Unimog Club UK

No, but I have got just the one conviction under my belt that sounds a hell of a lot more serious than it actually is. For my troubles I've been entered onto the terrorist register for life for setting off a small bomb. 

Edit... I say small, the army EOD attended so it wasn't that small!

It was back when I was 18. I've always had an interest in that sort of stuff so I made myself a decent sized batch of anfo. Then me and a mate carried it down the road and put it in the corner of the local hotel garden - they were posh used to hold loads of firework parties and annoy the residents (us) so I figured I'd give them some payback.

Trouble was I got my maths a bit wrong. Instead of making a bit of a bang it was huge. They found the lid of the box it was in about 250 yards away and there was a hole in the lawn big enough to bury a washing machine in!

Here's a youtube video I found of 16kg of it going off. I recon that's about the size of the one I made, although I didn't weigh it.


Edit... The police called out the EOD. It took me over a year with two visits to crown court to talk myself out of it. Ended up doing 120hrs of community service which was a result. I nearly went down for it.

If it was legal I could come up with some quality entertainment. I've had a huge interest in explosives since my early teens and can make pretty much anything from black powder to improvised TNT, all from memory. I don't do it any more though since learning quite how seriously it can be taken. I think if it wasn't for a reference given for me from a personal friend who is a retired prison governor I would have done a couple of years. I've got too many responsibilities to risk making even really small stuff as a joke these days.

Youtube is a great watch for me now. Search for the right things and you can watch crazy people all over the world making all the things I used to. My very favourite which was very impressive, relatively safe before it dried and easy to make was Nitrogen Triiodide. Put a tiny amount (I was always careful to only use enough to make people jump without getting hurt) of that somewhere people will walk in mid summer and it'll dry on the pavement in minutes. When someone walks past, well...

Funnily enough I did say in the police interview that I'd done it loads of times and I'd never had one blow up like that before! They actually had another one that was very similar from about a year previously that they had kept a record of, but they could never work out who did it because I wasn't on file.

It was the fact that I'd let it off in the hotel garden that really put the pressure on them to catch me. I'd made literally hundreds of smaller ones in the past but because I'd always set them off in remote areas they never got picked up on. The final straw was that the weekend before I set mine off, the first of the London nail bombs was detonated and a lot of people were hurt. I was working away during the week so had completely missed all of that information! Before they caught up with me they thought I was a nutter trying to achieve the same outcome, which couldn't have been further from the truth.

When I was arrested it was for causing an explosion with intent to endanger life - attempted murder pretty much. I was arrested by a detective chief inspector with armed backup... To say they hit me hard and fast is an understatement -  My feet didn't touch the ground between my car and the van and they didn't open the doors until I was locked in a secure razor wired compound back at the station. Even then I was being held onto by a copper that made a bear look small!

All credit to them, if I was a nutter they took me down absolutely perfectly. I didn't expect a thing and before I had time to react to what was going on I was restrained and frisked. For all the bashing the police get, looking back I'm proud that my local guys could pull something off that cleanly.