Where There's Smoke, There's Fun

With the Independence Day celibration coming up, I thought I'd see if I could find something that would be fun for the kids. I had some potassium nitrate lying around, so I figured I'd see if I could find a nice smokebomb recipe. Naturally that was an easy thing to find on the internet, so I mixed up a batch real quick.

The instructions mentioned that the mixture could be used as a powder, but was generally better when bonded, so I decided to do a test without bonding it. That was a bad idea, if it isn't compacted, it burns very quickly and doesn't make much smoke. Its more like rocket fuel really, and its good for scorching the hair off of ones knuckles.

For the next attempt I mixed up a smaller batch and went ahead and bonded it into a solid mass. I rolled it a bit and gave it a fuse. Heres the result.



The foil was there as an experiment, I wasn't sure if containment would make any difference in smoke production. I don't think it does. The fuse is a bit of paper coated in the smoke material. It burns at a nice reliable rate, and gives plenty of time to get ones hand out of the way of the higher rate burn (which is pretty impressive).

Unfortunately it was pretty windy today, so the test was less than awe-inspiring. It made a good trail of smoke, but not a huge cloud. It really did a nice job though, much better than commercial toy smoke bombs, although the smoke wasn't quite as dense.

I did a little bit of research into colored smoke, but that requires a bunch of other exotic chems that I don't have and don't really want to mess with, so I'm sticking with the old stand-by. It's quick and easy to make, and requires only two ingredents, both of which can be procured locally. Most drug stores carry potassium nitrate for around $5 for a 100g bottle. I have no idea what kind of affliction one would treat with it, but it is a convienant, although expensive, source.

For the second test I decided I'd need to go bigger to get a reasonable result on this blustery day. I used the remainder of my 100g bottle and mixed up what turned out to be about a 150g smoker. Here it is:



What a beauty, eh? It's about the size I was looking for, but quite a bit smaller than what I'm hoping to make for the 4th. The test was impressive. It burned completely in about 30-45 seconds, and even in the light wind made a huge cloud of smoke. I lit one of the commercial giant smoke bombs just before it as a comparison, and while the dense purple smoke was pretty, it wasn't very impressive because of the light wind. My smoker produced such a huge volume of smoke that even with the wind it completely obscured the street while it burned.

For the 4th I'd like to make one about 10 times this size. I'd like it to burn about 3 times as long, and produce more smoke. I'm looking forward to it.