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When I was in Junior High School I had a friend who was a High School Senior and was majoring in science. He got me started in that direction. I used to buy sulfur, charcoal, potassium nitrate, and powdered magnesium (all legal way back then) and make gunpowder, spiked with the Mg. I made small in-yard rockets with soda straws and set them off using an induction coil attached to pins in the sides of the straws.

However, my really favorite activity involved making small sailing ships from walnut shells and toothpicks and then blowing them up with my homemade gunpowder bombs. My powder didn't really explode so much as burn very fast with intense heat and brilliance (from the magnesium). I would dig a large lake system in the back lot and fill it with water from the hose. After my friends and I played with this stuff for a while, the crowning glory of the day was the placing of the bomb on a ship and then igniting the fuse and floating the ship out onto the lake. Neighborhood kids and I would cheer as the ship spectacularly went up in flames.

By the time I got to High School, I began to realize how silly it was to destroy these neat little ships by burning them up. By then I had really begun to put a lot of effort into making them and didn't want to see four days of work be flamed away in one minute.

I still have the last one I made (see photos below) and I now treasure it. I don't think my hands are steady enough anymore to ever duplicate this years-ago effort. I also found a walnut hull (see photos below) which was to be my next ship back then. It never was completed. The photo does show the sort of construction I used and gives an idea why it took so long to build one of these ships.

Had I saved the boats rather than bombing them, I guess I'd now have an armada of twenty or thirty ships. . . Oh well, kids will be kids.


Here are some photos of the last remaining finished ship. The hull is made from half of a walnut shell. I filled it partly with BB's so that the whole thing would float upright. I used carefully cut toothpicks for the decking and deck structures. This was all glued together. I used a combination of flat and round toothpicks. The masts were added and cloth sails were glued on. I used a needle and black thread to sew the sails to the yardarms. I made the rigging from black thread, glued in place. Likewise rope ladders were made and glued on. I didn't really attempt to make the ships accurate in any way, but I did look at pictures to see what sailing ships tended to look like.

These four photos show different angles of the last remaining uncompleted ship. One can see some of the detail that went into the hull construction. My first ships were hurry-up efforts that used a chunk of glued on cardboard for a deck. The hull in these photos, however, took something like two days to make.