What Does All This Other Stuff Do?
Chemistry, Exploding Targets and Tannerite
I get this question almost on a weekly basis. “What’s all this other stuff you sell?” “What can I do to get a bigger boom?”
Here’s the deal. The targets we sell, whether it be Tannerite® or our own Outlaw X Exploding Targets, create a chemical reaction when mixed THEN subjected to impact. (A bullet for our purposes.)
The thing to remember about chemical reactions is this: NUMBERS AND RATIOS matter A LOT. It’s the single most important rule in any chemical reaction. Adding more or less of one particular chemical does not necessarily cause a bigger reaction — in fact, it can cause it not to happen at all.
I won’t get into all the technical details about chemical bonds and electrons and all that. I’m not a chemistry teacher and don’t want to be. But use garden fertilizer for an example. If you add fertilizer to a garden, everyone knows you feed your plants and get better yields, bigger squash, tomatoes, etc. Dump a whole bag on one plant though and you get one very brown tomato plant and a spot of ground that won’t grow anything for a long long time.
Targets are no different. Add the appropriate amount of prills, catalyst and shoot, and you get a nice big boom! Add some extra catalyst and you’ll be lucky if you get a “poof” or anything at all.
As far as the sulfur and black iron oxide, yes, we sell them. They are not for our targets or Tannerite®. They are for making completely different items, and adding them will not do anything to enhance reactions. I may at some point write an article about what they do, just not today.
Don’t be looking for “how to’s” to pop up here. There are a lot of things that can happen when you start mixing chemicals without the proper expertise, and a lot of them are very bad. One more note: just because a guy has a YouTube channel doesn’t necessarily mean he should be a source for your back yard chemistry experiments either.
Bottom line: if the instructions on Tannerite® you buy from us say to use X amount of ingredient A and mix with X amount of ingredient B, do what it says. It’s chemistry, not horseshoes.
Thanks and have a great day!