Dammit Ace, don't you know, you're supposed to get these things on video?

Hmmm . . . let me get this straight. Highly combustible liquid, flint, and a semi-retarded blogger. All we need now is a six pack and a bug zapper and we've got a regular Ace o' Spades Saturday night! Yeehaaawww!

We quit distributing them years ago - for the same reason. Too damn dangerous, too many lawsuits.

Oh, ace, if only we had video! Instant comedy gold.

You are a one-man Beavis and Butthead revival.

Well, okay, yeah, it contains a volatile liquid in a tube of cheap plastic. So you don't have to be a genius to figure out that it's *possible* it can explode.

Still, I'm not exactly Nolan Ryan and I didn't rip this thing as hard as I could. At best it was a mid-speed pitch. I threw it at "annoyance speed," not "seething anger speed."

And the bastard just blew up.

"My dad says butane is a bastard gas." -- Bobby Hill

That actually makes me more likely to buy them, just in case, you know, the shit goes down.

I've always been a Zippo man for the most part. Of course, Colibris are pretty kickass.

Like, yeah, I did the wrist and elbow snap deal, so it was a throw and not just a toss, but still, not full force. Just enough to make the point to this stupid lighter that I didn't like it at all and didn't consider it a "real friend."

That's why you can't take them on airplanes anymore. Turns out you can make them blow up on purpose too.

PS. Smoking is bad for you. Just sayin'.

You're lucky you didn't get two in the hat from the local constabulary, on suspicion of terrorism. In you own home, I suppose...?

Huh. I've always been a little paranoid about those cruddy little buggers, but I figured I was fairly safe as long as I didn't use them while I was freebasing or cooking meth. Now I know better.

One of my buddies used to carry his lighter in his back pocket, and one time the lighter cracked and saturated his ass with butane. Another friend thought it would be hilarious to put flame to it. So he did.

Second-degree burns, a trip to the emergency room, ruined pants, and a busted friendship. (They were drinking at the time, in case that isn't obvious from the context.)

Just say no to cheap lighters, friends. It ain't worth it.

(And no, the "friend" wasn't me. I was the lucky one who got to drive Mr. Ass-Burn to the hospital, who screamed obscenities the whole way.)

That Colibris site almost makes me wish I was a smoker. Sexy metal.

(though the 'Quantum' everything is a annoying. 'Quantum' cigarette lighters? Am i supsoed to think these are what the loser scientists of the future use to light their Newports? - excuse me - Quantum Newports. Someone kill that buzzword already.)

You're lucky you didn't get two in the hat from the local constabulary, on suspicion of terrorism.

Nah, he'd blame it on the puertorican kids up the street.

One of my buddies used to carry his lighter in his back pocket, and one time the lighter cracked and saturated his ass with butane. Another friend thought it would be hilarious to put flame to it. So he did.

Second-degree burns, a trip to the emergency room, ruined pants, and a busted friendship. (They were drinking at the time, in case that isn't obvious from the context.)

What were the odds of that happening? One in... one?

Ray,

You're right on both counts: Lame names, but ooohh, that smoothly machined metal action.

With my single-action Colibri, it was just a sweep of the thumb across the side switch, which popped the lid open with a satisfying "snick" and simultaneously lit the mini-welding torch.

ACE, you need to put down the crack pipe and Wild Turkey enemas for awhile and get back to the clonopin and Val-U-Rie vodka.

Gone off the meds again?

Yeah, just consider yourself lucky you didn't pull that trick down in a subway station.

Alright. Time for "How I accidentally exploded the shit of something" stories.

I had raked a huge pile of fall leaves into my driveway. We're talking six feet high and twelve feet in diameter.

A lot of them were wet from a previous rain, having been covered by other leaves and not exposed to the air.

I couldn't get the pile lit. It would start on a dry leaf, but go out almost immediately. I went through a whole matchbook. I said fuck it and got the gas can. That'll make 'em burn!

I walked around, pouring well over a gallon of gasoline on this monser pile of leaves. Then I waited for it to soak in.

A few minutes later, new matchbook in hand, I struck one single match and tossed it at the pile from about five feet away.

The first single second was normal. Match hits gasoline soaked leaf, ignites, lights more on fire and KA-FUCKING-BOOM!!! The ground shook, I had leaves pelting me in the eyes and face and as I stumbled backwards and fell on my ass, it looked like goddam Times Square during a ticker-tape parade! Leaves scattered back all over the yard, ash, rocks, and sticks falling like shrapnel. Fuuuccckkk!

Wife and neighbors coming out of houses to see just what in hell all the commotion is about.

Leaves, especially wet ones in a big pile, don't allow for much ventilation. When you pour gasoline onto them, it tends to gravitate towards the bottom of the pile and release vapor, which when lit, has to find an outlet in a big damned hurry! So, you end up pulling bits of leaves out of your hair, eyes, and teeth.

Next.

ACE - Were you wearing you red slippers or your "boots of escaping?"

compos,

Aren't you the idiot who mocked me for not realizing a little butane lighter could blow up?

Your next story will be that you put a stick of fucking dynamite up your ass -- hey, it was your birthday -- and lit the fuse and asked your buddies to blow it out but damn, those fuses seem to not want to go out, and wouldn't you know it, the fucker unexpectly blew up in your dirtpipe and 'sploded your intestines around the room like wet membranous confetti.

Who would have figured!!!

Boy, that must have looked REALLY cool.

Colibris are the way to go, Ace. My Colibri spent a night at the bottom of an ice chest and still worked. After it dried out, of course.

Are you a smoker? I suppose it couldn't be any worse than breathing NYC air on a regular basis.

Later,
bbeck

Colibris seem to be the flame of choice for the crackheads and tweakers hereabouts. Most tobacco smokers seem to make do with plain old Zippos.

Heh. Monty, I also have one of these as a cheap alternative. And I don't smoke (except for the occasional cigar); lighters just tend to come in handy at parties.

Later,
bbeck

compos, I went with gunpowder.

I was 8 or 9. My dad reloaded shotgun shells, and had a big can of red dot powder way up on the top shelf where I had to actually climb up to reach.

I had been watching Bugs Bunny toons that afternoon, one of those where that wacky Yosemite Sam was running with a can of gunpowder, that had a hold in it, leaving a trail, and Bugs drops a match...

anyway, you can see the genesis of the experiment. I closed the garage door, made a pile of gunpowder about the size of two Coke cans, and made a 3 foot trail leading up to it. I placed the can a nice safe 3 feet away from everything.

The pile was for the exciting conclusion.

I started striking matches, and leaned down to touch the flame to the end of the little trail, right when dad was pulling into the driveway.

I had no idea that this gunpowder burned just a bit faster than that stuff on TV. The whole thing flamed up in about a second, made a big cloud of black smoke, and I walked out of it coughing and blinking. My eyebrows and about 2 inches of my crewcut were gone, and I was covered in soot.

I looked like I just showed up from hell.

It was the first time I can remember doing something so amazingly stupid that my dad was at a loss for words.

He made up for it later though.

Monty,

If I weren't all mellowed out on black tar right now, I'd probably be offended by that remark.

Presenting the Quantum Lighter. You can either tell your cigarette is lit of if you're holding it, but you can't tell both at the same time.

Hubris:

Hey, dude, no offense meant. I just meant that every single one of those frickin' blue-flame torches I've ever seen was firing up a glass pipe filled with illegal narcotics. Those friends of mine who smoke either use Zippos or wooden matches.

But hey, I live in Minnesota -- maybe that's just how we do it up here.

Monty,

I was kidding. Or maybe it was the smack talking.

Hubris:

Sinatra paid the price; so will you. Mark my words. (Of course, you can always pawn that gee-whiz lighter down the road when the smack has taken control of your life; in that sense maybe it's a good investment.)

My eyebrows and about 2 inches of my crewcut were gone, and I was covered in soot. LOL - great visual! Glad you weren't hurt.

As for lighters, I've always loved the sound and smell of a Zippo myself. Don't smoke anymore, except on rare occasions when drinking and it just sounds good. The smoking's rare, the drinking is not.

Come on, you wusses! I bought 50 cheapo lighters for $5.00 - that's right, 50 for $5.00 at Costco last year, and not one of them has blown up, only one of them ran out early.

I probably just screwed myself.

I don't think Ace is telling us the full story here...

I'll lay 3 to 1 odds that as he threw the lighter away he was yelling "Butane Bolt! Butane Bolt!"

Hey,
The more expensive kind (bic) can blow-up also.
I tossed an EMPTY ONE off the top of a 3 story parking garage once. It hit a manhole cover and went poomf!

Seriously, Monty, have you ever seen a crackhead that could scrape together the $50 for a Colibri lighter without blowing it all on crack as soon as they were able to put together the first $20?

Or even if a crackhead could somehow manage to buy or steal one, do you think they could hold on to the lighter without it getting lost or stolen (by another crackhead, natch) within the first 24 hours?

The only nice blue-flame lighter I've ever seen being used for smoking crack was by the dealer played by, I think, James Spader in Less Than Zero.

And I've seen a lot of crackheads sparking up. I live in San Francisco and went to law school in the Tenderloin. They do it right on the sidewalk there, don't give a damn who sees them.

Usually, they use a cheap-ass clear plastic lighter of the kind Ace detonated. Why should they splurge on a good lighter when they could be using that money for sweet, luscious, preciousssss crack?? (Seriously, these people are about the closest thing I've ever seen to a real-life version of Gollum.)

Granted, I have seen blue-flame lighters sold for $5-10 bucks at liquor stores, and these are probably a little more within the more-affluent crackheads' budgets. Usually when a crackhead wants to splurge, he goes for a Bic, but I can see them going all-out for one of these on occasion. But the liquor-store torch-lighters last only slightly less time than the clear-plastic ones before they stop working.

And besides, crackheads don't really much care what kind of lighter they use. These are people who will break the spark plugs off of a parked motorcycle so they can use the glass part as a crack pipe. They aren't that picky as to their paraphernalia. Now, on the other hand, I could tell you about some affluent potheads I've known ...

Fill out an "after action report" and put yourself in for a Purple Heart. I heard somewhere you can do that....

ThiedWaveDave: LOL!!

Alex:

Well, I haven't been doing field studies on the dopers' smoking habits here in rural Minnesota. Not a lot of crack aficianados here; mainly tweakers and huffers. The meth-heads I've seen haven't yet reached the spavined, stinky, don't-give-a-shit phase yet, and I swear: they all use those damned blue-flame lighters. Most of them are kids with too many tattoos and too few brain cells, so maybe it's not a tweaker thing so much as it is a young-punk thing.

Damned kids with their blue-flame lighters and their make-out parties....

The first single second was normal. Match hits gasoline soaked leaf, ignites, lights more on fire and KA-FUCKING-BOOM!!! The ground shook, I had leaves pelting me in the eyes and face and as I stumbled backwards and fell on my ass, it looked like goddam Times Square during a ticker-tape parade! Leaves scattered back all over the yard, ash, rocks, and sticks falling like shrapnel.

This is the sort of anecdote that really makes me miss The Secret Life of Machines. 'Cause they, like, built stuff to illustrate how it worked. In one episode, they took a long pipe just wide enough to slip a beer can in, put a pit of gunpowder in it, and lit it off. Beer can barely makes out the end of the pipe. Then they refitted it with a spark plug, poured a tablespoon of gasoline in it, and launched the beer across the lake. Way cool. They don't make shows like that anymore, unfortunately.

The most interesting spontaneous combustion bit I've seen (not involved in, but was around when it happened) went like this:

• Person A has big box of matches.
  
• Person B needs matches.
  
• Person A tosses matches to Person B.
  
• Person B misses matches.
  
• Big box of matches hits the ground and goes whoosh!
  
• Person B is now happy that he didn't catch the matches after all.
  

Yeah, it was on a camping trip.

ace you need to find other activities that won't require so many safety conerns. I suggest stamp collecting or knitting. Needless to say we won't be discussing the lit match head that dropped in my lap as I was lighting my cigar while driving down the freeway. Whew!!!! Now that was an intense moment.

A decade or so ago I saw an article titled, "The two-for-a-dollar bomb." The lead was a story about a welder who nearly lost a leg when a spark burned through his jeans and hit the lighter in his pocket.

This isn't exactly an unknown phenomenon.

All in all, I think the safer solution is to hold a wire across the terminals of your car's battery when you need a light. Baling wire works better than copper. Just keep it away from the carburetor.

Compos:

Here are some guys who apparently attended your seminar on litter disposal:

http://www.compfused.com/directlink/739/

I have an uncle who used to keep saying that a butane lighter can blow up an entire city block. I think he misunderstood something someone else told him. Stoner.

In one episode, they took a long pipe just wide enough to slip a beer can in, put a pit of gunpowder in it, and lit it off.

Actually, one of the most fun barbeques I ever had at my house was when a friend of mine brought over a spud cannon. This is a contraption made out of PVC sewer pipe. You muzzle-load the thing by jamming a big potato down the barrel so that you have a good seal all around. Below the barrel is a combustion chamber into which you spray some hair spray. The amount of spray and timing are important. Then you close the combustion chamber, hit the sparker (the same part that's on your gas grill), and launch a potato about 600 yards over the Texas Hill Country.

Now, that's just good fun.

Damn you Michael.

I was hoping the potato gun thing woud die down.

Hubby desperately wants to make one.

Exploding lighters and 5 gallon buckets are proverbial among government regulators as a yard-stick - is this potential problem more serious than a baby drowning in a water-filled bucket left unattended, or a lighter exploding?

Hubby desperately wants to make one.

Let him. I'm telling you, lauraw, once you've mounted that spud gun on your shoulder and propelled a few taters into the subdivision next to yours (preferably the downscale one where they can't afford lawyers), you'll be hooked.

No subdivision, but plenty of yankee swampland and woods back there.
Might be useful for disciplining the coyotes.

TheShadow: Great video, but shame about their choice of soundtrack. It should have been Kerosene by Big Black.

This is news?

Shit, my friends and I in high school used to love finding the "empty" lighters laying around. Throw 'em a coupla times hard at a wall and BOOM!

Well, I didn't hang out with kids who exploded lighters deliberately.

Or kissed girls, for that matter.