Design
The bomb is usually a short section of steel water pipe containing the explosive mixture and closed at both ends with steel or brass caps. A fuse is inserted into the pipe with a lead running out through a hole in the side or capped end of the pipe. The fuse can be electric with wires leading to a timer and battery or can be a common fuse. All of the components are easily obtainable.
Generally, high explosives such as TNT are not used, because these and the detonators that they require are difficult to obtain. Such explosives also do not require the containment of a pipe bomb.
Instead, any sort of explosive mixture the builder can find or make is used, and some of the explosive mixtures used, such as black powder, match heads or chlorate mixtures are very prone to ignition by the friction and static electricity generated when packing the material inside the tube or attaching the end caps—accounting for many injuries or deaths amongst builders. If sharp objects, such as nails or broken glass, are added inside the bomb in an attempt to increase the amount of injury, these also add to the risk of premature ignition.
Read more about this topic: Pipe Bomb
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ’s sake not black—
nor white either—and not polished!
Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)