Posted on 03/14/2009 8:54:42 PM PDT by keving
I was thinking of the one where he got drafted. By the end of the cartoon he was smacking bombs with a hammer to see if they were duds.
Paper caps smashed with a brick?
I wasn’t a suburban kid.
We had to find two rocks. Bricks were in short supply...
Well, OK, except if you want to get shot in the whosits you can’t use a spent cartridge. It has to be a live one.
Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s an urban legend anyway. Live rounds are somewhat resistant to cooking off from heat, and if they do, I doubt they could achieve much velocity without being fired through a barrel.
I don’t understand smashing paper caps though. I don’t even know what they are.
That doesn’t look like anything I’d want to do. I’d like to go out with a bang but... not literally.
The .22LR fuse replacement was tried on Mythbusters. It worked! They had to short circuit it, with very heavy wire (#8, I think) before it would go of. And it DID go off, and shot right into the seat.
Yup, an entire roll (or 3) of paper caps, on the curb, with a big rock dropped on top, makes a big bang.
“1/4 sticks,” basically a true M-80, are something else. Blew a dead bird in one of those plastic red cups around 50 feet in the air. Looked pretty funny before it went off—just two bird feet sticking out over the rim.
Threw one into my pool once, weighted with a couple nails. At night, of course alcohol was involved. House party. Went off, huge WUMP and flash of light, ground moved, walls of pool moved out and came back. Thought I had ruined my pool, but it was well made, expanded and contracted a bit, no prob. Never did that again.
Shot bottle rockets out of BB gun. Light fuse, pull trigger, rocket goes up, tips over, and shoots back to earth and goes boom on the ground. Real crowd pleaser, that one.
Course the old “tomato can rocket”—punch a hole in bottom of used soup can, insert firecracker most of the way in. Place upside down in pan of water (maybe 1/2”), light fuse, launches can up in air maybe 20 feet. And splashes everyone around.
Great fun.
Also tennis ball cannon made from two cans fueled with lighter fluid.
Flaming tennis balls! Forgot about that one.
The underwear’s acceptable also.
They were used in (toy) cap guns from simple single shot models to the 'six' shooters which would advance the strip so a new, unfired 'cap' moved into position under the hammer of the toy pistol every time you cocked it, to the Mattell 'Tommy gun' which consumed massive quantities of caps, a roll at a time.
I really haven't seen much of them since my childhood in the 50s and the 60s, when they were very popular with kids because of the noise, smoke and smell your toy gun had when you used them.
Many toy guns made nearly as good a noise without them, but the effect was just not the same.
Hammering a roll of caps between two rocks or bricks could cause most or all of the little black powder charges on the roll to go off at once, with lots of smoke and noise. While not as dangerous as a 'good' firecracker, nor as loud, it was considered fun.
I had a few of those; some use a plastic ring with 5-8 little things of those caps. Others use the strips.
But I’ve never seen a repeater like that.
check out mythbusters, they totally busted that myth.
its almust impossible to get enough current to sufficiently heat it up enough to ignite, and even if you can get it to go, since the casing is heavier than the bullet, without anything containing it, the case is more dangerous than the bullet, and even that won’t do more than leave a bruise.
All right, you two need to get together and get your stories straight before posting. ;-)
they couldn’t do it with any wiring *normally* found in a fuse box. it was their “lets find out exactly what it would take to do it” and got ridiculous using very heavy wire with a constant current.
the force of the bullet was not, however, enough to cause serious injury.
Only a bruise? On your gonads? OWWWW!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.