🚀 go-pugleaf

phil@pepsi.AMD.COM (Phil Ngai) writes:
   (previous excerpt deleted)
>You mean you're not teaching your son how to do this -- cough, I 
>mean teaching your son the proper safety precautions in case he 
>decides to try something while both parents are out and there is 
>no adult supervision? :-)

>I told my wife that I have to "encourage" our son in these 
>matters so that he'll invite me to help him with his activities. 
>If I discourage him he's more likely to do things unsupervised. I 
>don't think she really bought it but I really do believe it.

Teaching kids about pyrotechnics might be the best way to keep 
them from doing it!  Most kids hate all the stuff their parents 
like, and vice-virtue, e.g., Richard Feynman's son became a 
"goddam philosopher."

A note on exploding electronics:  Some military electronic 
devices, especially airborne ECM and crypto equipment (like the 
CRM-114 in _Dr. Strangelove_) contains destructive devices to 
keep the secret stuff from falling into enemy hands.  A friend 
who was an airborne radar/ECM technician in B-17's in WW II said 
that their radar jammers were so equipped, and there were big red 
buttons in the cockpit for destroying the equipment.  When the 
war ended, many of the buttons got pushed.  The result was a 
bang, some smoke, and an expanded radio case.

Equipment containing destruction charges is not supposed to be 
sold as surplus but sometimes it happens.  I read an article in a 
ham radio magazine (QST or CQ) in the '60s by a guy who found one 
of the little bombs in a surplus radio he had bought.  It looked 
a lot like a stud-mounted electrolytic capacitor.  He detonated 
it in his backyard and it blew a 2-foot crater.

--

Frank Reid     W9MKV     reid@ucs.indiana.edu