Potato guns were banned after two things happened.
One, I used one of my mom's precious horded cans of hairspray. The second was we (ok, I) shot a chicken. I did not mean to shoot the chicken. I was actually going to shoot the parrot. Which was very wrong of me. But that parrot would chase me to bite me. And it got annoying. So I was aiming at the parrot. When my brother said, "look! Chicken! Bet you can't hit it."
You can guess the rest.
Poor chicken.
If we were neighbors we wouldn’t be alive today. But, we would have a lot of fun, gone out with smoke and fire.
Heh, I made napalm one time by accident, or at least a reasonable facsimile...
My younger brother had one of those old tube-frame minibikes with the lawnmower engine...and it just didn’t work. So I determined I was going to try to get it to work.
First, I had to drain the gas tank, so...I found a large styrofoam cup and began draining the gas into it! It completely melted, and I saw that wouldn’t work, so I found an old Maxwell House coffee can in our garage next to where we lived on a Naval Communication Station near Andrews AFB, and drained the gas into that.
After all the gas was drained out, I was thinking about that cup and how it had melted. There was a large bag of styrofoam packing peanuts, so I threw some in.
They vanished instantly!
So I threw more in, and THEY vanished instantly! This was really interesting, because it seemed like making something into nothing...almost like magic. So, I began throwing handfuls of those styrofoam packing peanuts into that can, and they kept disappearing, but the gas was starting to thicken. So I grabbed one of my Dad’s Craftsman screwdrivers, and used that as a mixer, throwing more and more in until it became a fairly thick goo.
I had to go somewhere, so I put the can (with the screwdriver still in it) behind a tall cabinet and resolved to pick this up later.
Well, I forgot, and my dad retired from the navy some time later. As we were cleaning out the quarters to move out of state, I saw my dad reach behind that cabinet and pull out that Maxwell Coffee can with the screwdriver glued into it in a rather upright state!
He had one hand on his hip as he silently regarded this can, no doubt wondering what it was, how it had gotten there, and who put it there. I did an about face and marched away before he looked at me, but I never did ask him about that.
I always wish I had...:)