Wow Kutter, I knew that you did some engraving in addition to having a lot of other gunsmithing skills and knowledge... but I had no idea that your engraving was that good. The work on that Meriden 1915 pump .22 is gorgeous, and even more impressive considering the photos are much larger than normal size. I sure hope we'll get to see more of your engraving in the future, even if it makes me envious to know I couldn't even draw that well with pencil and paper, much less cut it into steel.

I did understand bushveld's comment concerning mixing a compound containing potassium chlorate. But it made me smile to think about some of the things me and my classmates did in our college organic chemistry lab classes. I made my first rust bluing solution in that lab using a formula John Bivens shared in a Rifle Magazine article. We had a very well stocked and well equipped lab, and when you turn some young guys loose in such an environment with minimal supervision, well, it's a miracle we didn't get seriously hurt or killed. We made ammonium triiodide, which is a very unstable contact explosive. It was fun to put some on a doorknob and watch as someone set it off with a flash when they touched it. But one classmate had a bottle of it on the kitchen table in his apartment, and it detonated when someone slammed the door. Just a bit too unstable. It's very cool to see potassium permanganate crystals and glycerin spontaneously combust into purple flames when you add a few drops of water. When we learned about nitrating things, it seemed like a great idea to make guncotton, or nitrocellulose. We had fun with that, and were soon attempting to nitrate about any organic substance we could, including some dead guppies from the aquarium in the biology lab. Ever see a dead guppy erupt in a flash of smoke? I made one batch of guncotton, and decided to dry it in the sun on a large rock in the landscaping outside the lab on a very warm and sunny spring day. When I went back to retrieve it a couple hours later, it had apparently ignited in the sun, because all that was left was some flash residue on the rock. We got the brilliant idea to make nitroglycerine, and were setting up the equipment to do the nitrating process, but fortunately came to our senses and decided to abandon that experiment. Of course, there was lots of other stuff, such as putting sodium into a glass jar, tossing it into a pond, and shooting the jar with a .22 to watch the extremely violent reaction of sodium in water.

Girls don't do stuff like this, which helps explain why they have a longer life expectancy. Fortunately, boys these days are probably too busy playing with their cell phones to do a lot of these things. And many of the Liberals can't even decide what sex they are.

I should mention that some of these insane ideas were hatched during what we called "Cocktail Hour". The professor was gone every day between 12:00 and 1:00 for lunch, and we had free access to cases of anhydrous ethyl alcohol that was stored in the chemical supply room. That is 200 proof pure grain alcohol, which we used to purify substances after doing recrystallizations. It was dehydrated with magnesium chloride desiccant to remove all traces of water that aren't removed by distillation. Of course we had to mix it with ginger ale, 7-Up, or orange juice from the Student Union.