority of the market and keep trying to get Skylighter shut down. Small retailers pop up and get whack-a-moled with regularity, you guys have a license to manufacture so that you can buy by the drum from wholesalers, without this hassle. But the small batch retailers are absolutely an endangered species… So there are various folks selling expensive platinoid series metal anodes on ebay for the discriminating home user. Or you can just freaking BOIL the pool chlorinator or Calcium hypochlorite bleach to make it into Chlorate, then use some potassium chloride water softener salt to replace the Calcium. It’s all on the net. Frankly, nitrates are more versatile anyhow.