WHAT THE HELL IS JETEX?

Jetex was crucial in the development of my pre-teen personality, and thus, when I discovered an actual print ad for the Jetex motor on my favorite website I was both surprised and uplifted. The Jetex motor was a cheap, solid-fuel burning, rocket-propulsion unit for toy planes, cars, and boats.
My first encounter was with a Jetex powered car that was supposed to run on a line – at quite alarming speed – in circles around a central tether. Although it was my car, my stepfather insisted on setting the thing up and lighting the Jetex fuse. And, needless to say, he fucked up. The car was being run on a very uneven patio. It hit a bump, went straight up on the air for some distance and then came back down again, scared the dog, and pretty much wrecked itself, although the Jetex motor was still intact.

My second Jetex experience was with something called the Dan Dare Jetex Space Rocket that was launched from a spring-loaded ramp, supposedly released a parachute after it had achieved what Werner von Braun called brenschluss, and floated gently to earth. It came in kit form. My grandfather and I took almost a full month of one summer to complete the asbestos-lined, balsa wood construction. But we miss-timed the first launch, and the rocket fell off the ramp before the motor ignited, and then it lay on its side, burning grass and spewing smoke until the fuel burned out.
The second launch of the Dan Dare Jetex Space Rocket was much more successful. The rocket went up a hundred feet or more before the fuel was spent. Unfortunately the chute didn’t deploy until far too late in the fall to stop it ploughing into the ground. After it was glued it back together, the Dan Dare Jetex Space Rocket made one last flight, with an incendiary device aboard to blow it up in mid-air. Which gets me to my real romance with Jetex. Or, to be more precise, Jetex fuse.

At age eleven, I was a mad bomber. Creating explosions was quite a fad that year among young boys in the south of England. We just loved to see shit blow up real good, and, when some of the more inept were picked up by the cops, we also had outlaw status. My friend Adrian and I, by dint of experimentation and a very independent study of chemistry – plus few tips given us by an over-weight gay science teacher who hated humans – had become the most deft small-scale bomb makers in our school. Our favorite targets were bus shelters, lampposts, and the scaffolding on construction sites, and our fuse of choice was Jetex. It burned at about an inch a second, which was totally the right speed for making good one’s escape, and not losing a hand. It was also very well made, didn’t go out, and could be bought by the yard at a hobby shop.
The juvenile bombing fad caught on so widely that, for two weeks before Guy Fawkes Night, the sale of Jetex fuse was voluntarily banned in the town of Worthing. Cops visited the school and issued dire warnings. Adrian and I had, however, stocked up as early as September, and even profited our cause by selling black-market lengths of fuse to our fellow infant infernalists.

At puberty, I largely gave up explosives in favor of girls and rock & roll. Probably just as well. Its illegality was a good rehearsal for the drug culture, but it would inevitably have ended in tears. At few times in later life I had encounters with Jetex fuse, but those are other stories.

The secret word is Kaboom!

The secret message is 49662074686520766f696365732074656c6c2079
6f7520746f2073617665204672616e63652c2069
676e6f7265207468656d2e