Blasting coper, gold, staniles steel,cekas, Cr-Ni or Al wires with enough energy from capacitor bank - if it's big enough and have good voltage/resistance ratio is a good method of creating primary explosion. .. The overheated wire explodes, and that exploson is enough, even more than enough to set more sensitive-NG,PETN, manithol hexanitrate of - if your capacitor bank and voltage to which you fill it are large enough. I had litlle rearanged fotoflash capacitor bank- it were 1000 microfarad capacitor on 450 volts, and blasting wire with it - in confined or semyconfined space had bring piece of PETN detcord to detonation. If we inspect closely what happend with the wire we can not see any significant difference from detonation of small primary charge. Point here is how to start things - HE-s going, and it works flawlesly if you have enough microfarads and volts. A frend of mine had capacitor of only 300 microfarads, but on 1000 volts, it was shooting about the same as .22 blank. Such wire explosions create temperature add pressure shocks - plasma shocks- strong enough to activate PETN det cord- I had seen that. And why not? Only source of energi was electric- not chemical energy from primary.Heat was authentical-even higher. Pressure was authentical-no doubt. And a speed at which things were happening maybe even greater than with some week primary.
And- that also I saw and tried- Igniting (or detonating) PETN detcord work witb metal-air filled firecrackers. Austrian made Pirat class II was working. In a caedboard tube was a litlle metal powder which exploded when ignited from BP fuse pressed in one side of the tube, with match had on it,for ease of ignition - amusment pirotechnic - and a cardboard cork on other side. Chamber was mainly empty.I took it out that cork and insert end of detcord. It was only that small amount of metal powder and no oxidizer(except air) in firecracker. Was it filled with finely powdered Mg or Zr I never tested. And it was working so reliable that those firecrackers I used to save real caps. Only, for last Christmans I found that they started to fill them with BP. Pity!

Just because the cap does transition to detonation... doesn't mean its a very strong detonation, and that weak imput translates to a weak output.
Pressure from deflagration ripping apart the blasting cap casing... is not DDT. Like you said that would be a low order explosion. DDT means that whatever energetic exceeds deflagration velocity to match the speed of that energetic's low density VoD, and in turn providing the same shockwave as would be achieved by primary initiation of that low density (uncompressed) explosive. Pressure and heat plays its initiation role before the casing bursts from overpressurizing.

Sorry, when I posted above... a long time ago... I assumed you meant like flash + somewhat sensitive yet not primary explosive as a cap. The flash frys the other explosive which burns and together they reach some velocity not quite the same as DDT... Ish... It can still detonate yes... but your not getting as much out... its a lower speed detonation, yet still faster than the speed of sound through the substance... Oh, low vs high density while important, has nothing to do with the definition of DDT. DDT is simply a transition from deflagration to detonation in whatever substance be it solid, liquid, or gas. Detonation is simply surface "decomposition" through the substance (be it solid, liquid, or gas) faster than the speed that sound travels through that substance. Trying to detonate NG with flash alone and with a proper primary alone should afford different results. As should proper primary + booster. NG in particular has some quirks about not always detonating with quite the force it should IIRC. This difference isn't like LE and HE... its like HE not detonating with the force it should because the imput means happen to be too weak in some cases.

4000 mesh? When you get past around 600 mesh its best to start using micron ranges as one would be extremely hard pressed to find an actual 4000 mesh screen... let alone 3000 or 2000 mesh one. Also don't forget particle shape. If the patents just cite mesh... then damn thats just became a huge micron range.

70:30 while often used anytime flash is called for isn't necessarily ideal for this situation. What are you going for? Excess oxidizer, excess fuel, or balanced? Carefully consider the merits of each.


BB is a slow forum. Topics on all sorts of things come and go. People have discussed other means of initiation on MANY occasions... Weather it be exploding wires, flash or pre-heating than the shock from flash, sensitization with whatever chemical or chemicals then shock from flash, spark gap stuff, primaries of all kinds, mixtures of primaries of all kinds, sensitized eutectic shit, NC and other binded primaries, secondaries that happen to be particularly sensitive enough to heat to used as primaries, fireworks modified in such a way as to be useable as crude weak caps, etc.... and this is just BB... initiation has been discussed in MUCH more depth at RS, SMDB, etc... Hell some of the time a thread here will start with someone asking if some means of initiation is viable and someone will just post links to threads at RS or SMDB where it has already be discussed at length. Then someone will say, damn, yeah thats a cool idea. Then the thread will die.

You must consider that most of the people here don't get much time to really mess with HE anymore for whatever reason, or if they do get the chance they turn it down due to improper enviroment concerns, paranoia, lack of time, money, supplies, motivation, etc.

I've tried to get people experimenting in the past to get simple methods down for heat sensitive primaries from OTC material, and it just doesn't really work. Especially when you find out that someone at SMDB already did a good amount of experimenting on it and concluded that the patent they were going from was too vague or some proprietary catalyst or important step was excluded.

You fuckers should learn about something called PARAGRAPHS.

Well look at that, 1000mF @450V is not that much after all, (I have a 5x 1500mF @ 550V pulse caps, from my high school coilgun project. Yea they let me bring it in after all these school shootings...) but apparently much less gives satisfactory results.

I'm suprised to hear that a FP firecracker had successfully initiated PETN, good news though.

Sorry, when I posted above... a long time ago... I assumed you meant like flash + somewhat sensitive yet not primary explosive as a cap. The flash frys the other explosive which burns and together they reach some velocity not quite the same as DDT... Ish... It can still detonate yes... but your not getting as much out... its a lower speed detonation, yet still faster than the speed of sound through the substance...

I understand the importance of the VoD of the primary used, as low VoD primary (<3000m/s) will not utilize the maximum achievable VoD of certain explosives (regardless of density), and low VoD initiation has the greates negative influence on explosives that do not self sustain their own detonation unless there is enough of it (as in the aspect of critical diameter in case of detcord), PETN/ETN and some others do not suffer significantly from such initiation, since the detonation propagation accelerates itself even in small quantities, (reason why compound caps give better results), to achieve close to maximum VoD possible at that particular density.

Oh, low vs high density while important, has nothing to do with the definition of DDT. DDT is simply a transition from deflagration to detonation in whatever substance be it solid, liquid, or gas. Detonation is simply surface "decomposition" through the substance (be it solid, liquid, or gas) faster than the speed that sound travels through that substance. Trying to detonate NG with flash alone and with a proper primary alone should afford different results. As should proper primary + booster. NG in particular has some quirks about not always detonating with quite the force it should IIRC. This difference isn't like LE and HE... its like HE not detonating with the force it should because the imput means happen to be too weak in some cases.

While I agree with the "NG not giving its full potential under weak initiation" statement, the density of materials that do DDT has severe influence over its ability to DDT (too pressed might deflagrate too slow in certain situations, while not enough density might cause to deflagration without detonation in other cases, depends on the explosive on hand). AP, while a bad example, burns in small quantity while unpressed, but if pressed enough or plasticized, or molten (or cast, suicide i know), will detonate in the same small quantity.


BB is a slow forum. Topics on all sorts of things come and go. People have discussed other means of initiation on MANY occasions... Weather it be exploding wires, flash or pre-heating than the shock from flash, sensitization with whatever chemical or chemicals then shock from flash, spark gap stuff, primaries of all kinds, mixtures of primaries of all kinds, sensitized eutectic shit, NC and other binded primaries, secondaries that happen to be particularly sensitive enough to heat to used as primaries, fireworks modified in such a way as to be useable as crude weak caps, etc.... and this is just BB... initiation has been discussed in MUCH more depth at RS, SMDB, etc... Hell some of the time a thread here will start with someone asking if some means of initiation is viable and someone will just post links to threads at RS or SMDB where it has already be discussed at length. Then someone will say, damn, yeah thats a cool idea. Then the thread will die.

Well, there is no reason why we couldn't expand on their (RS/SM) ideas.


You must consider that most of the people here don't get much time to really mess with HE anymore for whatever reason, or if they do get the chance they turn it down due to improper enviroment concerns, paranoia, lack of time, money, supplies, motivation, etc.

I've tried to get people experimenting in the past to get simple methods down for heat sensitive primaries from OTC material, and it just doesn't really work. Especially when you find out that someone at SMDB already did a good amount of experimenting on it and concluded that the patent they were going from was too vague or some proprietary catalyst or important step was excluded.

Although I totally see where are you comming from, there is no reason to give up :) regardless of the vets from those forums, we can still push the concepts further, it just takes some work.

Besides, when was the last time you seen someone from these forums shoot a paintball gun with ldpe paintball shells filled with mekp or chlorate+sulfur :D

Lol, while the paint balls are a novel idea, RS is again way ahead.