Match heads as black powder substitute
Got yer reloads right here. (img by Will Nickelson)
It’s hard to forge gunpowder from base elements, despite what you may have read in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s more complicated than making a telegraph key… there’s some chemistry involved, and honestly, where the hell are you going to get sulfur when someone else has already thought to loot the chemistry shop?
These guys have come up with an interesting black powder substitute:
And I thought I had come up with new levels of incendiary warfare when I learned to fire strike-anywhere matches out of the end of my Red Ryder BB gun. If I had known about this trick, I maybe would have hurt myself.
I especially like how they test various loads (BBs, river rocks) and numbers of match heads in the video.
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