explosives from everyday cleaning supplies?

High-nitrogen fertilizer and fuel oil.

AKA ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil).

Packs a wallop. All you do is mix the two and light it.

That's what Tim McVeigh blew up the Fed building in Oklahoma with (if you're too young, look up the pictures, one truck of the stuff demolished a 7 storey building).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO

elinor said:

I have a scene where two characters retreat to an empty general goods store, being chased by a humanoid creature. I've been trying to think the scene over and over and over because I need them to have no option but to retreat through a magical doorway created in the store. So I have been wondering if it would be possible to create a kind of incendiary device very quickly from materials in a general goods store that would do enough damage to destroy the monster - or at least damage it enough that DNA evidence was a moot point (or at least too expensive to be a viable option, or damaged enough to delay humans looking at the remains too closely before they were disappeared) - and also is enough damage that the two characters have no way to escape the blast without opening up the magic doorway.

Anyone smarter than me who might know what they would use or do in the grocery store to do this?

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This would be the sort of thing I could probably get locked up for even knowing over here in CCTV UK, so I don't actually have any ideas for you. But I would say you would have to attribute that kind of knowledge to a character anyway, so there's no burning need to share the details with the reader.

You could just have your MacGyver grab a bunch of cleaning supplies and send the POV character to watch the door. When we next look back, there's a bubbling bucket of chemicals and a fuse of some kind. Dramatic escape! Explosion! And scene. You can hide the actual chemistry in the direction and if you've done the groundwork with the character in question it should work fine.

In fact this kind of scene is generally used to do character work. Have you seen Under Siege, with beefy zen-bro Steven Seagal as a Navy cook? There's a bit where the mercenary killers are coming to kill him in his kitchen and we don't quite know the extent of his martial powers as yet - we know nothing of his background either. He rigs up some kind of IED using the microwave oven as a timer. We have no real idea what this consists of - the director and editor just have Seagal swiftly and decisively slap something together, whack it in the oven and get out of there. The character point is: Seagal is surprisingly swift, decisive, ingenious and deadly for a cook.

The store may stock kerosene or propane. The whole place would have to become an inferno, though, to destroy the body. And both those things would normally produce a fire, not an explosion. A propane explosion is possible, of course, but the characters would need to contrive the right balance of air and vapor.

A quick and dirty incendiary timer can be made out of a box of kitchen matches and an unfiltered cigarette.

Drachen Jager said:

High-nitrogen fertilizer and fuel oil.

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I don't think this can be casually mixed together while on the run.

Telergic said:

I don't think this can be casually mixed together while on the run.

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Well, you'd need the know how and a minute or two. But it's not tricky. If you do a bad job of mixing you'll get a lower-yield explosion (which is still pretty good, because ANFO is powerful stuff) but unless you really screw it up, it will work.

Drachen Jager said:

Well, you'd need the know how and a minute or two. But it's not tricky. If you do a bad job of mixing you'll get a lower-yield explosion (which is still pretty good, because ANFO is powerful stuff) but unless you really screw it up, it will work.

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No experience or knowledge of it myself, it just seemed implausible offhand that no advance preparation would be required. But you sound like you know better.

So wouldn't you need some time with a mechanical mixer of some sort? Surely you couldn't just pour some oil into a pot of fertilizer and stir for a few seconds before setting it off with an ordinary flame? I honestly don't know what it takes to detonate this kind of explosive, but I imagine you'd want to bake any water out of the fertilizer first, wouldn't you? And then perhaps spend some considerable time mixing it up and setting it either in some kind of closed container or as a formed dry solid?

Drachen Jager said:

High-nitrogen fertilizer and fuel oil.

AKA ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil).

Packs a wallop.

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Yes, it's really easy to make, and really hard to set off. The nitrate is bound up in crystals in the fertilizer and it takes a hell of a bang to break it free.

Fast and dirty, some trash bags, a can of Sterno, and several lantern size propane tanks. Oh, and an ice pick. Open a trash bags, fluffing it to get air in there, toss in a punctured propane tank, tie it shut. Lather, rinse, repeat, stack them up. When you're ready, lite the Sterno can, slide it into the bags and run. Welcome to the wonderful world of Fuel-Air Explosives.

DNA will survive an explosion in a portion of a body smaller then the pinkie finger. After an explosion, you look for body parts, and yes, there will be body parts. It doesn't take a whole lot to test for DNA.

Now how long it will take to get results is another matter.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

jclarkdawe said:

DNA will survive an explosion in a portion of a body smaller then the pinkie finger. After an explosion, you look for body parts, and yes, there will be body parts. It doesn't take a whole lot to test for DNA.

Now how long it will take to get results is another matter.

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While a FAE is powerful (five times more powerful than TNT by weight) there isn't going to be enough propane to produce a 'squish' zone that reduces things to a fine red mist. It will blow down the walls and blow off the roof, but it will also blow out any fires (it consumes all the oxygen).

Now if this creature isn't human, all the lab will be able to tell them is it's not human. There's a lab out in Oregon or Washington state that specializes in animal CSI for illegal trafficking cases, but even they don't have a complete DNA roster.