Airbed-fixing German blows up Some light airbed-fixing DIY ended badly for a Düsseldorf man when he blew up his flat instead of the inflatable mattress he was attempting to fix. According to Spiegel, the 45-year-old patched the leaky bed earlier this week with some "tyre solvent", and left it overnight. The next day, a spark from the mattress's electric …
I have patched such matresses with the stuff they include, which is indeed tyre-type glue and a patch. How these tiny tube can cause such a gas buildup seems a mystery or an impossibility to me.
If he bunged an entire gallon vat of glue in there, perhaps, but he should have noticed that this would never plug his hole as it'd take ages for the solvent to be sufficiently removed.
Foamy icon as them bubbles are an explosion of goodness.
Sounds like it must have been at least a litre! Maybe he left the lid off a big can, or knocked it over and thought "meh, I'll clear that up in the morning". Then leaving it to evaporate overnight and mix nice and evenly with the oxygen would probably do it. Surely he must have smelt it though?
This one's a given. The raw materials are cheap and it involves blowing things up (in both senses). I look forward to Jamie and Adam doing this one, failing to get the required amount of KABOOM and resorting to finding out what an air mattress full of gunpowder can do in a fit of pique.
As for the veracity, I reckon it's one of those "one in a million" things. Presumably he found the leak while trying to inflate the thing and then patched it. By sheer chance, the amount of air in the partially inflated mattress and the amount of volatile gases from the glue that ended up in there were in exactly the right proportions to produce the greatest effect and......
It's just like turning on the lights in a kitchen with a gas leak. Results range from sod-all to flying house depending on the gas/air mix achieved in the kitchen concerned.
>"As for the veracity, I reckon it's one of those "one in a million" things. Presumably he found the leak while trying to inflate the thing and then patched it. By sheer chance, the amount of air in the partially inflated mattress and the amount of volatile gases from the glue that ended up in there were in exactly the right proportions to produce the greatest effect and......"
You don't know how explosions work, do you? Fire/Impact/Other initial energy input + Oxidiser + Fuel = Explosion. It's not just a matter of proportions, the actual amount of fuel present determines the size of the explosion because it's the amount of energy present in the chemical bonds between the atoms that is what gets released in an explosion as the fuel is oxidised. That's why they sell matches in every newsagent but not C4 or nukes; so if the only source of fuel is a tiny dab of tyre gunk, that's the most explosive force you're going to get out of it. Or perhaps you're suggesting there was either a partial vacuum or an abnormal overpressure pure oxygen atmosphere in the flat?
>"It's just like turning on the lights in a kitchen with a gas leak. Results range from sod-all to flying house depending on the gas/air mix achieved in the kitchen concerned."
Yes, it's just like that. But when the amount of gas is a thimblefull, you'd have to have a TINY kitchen for the mix to reach explosive proportions. And even then you'd only get a TINY explosion.
So either the guy used a whole bucketload of gunk to fix that one little hole, or we've not got a full and accurate understanding of the details. I think the most likely answer (but not given in any of the reports that I could find) is that it wasn't the patch on the mattress itself that detonated, but that he did something stupid like leaving the lid off the tin overnight and the whole room filled with the fumes. That would account for how a spark from the pump could ignite it without requiring one hell of a coincidence of positioning the pump right up against the mattress exactly near where the hole was. And that *could* produce the kitchen + light switch kind of effect you're envisaging. But the mattress is a red herring.
common unless he was pouring gallons of the stuff all over the place it isnt exactly something any of you wouldnt do ..
or would you really go down the 4 flights to ground floor and work on it outside leave it drying outside over night and then drag all the way back up and then inflate ??
thought not !
lazy bastards
Must have been a lot of glue to give that sort of explosion. Usually when that sort of thing happens around here it is someone trying to brew up some "P". (Pseudoephedrine)
It does remind me of one of my mates when I was a teenager. He decided he wanted a powerful burner, and came up with a setup where a vacuum cleaner blew air through a closed container full of petrol, like an old style surface carburettor. The resulting mixture came out through a nozzle and burnt really well. Until the time he forgot and left the vaccuum cleaner on suck. In those days the motor was not sealed, so the machine filled up nicely and the brushes ignited the mixture. Didn't do the machine any good at all. The insurance company was mystified but paid up... I doubt if they were told the whole story.
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