Via a Toledo based TV station:
BOWLING GREEN, Ohio (WTVG) - A loud explosion in the city of Bowling Green Friday night prompted police to investigate, eventually calling the Toledo Bomb Squad to assist.
“A very loud like pop, clap, bang, and it startled me,” Shana Bentley, who lives just a few houses from the explosion said...
...Police interviewed a resident in the 200 block of Reed Street, where they believed the explosion came from.
“He has an infinite and interest in mixing different chemicals and powders and stuff like that to make homemade explosives, slash, fireworks,” Skaff said. He also told police he just passed an online class for a pyrotechnics license and has been using a detached garage to mix powder chemicals together to form an explosive compound in a blender.
Lt. Skaff said the man was using a blender to mix components to build fireworks. He told police he was mixing the powder chemicals together to make the explosive compound in his blender as he always does. He also told police that he ran out of standard aluminum powder, so he decided to use Magnalium instead, a mixture of aluminum and magnesium. He went on to tell police that when plugged in the blender, it immediately exploded.
“Thankfully for him and the citizens, there was no one in the area, he was a decent distance away when the blender exploded,” Skaff said.
I'm glad the home experimenter is all right, but I guess that he learned the classic lesson of needing to start small regarding new reagents and new techniques...
He used a blender?! By the sounds of it, I'm guessing he was mixing flash powder. Usually that's mixed by putting the components on a sheet of paper and lifting each corner in turn to heap the mixture over itself repeatedly ("diapering").
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