@mb300sd: people weld galvanized steel all the time. Don't believe the hype
In my teens I had a chemistry lab at home. Started with a toy chemistry set, but augmented with many chemicals from oter sources. Back then pharmacies still carried things like elemental iodine, potassium chlorate, potassium permanganate, ether, etc.; and the pharmacists would not mind selling them to a nerdish kid like me, no questions asked. From other places I easily got caustic soda, lead, ethanol, acetone, hydrochloric acid, mercury, calcium carbide, ...
Looking back, after reading tons of MSDSs and "toxicity" sections in Wikipedia, I discovered that I died several times over before I even started to shave. Today, lead has become as dangerous as plutonium, one pint of acetone will turn by itself into ten pounds of cocaine, one whiff of 190-proof ethanol will send everybody in a mile radius to the hospital, ... Sigh...
I hear you. It was much easier for grade-school children to take up pyrotechnics as a hobby back then.
I used to get everyday fun stuff like ether, sulfur, potassium nitrate, fuming nitric acid, glacial acetic acid, lead acetate, and reagent grade sulfuric and hydrochloric acids from the neighborhood pharmacy with no questions asked. More interesting but relatively nontoxic stuff like potassium chlorate, red phosphorus, manganese dioxide and sodium ferrocyanide came in pricey little chemistry-set-sized bottles from the local hobby shop, also with no questions asked. Other cool substances like calcium carbide, cheap muriatic acid and various alcohols came from the hardware store.
My biggest problem was trying to source powdered charcoal to make gunpowder. I found that the easiest way was to cut the heads off wooden strike-anywhere stove matches (the heads were an excellent material for other fun projects) and reduce the matchsticks to charcoal to be ground in a mortar and pestle.
By the time I was in my teens we were forging notes from our parents to get the really cool stuff like white phosphorus (and the carbon disulfide to dissolve it in), zinc dust, red iron oxide (to make thermite), etc from Central Scientific.
Now kids need to buy stump remover just to get their hands on some saltpeter for the time-honored childhood tradition of making gunpowder. Even an adult trying to buy half of those things would probably come under investigation for being a terrorist or meth chemist.
Guess what? For all our pyrotechnical fun we never burned anything down nor suffered any more than minor skin burns. We'd been taught to think before we did things.
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Today's kids are so over-protected it's ridiculous. The political correctness geniuses figure they can use simple "childproof" packaging and devices to fool the same children they need to ask for help to reprogram the remote control. When I was a kid we learned not to play carelessly with fire by burning ourselves on a hot stove. I understood what the skull and crossbones meant on the iodine bottle in the bathroom cabinet long before I was tall enough reach it.
We learned to respect fire and dangerous chemicals at an early age. Even substances now considered dangerous were freely given to children. In kindergarten we were given powdered asbestos (I can still remember the distinct smell) to mix with water to make a modelling compound. A trip to the dentist wasn't complete without receiving a decent blob of mercury to play with. Now kids can't even take peanut butter sandwiches to school.
No wonder today's kids have no sense of responsibility for their own safety.
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