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How much explosive is in a detonator?


Alpo

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IN THE BOOK, the guy has five detonators in his shirt pocket, and is worried that the C4 is in his briefcase, only three feet away. He's afraid that if one detonator decides to go boom on its own (they're about 12 years old, and may be unstable), the others will go off by sympathetic detonation, and this will set off the C4.

 

Now, I don't know if that BOOM would jump the 3-foot gap and set it off or not. But it seems to me that five detonators going off in your shirt pocket would kill you, without worrying anout the C4.

 

Anyone with experience with military explosives that might know?

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Nope. C4 is a very stable explosive. In order to set it off from that distance you would need one whopper of an explosion...like a whole bunch of C4 going off. :D

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If five blasting caps went off in your shirt pocket if it didn't kill you it would be a miracle and you might just wish it had killed you.

We used chunks of C-4 to heat up our C-rats in Vietnam, It burns real nice.

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C4 is God’s gift to the combat engineer. Highly stable under an extremely wide variety of circumstances, versatile enough to cook C-rats, and malleable/cuttable to build shaped charges. But given the right combo of heat and pressure, its controlled fury is truly a thing of beauty. 

 

As for the detonators, just one is sufficient to blow a hand off. Five in the shirt pocket would render the C4 irrelevant to the said book character. 

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2 minutes ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

Is a detonator the same as or more than a blasting cap?

 

If I recall right, the terms were casually interchanged, but the “detonator” was actually the device which controlled energy to the “blasting cap”.  

 

Somebody might have clearer memory than me. 

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I alwas thought of something like this as a "detonator".

 

Sig1480x800.png31E8009C-F66B-4F15-8DBA-6

 

But based on the story, I'm thinking it's more like this.

 

ill_shunpatudenkiraikan.gif

 

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRh9CaWr8ZuVq0vyfTeUqv

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You don't have to star it out.

 

Go ahead and say it's a big HONKING primer.

 

Ain't nobody gonna think less of you. :)

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My Grandpa told me a story once about getting in trouble with the CCC officer when he was young. Seems he thought he would save some time on a job and haul dynamite AND blasting caps in the same truck. Seems it was frowned upon. Can't remember how he was punished.

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13 hours ago, Cheyenne Ranger, 48747L said:

I remember the engineers saying if you're using C4 to heat your food don't try to stomp it out.  That results in an explosion.

 

does give off some serious vapors, though

C4 requires both heat and pressure to create the explosion. Either one without the other has a much milder outcome. 

 

Pressure without heat lets C4 be safely cut and molded into a variety of useful shapes. 

 

Heat without pressure produces the famous flame that’s heated a million C-rat meals. 

 

Stomping out the famous flame adds pressure to the heat, which leads to the aforementioned explosion, plus typically a permanent disability. 

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On 5/20/2019 at 6:48 PM, Willy B.SASS#26902 said:

If five blasting caps went off in your shirt pocket if it didn't kill you it would be a miracle and you might just wish it had killed you.

We used chunks of C-4 to heat up our C-rats in Vietnam, It burns real nice.

Did you ever do that in front of a brand new 2LT?

 

We did and the kid just simply froze up.

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to continue this story of C4 . . . the troops would often 'steal' C4 out of the claymores for cooking purposes.  Just a bit but night after night

 

we were on a firebase and our 'beloved' CO decided he wanted the 'mad minute' to be with claymores one night and he wanted them to 'walk' around the perimeter starting with his and going around in both directions--spaced 2 seconds apart.

 

0200 rolls around and he starts the fun and games off.  The company is doing a pretty good job till they get to our platoon; we had 3 in this go around:  Bang! Bang! poof, seems the one our newbie picked to clacker off was the one that had the least C4 in it . . . we were the only platoon on full alert for the rest of the night.

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On 5/21/2019 at 9:23 AM, Charlie Harley, #14153 said:

 

If I recall right, the terms were casually interchanged, but the “detonator” was actually the device which controlled energy to the “blasting cap”.  

 

Somebody might have clearer memory than me. 

Yeah. Technically they are separate items but often used interchangeably, usually by civilians.

 If you were to do that in a demolitions class though, the instructor would not take it well. Not well at all.

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