posted December 10, 1999 06:44 AM            

and i read somewhere that the tips of WHITE match heads contains potassium chlorate, anybody help me here?

posted December 10, 1999 03:31 PM            

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-Knowledge is power, power leads to corruption, corruption is a crime, crime doesn't pay. So if you know to much you will go broke!!!

All burning explosives suffer from low explosion pressure. As a reaction proceeds and pressure builds up, in burning explosives, there is a pressure where the chemicals that are formed by the burning begin to recombine back to what they were, and at that pressure limit the reaction would stop if something could contain the heat and pressure without loosing any of it. For black powder it is about 50,000 PSI, that's why you can use that powder in guns that will blow up if you use smokeless powder in them.

Smokeless powder is made of high explosives like nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine gelled into celluloid like particles. They will detonate if you put a cap in them, and their detonation will not be a burning, but will be a true sonic velocity decomposition of the chemicals in them as the shock wave travels at the speed of sound in whatever chemical is being detonated. It's several thousand meters a second because at high temp, and high pressure, and in solids, sound moves a lot faster than it does in air.

The explosion pressures of high explosives run in the millions of PSI. Their pressures can make steel flow like butter, or even liquid.

Chlorate plus vaseline or any other oil, was called rack a rock and was used around WWI time to do a lot of rock blasting around the world. It makes big lumps and not so much dust as dynamites do. Its about like the dynamites that are used in coal mining where lumps are wanted and not dust.

It has a propagation velocity around 5000 ft per second. (thats the speed at which the "fire" travels down a stick of it in a borehole.

Good High explosives run around 20,000 ft per second.

Rack a rock is only interesting if you have access to gobs of very cheap chlorate. Its too expensive today when chlorate is not all that available.

posted December 13, 1999 04:18 AM            

if so then i have 'red dot' smokeless powder i think it is double base, not sure, but anyhow if i wanted it to DETONATE, not deflagrate how could i go about making the right blasting cap?