The Pipe Bombs Were Part of the Plan

[Effete Snob]

63. One minor possibility

As a youth with an interest in electronics, model rocketry, and things that go boom, I used to play a game with a friend of mine where we would make booby traps.

For example one time he took a battery, a piece of nichrome wire wrapped on the fuse of a smoke bomb, and rigged it with a pair of contacts on a clothespin that would be triggered when I opened my bedroom door which pulled a slip of paper out of the clothespin. Left a burn mark in my carpet that I lived with for years.

Anywho, playing around with dumb stuff like that, it was always good to have an "arming" circuit and a "trigger" circuit, so that there would be a safe getaway between setting the device and it being really ready to go off. (a piece of ice in a clothespin, in series with another clothespin trigger, for example)

It's conceivable that the kitchen timers could have been a delayed arming mechanism, and that there was, say, a miniature electronic timer and battery inside the pipe part of the device, so that you could plant the device, set the hour timer, and the device would not be armed until you are well away. That would be to avoid, for example, any power-up transients in the secondary solid state timing trigger.

However, that's kind of an outside possibility. Because if they were that worried about a safety delay, the devices would have been more reliable anyway.

There is an oddity though:

https://madison.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/madison-native-says-she-found-pipe-bomb-near-rnc-office-in-d-c-by-sheer/article_0972de1a-6012-5407-8a19-63d5763ea43a.html

“I just happened to look down by sheer luck,” Younger said. “And I noticed that by the recycling bin there was this tangle of wires.”

She thought someone had missed the recycling bin, and she’d be able to throw away the trash for them. But when Younger looked closer, she noticed the wires were attached to a pipe that was capped on both ends. The wires were also connected to a radial dial, almost like an “old-school kitchen timer,” with a red hand pointing at the number 20.

So, how does a one hour timer get set the night before and then found the next day at 20 minutes to go?

U.S. Capitol Police, FBI agents and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were called to the alleyway around 12:45 p.m. to deactivate the bomb. About 30 minutes later, as the agents and bomb technicians were still investigating at RNC headquarters, another call came in for a second, similar explosive device found at the Democratic National Committee headquarters nearby.

Now, one of the FBI pictures shows the armature of a timer which has been popped off the timer (where you can see the glue gun glue and the paperclip). Did they disarm it onsite, or was the timer not working?


(on edit: I might have answered the "why at 20" question. The paper clip extended well beyond the timer. So if the timer was laying sideways, it would get stuck, since the spring mechanism doesn't have enough torque to push the whole works sideways and keep turning. That would make for a good effect if it was intentionally designed not to go off, since, whenever it was found, it would look like it was going to go off soon. That would also explain the actual function of that big long paperclip 'contact'.)