ot: remembrance of fingers lost

[Julia Hampsten]

(ok, so I am permanently off topic :) )

forget bikes, these are some dangerous toys. . .

Pray for Coal
http://www.radarmagazine.com/features/2006/12/toys.php

Reminds me of a story. . .When I was a kid my dad worked for a Swedish company that made turbines, and he would bring home ballbearings for my brothers in various sizes, highly prized in the cutthroat marble craze that was sweeping our school. When he left that company they presented him with a working replica in cast iron of a cannon from a Swedish ship, about 10" long with a 3/4" bore, mounted on wooden supports and with cast iron wheels.

. . .So now you've got your cannon, got the perfect size shot, all you need is the fuse and powder from a few firecrackers. You place your weapon on the slope behind the house and aim it at Dad's new 2x4 fence that he built himself and light the fuse. . .I think my brothers thought it would just make a nice dent. . .luckily there was an empty field on the other side. To their amazement and ecstasy, the shot blasted right through a board leaving perfectly round hole. . .nobody lost any fingers. . . :D

[Sandy]

Somehow I get the picture of you in the basement designing a cruise missile
as your brothers were making a little hole in the fence! :)


Sandy

[mike p]

I always wear my helmet playing lawn darts.

Mike

[Too Tall]

We could hang.
I know from black powder a thing or two ;)

[roman meal]

I think that the brothers Hampsten were in that "Johnny Reb" cannon video..

Child actors!

True story, I had the "revolutionary war" version of that cannon. My brother whipped the firing cord hard after i had used the ramrod to seriously stuff the ball in, and the cannonball made a high, fast arc over the backyard, until our hyperactive labrador stuck a six foot vertical leap in the air, while running facing the cannon, to inhale the cannonball right at its zenith. The timing was impeccable.

Our dog was heaving, and I swear i could see the bulge of that ball stuck deep in it's throat. In desperation, my brother then planted a quasi- Heimlich maneuver on Daisy, and he coughed up the ball, staggered sidways over to the vicinity of the cannon, and then heaved the remnants of milk-bone, alpo, breakfast's leftover cream-chipped beef, and lawn grass over the cannon.


Daisy looked at us with a "*** you look'in at?" in his eyes, took a well deserved nap in the shade, lived the next twelve years, and i went upstairs for a change of underoos.

[gasman]

True story, I had the "revolutionary war" version of that cannon. My brother whipped the firing cord hard after i had used the ramrod to seriously stuff the ball in, and the cannonball made a high, fast arc over the backyard, until our hyperactive labrador stuck a six foot vertical leap in the air, while running facing the cannon, to inhale the cannonball right at its zenith. The timing was impeccable.

Our dog was heaving, and I swear i could see the bulge of that ball stuck deep in it's throat. In desperation, my brother then planted a quasi- Heimlich maneuver on Daisy, and he coughed up the ball, staggered sidways over to the vicinity of the cannon, and then heaved the remnants of milk-bone, alpo, breakfast's leftover cream-chipped beef, and lawn grass over the cannon.


Great story !!!

Glad he was OK.

[roman meal]

Great story !!!

Glad he was OK.


Yes, so were we. Mom was not told, Dad never knew. Not the same situation later when my brother threw his wide-eyed stuffed "Moe" doll from the three stooges out of the front window to the street below. Just as it was about to hit the street, the neighborhood drunk was driving pickled down the road into his driveway, and the doll was pasted face down on his front windshield. He has thought he plowed into a kid (which he could have easily done). He nearly had a coronary, and got out to peel the offending "body" from his windshield. When he heard my brother's scream/laugh, he ran into our house yelling, running up the steps, until my father intervened, and well, it goes on from there.

[OldDog]

As an adult I now wonder back when I was a kid I would go into our local drugstore and buy pounds of sulfer, charcoal and salt peter, and was never, ever questioned.....today the FBI would be waiting at the door.

[Julia Hampsten]

Somehow I get the picture of you in the basement designing a cruise missile
as your brothers were making a little hole in the fence! :)


Sandy


Who ME? With my little chemistry set that I asked for for Christmas, then just liked looking at the copper sulfate and the magnesium sulfide and playing with the bunsen burner and the litmus paper, till my bro's purloined it for more devious purposes?? Where exactly did you find this picture anyway???. . . :beer:

[Kevan]

and to think I was satisfied playing with tennis balls and lighter fluid.

[William]

and to think I was satisfied playing with tennis balls and lighter fluid.

Ditto,

Metal tennis ball cans, or the old metal (not aluminum) soda cans, duct tape, tennis balls, and lighter fluid. Hours of fun and all fingers and eyes intact. I won't get into the spent CO2 cartridges, solid rocket fuel, BB's, and water proof wick experimentations with you at this time. It's all alleged any way. ;)



William

[Tom]

Jones and Lamson, Bryant Grinder, Goodyear's... lots of round stock and turret lathes... spare time... Fourth of July... big cans of black powder... echoes off the ridges for ten miles all around. We had hillbilly neighbors with a big back field full of junk. Imagine the subwoofer you get with a cylindrical tank, ten foot in diameter, with one end cut off. You slide a black powder cannon up that baby and let it rip. Low frequency sound goes a long, long way.

You can also put water in one of those old press-top milk cans, pour in some carbide crystals and put the top on. When it fills up with acetylene you put a flame to the hole in the side. The second time, you tie a rope to the replacement top because the first one disappeared into the woods.

Then you make your own bottle rockets: an Estes model rocket engine attached to a stick with an orange juice can duct taped to it. Fill the OJ can with black powder and wrap it up really really tightly with more duct tape. It's remarkably effective. Make several and launch a rocket attack on your neighbors.

Ah, the fun you could have.

[sspielman]

Reminds me of my childhood....who would know that black powder stuffed into an empty CO2 cartridge...with rocket fuse and epoxy putty to seal the whole mess could completely destroy a semi-hollow tree that stood about 50 feet tall?....If a couple more people 'fess up on their own stupid antics, I may relate the "Bottle Rocket Story"........

[mikemets]

Loved Lawn Jarts.

There wasn't a single neighborhood get together when I was growing up that didn't have Lawn Jart games all day long.

[roman meal]

As a collective group of neighborhood boys, we set up more than a dozen estes rockets with the larger engines six each horizontally across the street from each other, and had a rocket war. Simultaneous ignitions. You could get out of the way, but I forgot about the ending parachute jettison charge those things have..


I was reminded of this years later when I saw coverage of the tow- missile assault on Saddam's sons' hideout.

[William]

Reminds me of my childhood....who would know that black powder stuffed into an empty CO2 cartridge...with rocket fuse and epoxy putty to seal the whole mess could completely destroy a semi-hollow tree that stood about 50 feet tall?....If a couple more people 'fess up on their own stupid antics, I may relate the "Bottle Rocket Story"........

Allegedly (what I mentioned above) very similar, the BB's added to the shrapnel effect.



William

[roman meal]

this sort of behaviour is popular with youth in Britian, too:

(work warning! some ripe language at the end of the video- sorry)


video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODvo23FITWs)

[petitelilpettit]

But I've had fun with gasoline, some empty Martinelli's bottles, some styrofoam, and some paper towels. Put styrofoam into the gasoline, create a weak form of napalm, put it into a Martinelli's bottle, stuff the opening with paper towels, and boom! Instant Malotov Cocktail! Take it to the river trail, light the paper towel, throw it, watch it explode into a 20ft fireball. ooohh!

However, I've had this backfire on me. We went out with six or seven cocktails, and we were getting bored. So we decided that the next underpass would be our last and we would throw our last five together. We did, and the explosion was great. However, we failed to realize that excess brush had accomodated at the base of the overpass. Suddenly we looked down and realized that the brush was on fire and spewing out massive amounts of black smoke. Only then did we realize that the overpass we chose happened to be the Interstate 605 Freeway. Let me tell you, we probably broke some running records fleeing from the scene. I rode by later on an afternoon ride to find police, fire and paramedics around the area. Let's just say that they didn't find the people who did this.

Another good thing that we played with was 2-liter bottles, water, and dry ice. Dry ice bombs are great to play with, but make sure that you don't let off your first one in the center of a col de sac in downtown.

Pettit

[Kevan]

the setting off of a certain smoke bomb in junior high school. Ah, you should'a been there... our nazi-like assistant vice principal running the hallways looking for heads to stick on the end of poles, it was beautiful. Yellow sulfer-smelling smoke billowing everywhere...kids running amuck...and three semi terrified hooligans who circled around and returned to the scene of the crime. Good thing there was only 10 minutes left of school that day.

Why, did you know that those porcelain wall hanging water bubblers have holes in the bottom of the fixture so you can get at the plumbing? Among other things.

[csm]

estes "d-sized" model rocket engines taped to a big yellow tonka dump truck.
that will teach you about aerodynamics and tire compounds.

[Kahuna]

Wow, this is incredible - like a trip down memory lane. I too had the Johnny Reb Cannon and also remember a story about it. It was the time I gave my grandmother a big hematoma with it. I was just a young rugbrat living in NYC at the time.

I distictly recall that cannon and it's spring loaded mechanism, took some force to cock. I remember having to brace the rear of the cannon against the wall as I used my entire body weight and every ounce of strength I had to load the cannonball into the barrel with the ramrod.

So here is my grandma, dressed in her navy blue "Union Army" dress, sitting on the couch peacefully reading her newspaper which was spread open hiding her face (conveniently enough) so she couldn't spy the enemy. Meanwhile I had snuck around a corner in the apartment and carefully took aim from about 20 feet away. My target was the newspaper but the cannon, being the inaccurate weapon of that period, sent the projectile straight into her shin and my poor grandma straight onto the floor in pain.

That was the last I ever saw of my cannon.

-K

[Ginger]

Hmmm...yogurt cup (think Dannon) full (full mind you...) of black powder, some tin foil with a hole in the top, and a sparkler all inside a coffee can...

Lovely.


(What was that? No...I didn't hear you... WHAT?)


I remember something fairly cheap, harmless, and fun having to do with plastic milk jugs, vinegar? and...hmmm...baking soda? So long ago...

Oh...and laying out and setting off whole bricks of Black Cats thinking they were firecrackers...those little helicoptery things launch pretty far!

[gt6267a]

i do recall not knowing anything about a smoke bomb getting thrown into a school dumpster and lighting the trash on fire. flames were like 10 maybe 15' in the air. it was really impressive. aftewards there was a conversation something like this:

principal: did you throw a smoke bomb in the dumpster?
friend: i don't remember
principal: what about you?
me: really sir, there were so many smoke bombs getting thrown around, who could tell whose smoke bomb ended up in the dumpster?
principal: so, you are admitting to throwing a smoke bomb.
me: i am admitting to seeing smoke bombs present at the time.
principal: and who were these people throwing the smoke bombs.
me: i don't recall. with all the smoke, who could tell who was doing what?
principal: did you throw a smoke bomb in the dumpster?
me: as i was saying, my memory of the afternoons events is kind of hazy.

it went on like this for about thirty minutes until we got sent home.