Blend a small amount of plastic explosive in exterior housepaint. Paint house. Wait a few years for the house to need repainting. Attach a small blasting cap to a corner of the house, rig to one of those electric plunger thingys they show in the movies, depress plunger and dance in the brief snowfall of former housepaint. No sweaty scraping or sanding required.

One might also imagine this useful for sidewalks and driveways that one wished to avoid shovelling snow/ice from.
-- gregor-e, Aug 07 2001

Hindenburg had explosive paint http://www.canuck.c...ets/hindenburg.html
"high-volatility paint that was used to paint the outside of the balloon - akin to coating it with rocket fuel." [Jeremi, Mar 22 2002, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Explosive paint would be too hazardous to transport or store in any quantity. Every home owner would be required to obtain an explosives license before purchasing, transporting, or using the paint. Proper disposal of unused paint would be troublesome as well.

When you went to remove the paint, what would you do if only one feature needed repainting? You'd be forced to repaint the entire house at one time. This one gets a fish bone.
-- BigBrother, Aug 08 2001


Not to mention the large holes that would result if the paint were't properly stirred and to much explosive was in to small an area.
-- tigerwren, Aug 08 2001


Oddly enough, I'm reading a book called "A Whack On The Side Of The Head" that talks about a very similar concept. Apparently, someone brought a similar idea up at a meeting once as a joke...to add gunpowder to the paint so it could just be blown off of the house.

The staff at the meeting apparently turned it into a useful concept- they decided to put additives into the paint that would be inert until you put another additive on it. This would cause the paint to strip right off of the wall when you were ready to do so.

Considering that this book was published in 1983 and the company was planning on putting a product out "soon", they've apparently run into some snags...

So why can't someone genetically engineer a termite to only eat paint?
-- jabudi, Mar 21 2002


Odd that no one has pointed out the difficulty of hanging pictures, etc, yet.
-- phoenix, Mar 22 2002


Okay. Pictures are difficult to hang.
-- bristolz, Mar 22 2002


On the other hand, the idea specifies //exterior housepaint//.

Most of the pictures in my house are hung on the inside. Furthermore, if you wanted to hang them outside, you could always attach an exterior picture rail before painting, and then just hope that the wind won't blow, the rain won't fall and the sunshine won't fade the colours.

Or make the painting in such a way that it might be improved by damp, bleaching and occasionally being dropped from a height. You may laugh, but something like Picasso's Guernica might well gain extra pathos from a process like that.

Alternatively, instead of hanging a painting, you could paint the painting as a second undercoat before applying the explosive paint. Then it would emerge years later with the artistic advantage of surprise.
-- pertinax, May 11 2021



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