Fun snaps

[Tengu]

Living on a camp site I see lots of good stuff thrown away.

Management try to keep me out of the bins but havent been succesful so far...

Today underneath one and a half bars of soap, and half a bottle of washing up liquid, I found a box of fun snaps.

Cant recall what the chemical is (I am the worlds worst chemist) but I assume its flammable.

Any application in fire starting?

 

[Hammock Hamster]

Living on a camp site I see lots of good stuff thrown away.

Management try to keep me out of the bins but havent been succesful so far...

Today underneath one and a half bars of soap, and half a bottle of washing up liquid, I found a box of fun snaps.

Cant recall what the chemical is (I am the worlds worst chemist) but I assume its flammable.

Any application in fire starting?

No joy I'm afraid, I have memories of trying this in my slightly misspent youth and even dropping them into a small pool of lighter fuel didn't have any effect.

They do produce heat (especially when snapped between you fingers) but not enough to cause a burn and my childhood brain couldn't find a way to make fire happen - lighting the wick and watching them pop was something different entirely!

I suppose being marketed for kids they need to be particularly safe.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Bishop]

Any application in fire starting?

The detonation shockwave of the silver fulminate will ignite strike-anywhere matches if they are confined close enough and had good results with Party-Poppers. Not sure I would want to mess about a with a loose mix though.

There's even a commercial product available

 

[bob_the_baker]

I seem to remember that it's so explosive, there's a critical mass where it will explode under it's own weight. Fortunately, for children, that critical mass is so low it's not dangerous

 

[Tony]

Ha ha, I was playing with a pack of those fun snaps two weeks ago!!! reliving my childhood, i was firing them out fo pens, with rubber bands, flicking them, kicking them and generally being a naughty boy again!!

 

[Ascobis]

AgCNO won't light your fire. A high explosive's effect is a shock wave. A deflagrating low explosive would work better, though not very well, for fire starting.

Enjoy the find for its own sake. Crack away!

<deleted really funny paragraph that would have set off GCHQ and NSA>

 

[oldtimer]

I'd never heard the name fun snaps before but they seem to be what we used to call caps. A significant amount of my pocket money went on these to keep my cap pistol firing. When I grew out of cap pistols and cowboys and Indians games I discovered that a quantity of them could be folded and compressed using a large nut and two bolts. When dropped it made a very loud and satisfying bang.

In my youth, fireworks were readily available and in the interests of safety (don't try this at home or anywhere else) I hesitate to tell of the dangerous and stupid things we got up to by repurposing penny bangers. I'm lucky to have kept all my fingers.

 

[Wayland]

I used paper roll caps for fire lighting when I was about six or seven by scratching them with a pin next to a piece of tissue paper (All of which I generally had in my pockets).

Completely different to "Fun Snaps" though which are a twist of paper wrapped around a percussive explosive compound.

 

[MrEd]

As a kid, i once spent ages stuffing fun snaps and heads of swan non-safety matches into a slit in the side of the tennis ball. When full I threw it at the wall, made a good sized bang and caught fire!