From Black Powder to Boom
It started with my dad’s childhood stories—tales of blowing up trees in Øresundsparken, Copenhagen, using homemade explosives. Naturally, I begged him to teach me how to do the same.
Most fathers would’ve laughed or given a firm “No.”
Mine said, “Sure.”
Right from the start, this wasn’t about lighting fuses and running away. My dad showed me how to short the end of a length of electrical flex using a thin wire filament, which we’d then bury deep in a charge—usually packed inside a pipe or something similar. When connected to a DC battery, the current would heat the wire and ignite the mix. No fire. No matches. Just science and some very questionable parenting.
We began with black powder, originally supplied by a Danish friend of my dad’s from a black powder rifle club. Those early experiments were modest but satisfying—tight little booms that sent puffs of dirt skyward.
But the supply ran out quickly.
That’s when my dad mentioned magnesium.
“That’s what gave my bombs real punch when I was a kid,” he said wistfully.
So, a few weeks later, we were deep in the old town of Palma, wandering through narrow, sun-baked alleys on a mission to source our own ingredients: sulphur, fine charcoal, and saltpetre. No one spoke English. We didn’t speak Spanish. But we were determined.
Eventually, we stumbled across a tiny apothecary tucked into a forgotten side street. The man behind the counter looked like a character from an alchemy textbook. We explained what we needed—badly—and to our amazement, he nodded and disappeared into the back.
He returned with jars of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre.
And then, as if by magic, he produced a glass jar of magnesium powder.
My dad’s eyes lit up.
“Can you believe it?” he whispered.
I couldn’t.
We’d gone looking for basics. We came back with rocket fuel.
We raced home. My dad swiped an olive wood pestle and mortar from the kitchen, and soon I was grinding, mixing, and packing charges myself. I learned quickly. Before long, I discovered that a 50/50 blend of magnesium and saltpetre didn’t even need sulphur or charcoal. It was fast. Hot. Devastating.
The pestle and mortar moved permanently into my bedroom cupboard—a beautiful piece of furniture with a secret life. Press a button on the top, and the whole front folded down into a desk, with compartments and shelves. Every time I opened it, I got a hit of that pungent chemical smell—like a warning, or a promise.
Between my motorbike, my pellet gun, and now homebrew explosives, I felt invincible.
Looking back, it’s a miracle I didn’t lose a hand. Or an eye. Or a chunk of my skull. Frankly, it’s a miracle I didn’t end up in orbit. My guardian angels must’ve been filing incident reports daily.
Eventually, all of this led to the big one.
The explosion I planned for Niels.
Niels is my brother—fifteen years older than me. I idolised him. Everything he did seemed cooler, smarter, better. So when we found out he was flying in to visit, I decided to make an impression.
This wasn’t some lazy garden bomb. It was a full-blown operation.
I carefully buried a charge beneath a small pine tree on the side of the road near our house in Son Vida. I ran a long length of wire back to the car and rigged it to a switchbox I’d prepared: a short lead from the cigarette lighter, complete with an on-off toggle and a small countdown light.
Everything was in place.
The day we picked him up from the airport, I sat in the back seat, heart pounding. As we approached the spot, I casually turned to my dad.
“I just need to check something,” I said.
He nodded. We stopped.
I connected the wires. Took a deep breath. Gave a dramatic countdown.
3… 2… 1… BOOM.
The charge exploded. The tree shot into the air. A great, dusty chunk of Mallorcan earth followed it. It was glorious.
Niels, mid-sentence, froze. Completely stunned.
Later, he told me the giveaway had been seeing my mum and dad duck below the dashboard just before the blast. A bit obvious, in hindsight.
But even he couldn’t deny it: the timing was perfect. The execution was flawless.
He spent the rest of the drive home bouncing between laughter and outrage—shouting at my parents for letting me build bombs unsupervised, then bursting out laughing again.
My dad just grinned the whole way back, proud as anything.