First, the introductions

First, the introductions.

I am a 59 year old Engineer and organic chemist. I hold a federal explosives permit and am licensed to possess, handle, synthesize and use high explosives. I only mention that so as to stress the point that if what happened to me could happen to me,then it could happen to anybody.

In the early morning hours of November 3rd, 2010, I attempted to synthesize erythritol tetranitrate (ETN), using a procedure I had come across here and other explosives websites. I had performed this synthesis dozens of times before without incident, until that Wednesday morning. I was preparing for a WWII reenactment that was scheduled for the next weekend at the local Army post, a gig that I had done 3 or 4 times a year for the past 3 years.

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The ETN was needed for the electric squibs that I used to detonate half-pound buried Tannerite charges that were used to simulate artillery impacts. I began using electric blasting caps, which proved expensive and impractical since I had no legal way to store the caps where I needed to use them. Instead, I invented a tiny electric match that was dipped in several layers of chemicals, including ETN. When hit with a current, the squib made a small pop, no louder than a firecracker, but was energetic enough to fire the Tannerite.

Anyway, back to Wednesday morning, I chose to nitrate the erythritol using sulfuric acid and ammonium nitrate since I was out of white fuming nitric acid. This necessitated a recrystallization from hot methanol, which I proceeded to do in a large beaker on a radiant cooktop. I grabbed a 1L beaker and brought about 500 ml of MEOH to a low boil while dissolving 50 grams of crude brown ETN into the hot alcohol.

As I turned around to put up the container of dirty ETN, I heard a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was a loud TICK!, the sound of cracking glass, followed less than a second later by an even louder one. The beaker was cracking from the heat of the hotplate, and the second crack had opened a crack on the bottom of the beaker. As I watched, the MEOH/ETN solution flowed onto the hot surface. Before I could react, the leading edge of the pool of solution flashed to dryness and the precipitated ETN deflagrated, igniting the MEOH/ETN in the beaker. I now had a roaring fire in the stovetop and no good options open to me. For about 3 seconds, I did the singularly most stupid thing I have ever done in my 6 decades on this planet. I leaned in close and tried to BLOW OUT THE FIRE! The sharp crack of another glass fracture brought me out of suicide mode. It also made me pull my head back, which saved my life. What I should have done right then was drop to the floor and cover my ears. I'd give my left nut to be able to time travel back 2 years and do that. What I actually did was try to shove the burning beaker into the sink and drown the fire with water. As I reached for the beaker with both hands, my life was changed forever.

I barely remember the moment of detonation, aside from the curious sensation of electricity coursing through my hands. The actual explosion didn't seem as loud as it should have been, but having both eardrums blown out will do that. I remember standing there for a few seconds taking mental stock of my situation, not really sure of what had just happened. As what was left of my hearing began to come back,

I began to hear a strange sound that reminded me of the sound that water from a hose makes when the stream hits dry concrete, sort of a splopping sound. I raised my left arm and discovered the source of the strange sound. Arching up from the stump of my left wrist was a half-inch wide torrent of bright red arterial blood that was splashing on the floor and had already pooled for a yard around my feet.

Instinctively, I tried to clamp off the blood flow with my right hand, but the mass of loose bones and tattered pink and yellow tissue that was attached to my right wrist was no longer a functioning hand. It had just begun to sink in that I had just blown off both of my hands when I heard my wife screaming from the bedroom. Above all else, I couldn't let her see my hands. I made a run for a downstairs bathroom and blocked the door closed with my body. By this time I was beginning to feel the effects of blood loss. It was also at this time that my nervous system began to regain function. That's when the pain started. Now we were both screaming. I managed to tell her to call 911 and that my blood type was A+. I had to staunch the bleeding, or I wouldn't live long enough for the EMT's to arrive. With no hands, that would be tough. I managed to pull several towels down from a shelf, cross my arms in front of my chest and lay face-down on the pile of towels. It must have worked because I made it to the hospital. I never lost consciousness and remember most of the ambulance ride. The last thing I remember was the EMT briefing the surgeon "traumatic bilateral amputation of the hands". I awoke sometime a day or two later to the sight of the bandaged stump where my left hand had been. I then looked to my right, expecting to see the same thing. What I saw instead was a miracle. Instead if a slim tapered bandage, my right arm terminated into a huge bulbous blood-soaked bandage.

Somehow, the surgeon managed to find most of the pieces of my right hand and put them back together into something resembling a hand.

Fifteen surgeries later, I'm still getting my life back together. I wear a prosthetic left hand, actually a steel hook. I lost the tips of two fingers on my right hand. I sustained a degloving injury to my right thumb, nothing but bone and tendon was left. I was given two options, amputation or lengthy painful reconstruction. I chose the latter. In order to regrow tissue on my thumb, it was implanted into my abdomen for 2 months. After that delightful time in my life, I endured a dozen more surgeries to carve that mass into a useful thumb.

My life will never be the same. Please think of my accident while you make the energetic materials listed here. I'm not going to tell you not to experiment with them, I'm just asking you to be careful when doing so. I don't want anybody's wife to be handed their husband's wedding ring after a fireman found it embedded in the ceiling. How does one wrap their head around something like that?

I've got to hand it to you OP, that was an entertaining read.

BTW, the cause of the accident turned out to be the Chinese knockoff beaker that I bought at a kitchen store earlier that year. The "Pyrex" logo on another one bought at the same time, on closer inspection, read "Pyrox", with a tiny "made in China" text at the bottom. Instead of being made with Pyrex borosilicate glass, it was cheap soda-lime glass that couldn't stand up to heating. I never noticed the difference.

Please be careful. And don't buy chink equipment.

Hands down, the best story I read on Veeky Forums in weeks.

This is why you should do a dry run beforehand if you're making any changes to the protocol or equipment.

I did a lot of small things wrong, including working at 4am while I was dead tired. Just as is the case for any disaster, it was a series of mistakes, poor decision making and just blind dumb luck that bit me in the ass. Removal of any one of these factors would probably have averted this accident.

I can't undo what happened, so the only logical move is to share the experience with everyone here in the hopes that I can shed a little light on the dark side of this hobby. I'm not going to claim that if, by sharing my story, I can prevent one maiming, that it would have been worth it. That's just total crap. Saving an entire busload of nuns from driving over a cliff wouldn't even the score. Losing both hands to an explosion is one of the most horrifying experiences one can experience. Trust me. If you don't want to go through life like me, don't get careless and overconfident like I did. Thus endeth the lesson.