I grew up with Guy Fawkes nights where 8 yr olds were sent to the service station with $10 to buy enough gun powder to blow up half a suburb. Then as I entered high school our eyes were opened by simply paying attention in chemistry class and chlorine+break fluid bombs were the flavour of the month. Now days I'm sure the feds would be called by the neighbours as soon as we started detonating our toys. Still don't know how we survived the day we blew up a bees nest that lived in an old tree at the end of our street.
Our crowning glory was the exploding touch paint, created by super saturating ammonia with candice crystals, both freely available at the local chemist. You could paint it on a surface and once it dried with would explode on contact. We painted the inside of a school locker with our test run and the door was blown off simply by tossing a shoe inside. We then got up early and managed to paint the hand rails where the day boys sat before they arrived at school. Plenty of sore arses that day and no one ever got caught.
