A guy I used to know used to make hydrogen in a glass cranberry juice jug from a simple reaction of common household materials. He would fill up balloons, tie a greased string to it, light the string, and let it go.
Then he found a bottle of helium... made up “2 ballooners”... one for lift tied to the other with a mix of oxygen and acetylene. The explosion flash from the oxy-acetylene mix was “quite violent”. He could time the flash to the sound (like one does with thunder)... and judging from the angle, some of these things were 2 miles away and about 4000’ up. I often wondered if any stargazers saw the odd flicker of the greased string and were watching and then all the sudden BOOOOOM!!! The horror.
Once, he filled a 2 liter bottle with the oxy-acetlene mix... and set it off in the shop with a lit rag on the end of a broomstick. My advice... don’t do it unless you want to lose an eyeball.
These days, though... if you did anything of these sorts, you would be undoubtedly be cornered in a boat under a tarp by a lot of scary men in body armor shooting hollow point bullets at you or using those scary assault style firearms with their scary 30 round magazines, then “detained”, you know... using “The Public Safety Exception”... and eventually sent to Gitmo... which I thought 0bama was supposed to close.
How true; much of what my brothers and I did back in the day would now be taken very seriously indeed. I still remember when I set off a pipe cannon (not bomb, only one end capped),using my homemade black powder, through the hedge one Sunday morning, not knowing that the neighbor lady was hanging clothes just on the other side. She didn’t call the cops, just my parents, which was probably worse for me.
We had some long-suffering neighbors, I can tell you. Today, you are right; I’d spend the rest of my life in government custody.