this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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Safely?
You've got enough information to try to execute the above formula. Okay. And you've still got all your fingers after attempting this... more than zero times?
Absolutely. We invented gunpowder centuries before we invented airplanes.
That said... as an anecdote, I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.
"I could cook up some blasting caps with the trash from a frat party" is a theoretically believable claim.
"Every time I clean up a frat party, I add a dozen shaped charges to my inventory" is not.
Lol, I've done that before in my apartment. Guessing it's the same thing as an ammonia-bleach reaction.
urea-bleach but close enough.
Safely? Yes.
Keep the reaction stirring under ice and if you see the temp rise above 15 C you dump the whole thing in a water bucket or you get a runaway exothermic reaction that is never good with a high explosive forming crystals in the solution.
If you are stupid, don’t ventilate, or are stupid stupid it will light your shed on fire and potentially kill you.
That’s why you work at lab scale, and why you always keep your reactions under the temp limits with acids added slowly.
Basic chemistry safety covers all the bases here.
My preferred blasting caps are nickel guanidine based. I can play with the crystal morphology to produce small more friction inert powder and it is an extremely simple synthesis.
You can use reloading press combined with highly suggested lexan sheet as a blast shield and wooden block to gently press the powder into caps. China sells packs of 1000 electrical ignition assemblies for $40 that you can then set off with a COTS or a clacker.
I cannot emphasize enough that working at small scale and knowing what you are doing are important, but in faster time than it takes to print the parts for that drone you can absolutely complete the reaction, do some recrystalizstion, dry your product,and be ready to mix with plasticizer.