Carbide Lights

I’ve used a very old Justrite lamp for caving. They do give off a nice light but man they smell like crap.

LOL...yep..that's Acetylene gas they give off...big stinker for sure.

LOL we used to use artisanal carbide cannons primarily for noise during winter holidays when I was a kid. Try to do that now and you’d probably get in jail or worse.
We used carbide burners when camping in the Danube Delta for light cooking and such. Great use of carbide but not very safe.

Ah, this is about carbid cannons now :-)

In the Netherlands old milk churns are used as carbid cannons, with a football pressed in the opening for the right pressure build-up, they shoot the ball 100+ meters away. It still is a national pastime everywhere outside the cities, although milk has not been collected in milk churns anywhere for decades now.

Love the photo, but that thing does look a little scary. Was that everyone’s EDC in the 1800s?

Or you could stick a piece of carbide in a plastic bottle with water, put the cap on then run away. Don’t try it folks !!!

The blast is aided by some sort of ignition :-)

I’ve heard of cavers running out of water and peeing in them… Now that’s a smell I’d rather not experience!

Gotta love the Dutch…

The one thing you don’t want to do is fill a beach ball/inner tube from an oxy-acetylene torch. Some lady did that around Austin a few years back (thinking it was just compressed air). Blew up in her car and totally shredded it. And there was a guy that did it on purpose in his back yard… broke just about every window for a block around.

Carbide lights…neato

Wanna see something crazy…Google “Punkin chunkin”

Real men toss anvils…

no no no

Real men CATCH anvils

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

That’s some wicked cool stuff blasting an anvil in the air for sure

People take anvil shooting rather seriously. Precision machined surfaces, etc. People put thousands of dollars into their anvils.

A friend of mine makes cannons. You can shoot a golf ball up to around 7 miles. Past that and the cover comes off. He also has one that shoots D-cells.

I saw a report today that the huge explosion in China involved calcium carbide — that’s the fuel used by miner’s lamps.

CaC2 + 2 H2O → C2H2 + Ca(OH)2

C2H2 is acetylene gas. Inside the miner’s light, as the gas evolves it quickly pushes out any air, and the stream of pure acetylene coming out of the tip burns.
But acetylene mixed in air is explosive over a wide range.

One common experience using a miner’s lamp for caving I recall was — they’re ignited with a little spark made by turning a rough steel wheel on a flint (typical mechanical spark lighter). Cup your hand over the reflector, feel the gas, whip your hand away over the spark wheel. POP and then a flame. If you did it too quickly, sometimes some acetylene in the delivery tube behind the flame tip would POP throwing the tip out (it was a press fit tip, as a safety factor, so you wouldn’t blow up the brass container).

Chasing down those little tips was — something to plan not to need to do.

The report on the China explosion mentioned that the firefighters knew there was calcium carbide in there somewhere but not where, so they had to keep pouring water on the fire.

Well, here’s a new gas source:

Put crumbs of that alloy in the bottom of a carbide lamp, light it, and you’ve got a hydrogen flame coming out the tip.

Nowhere near as bright as acetylene though, and not particularly useful for illumination:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5/n128/abs/005461d0.html

A possibility for cheaply refueling internal combustion engines though.

Just shovel the metal alloy in, add water, burn the hydrogen for energy, and shovel the powdered aluminum hydroxide out of the exhaust bin.

1964 or so, I got a new Justrite carbide lamp. Tested, demonstrated, used it on a few Boy Scout camping trips, then broke something off in the tip. Got it down from the attic a couple of days ago, cleaned up lamp, polished reflector, soaked the tip in alum solution and cleared it out.

It works.

Little or no odor unless the carbide compartment is leaking, no smoke, no flicker.

I remember as a child in South Africa in the 60’s there were still carbide lamps around. Being a large gold mining country, some were still used on the mines. A lot of the poorer people still used carbide lamps for bicycle lights, but the newer lights were generator driven off the wheel of the bike.
Batteries were expensive and had little capacity in those days so I don’t think many people would have used them in flashlights as bike lights.
Kids were obsessed with making explosive devices, and fire crackers were still legal to buy.
On the 5th of November (Guy Fawkes night) we used to have huge fireworks parties and displays.
My older brothers used to buy carbide at the hardware shop to make some sort of cannons out of old coffee or baby formula tins.
By the time I joined the scouts and got into camping, we used LPG cylinders with cooking or lamp attachments.
These gas lamps became very popular for many years before batteries became as advanced and affordable as they are these days.

Useful thread