Dangerous Things You Did as a Kid (Age 0 - 99 Years Old!)

thank god you were a kid.......never get a chance like that.

Oh, around the house it was easy.

Insert igniters and tape 'em, connect 'gator clips, connect the clips to the cut off end (female) of dad's extension cord, and plug it in! WHOOSH! (I forgot about that... caught a little bit of heck for that, too)

Yeesh. Did I/we really do all this stupid stuff? Sure was fun, though.

We didn't even bother with rockets, we just glued fins to the engines themselves. Glue a piece of plastic straw to the engine and use a long piece of 8 Ga. wire to guide it up. Of course it became aerodynamically unstable in a few seconds and wound up in a neighboors gutter. If was fall and the gutter was full of dry leaves, luckily the owner was home and had a hose outside. As a 10 year old I never heard so much cursing in my life!

My contribution in the amateur firearms category involved a die-cast toy replica of a muzzle loader with a flash pan that used a single "Greenee stick-um cap" to project the tiny red plastic bullet.

"Too weak" I thought. So my friend and I extracted the business part of the caps until we had enough to fill the barrel of this pistol. We found that using the eraser end of a pencil did not work as a ramrod, as the metal band for the eraser caused sparks and ignition of the charge, sending the pencil through the drywalled ceiling of my pal's bedroom.

Once we got the ramrod sorted out, we shaved a lead fishing sinker to fit, and made our way to the small pond below my friends house. Here, you fire it, he said. "Nope" I said, not happening. So we wound up lashing the "gun" to a small sapling and attaching a string to the trigger.

A pull on the string brought a loud bang, several tiny splashes across the entire surface of the pond, and the slow descent of the top of the sapling caused by the missing section of tree/pistol.

When in doubt, remote control!

Tennis ball cannon.

1/4 thick Al tube about 24 inches long. Modeled after 3 16 oz. beer cans duct taped together. It had a perforated plate about 6 inches from the bottom. This is the combustion chamber. It has a 1/4" hole drilled in the side at the bottom for introduction of a few drops of gas and a squirt of welding O₂. It has one of those Coleman lantern flint strickers mounted on the side that can be positioned over the hole for ignition. Sounds like a shotgun. It got us kicked out of a campground and almost arrested. It could put a tennis ball out of sight.

Push ball down tube till it gets to plate. Insert gas and O₂ flick the striker and look out. YOu had to keep the muzzle above your head when you fired it or you'd be deaf for a couple of hours.

This explains the lawn dart with the tennis ball stuck on the point I found in my backyard!

They had just introduced a slimmer aluminum Coors can that was a perfect, slide slowly down the tube, fit. We'd fill them about 1/4 full of water and shoot them out of the thing. The can would collapse.

We even put ice cubes in it and shot them out. Crushed ice came out when we fired it off. Really.

Ah yesssss, those were the days.

Put a 12' parachute on the back of a bicycle and rode full speed down a hill and pulled the chute out. Instant stop, for the bicycle only that is. I slid down the hill for some distance and left quite a skin trail along the way.

Then there were the bottle rocket wars, always fun.

And least I forget, the go-cart that had no brakes and a direct drive fan belt with no clucth and no way to kill the engine.

Many of my friends parents often commented "So I see you're still alive!"

L

Ah yes, the bottle rocket wars! The last time that I did that was back in college at my roomates' friend farm. It was Independence Day and my roomies' friend Bob had about 60 or 70 friends over for the beer & food bash. The bottle rockets were broken out about 10 pm when it was totally dark. I swear there must have been well over 10,000 bottle rockets parcelled out to everyone. No teams whatsoever.....free for all with each man for himself! the battle went onfor no less than 3 hours. I can attest that getting get square in the chest or back with a bottle rocket does indeed hurt and will even leave a good size dent in your skin and muscle! Good thing I was drinking good 'ole Dr. Jack Daniels straight that night!! LOL Surprized that we didn't kill someone or knock-out someones' eye!!!! Those were the days.........

When i was working in a pharmaceutical company the people in the warehouse would wrap a piece of dry ice up in paper and place it on the floor behind you as the ice melted the pressure inside the wrapping would explode with a loud bang. But if you really want to see and hear a bang the best thing is a acetylene bomb made from a length of water pipe and put down a drain. It will blow off a few manhole covers.

Ah yes, my young bomber days. I used to take the large cartridge fuses with the replacable element and the screw on brass caps; take them apart; fill them with gun powder; attach wires to the end caps and detonate them with a long extension cord and ignition battery. The first one I made, put shrapnel through 1/2 plywood in the basement of my house. The next one I tried was burried in the ground. That one blew a hole about 3' dia and we could hear police sirens in the distance and getting louder. Another was the cherry bomb in the mail box. Not the home boxes, but the ones on a street corner that read U.S. Postal Service. All this happened a very long time ago when I was around 12. If someone did this today, they would be facing serious time in jail.

Wow! You did some pretty dangerous things. Are you speaking from the grave? I used to take track torpedoes from the cabooses, wrap the lead straps around a paver, throw it up in the air and when it came down, it would explode throwing pieces of stone all around. We used to walk through single track tunnels on the New York Central line just after a train had passed and hoped another train wasn't far behind. We also used to hitch rides on our bikes from the back of busses and trolleys. I'm 75 now so I guess I was smart enough to survive.

For those who never heard of track torpedoes, it was a sensitive explosive device that was about 4"x1"x2" that lead straps extending out each side. You would place them on the track rail, using the lead straps to hold it in place. It was used as a signaling device between the locomotive and the rear of the train. When the train backed over the torpedo, it would explode and signal the engineer to stop. After two way radios were introduced, track torpedoes disappeared.

You do know the old joke about the most common last words of us hillbillies? "Hey Bubba, watch this".

...in Maine they say..."Here, hold my beer, and watch this!"

Yep! I understand that once you get NW of Lewiston, they're just hillbillies with really funny drawls.

I saw one about that size walking across the road the other day.

Soaking our hands in lighter fluid, lighting them and waving them in front of people's windows at night.

<splarf>...damn there's snot on the keyboard now... hmmm I'll tell mrs Cat it's Guacamole
Del

I chuckled to my self as I read that. Remembering the smell of burning all of the hair off my arms, doing that exact thing

Dry Ice Bombs are fun. Two liter bottle, dry ice and duck tape...we tried putting one in a river in the deep water next to a dam, had to tie rocks to it so it would sink. Didn't get any fish floating like we hoped but it made the dam shiver and a 4 meter circle of water dance and stipple like those egg-crate foams.

When dropped in shallower water (less than 1 meter) it shot water up over the trees and you could see the bottom before the water collapsed back in...still no fish floating.

The last one we threw in the woods next to a friends house never went off...for about an hour. We were back home across the river and thought we heard a cannon.

Also, riding a go-cart that was missing an engine, wheels, and rollcage pulled behind a farm tractor. It was fairly stable till the kids riding on the outside jumped off, then it would flip and drag whoever was brave stupid enough to sit in the seat.

Drew

used to make home made explosives, nearly killed my self several times.

made them from common household things, and no i will not publish them here

you never know who is watching,

anyway theres a lot of sites now you go to i am told

Someone once said that you looked like an IRA bomber. Could there be any truth to that??????

I tried to make nitroglycerine during my mad scientist days, but couldn't get it to work. Hmm, I wonder what I did wrong.

Never tried nitro, but I make mercury fulminate for a high school science project.

SPLARF! You'll have to go try again, I guess...

Does anyone remember when you could just go get dynamite at the hardware store? I do remember my dad wanting to blow out a stump in the backyard...mom wouldn't let him do it, yhough, so we had to go back and return the TNT.

Lawn darts, stainless steel play equipment, with concrete underneath, no helmets for us when we rode our bikes! In fact, I don't remember any safety gear at all for anything...

I didn't do anything stupid as a kid...I was a scared little kid...waited 'til adulthood to do dangerous stunts!

What about marrying Garth? That should count.

didn't boil it long enough...it's all about concentration...or so I've been told

I discovered that an oil furnace ignition transformer:

• Has 10,000 Volts on the secondary.
• Is midpoint grounded, meaning the metal case is grounded to the secondary winding halfway between the ends.

Using these important details, I discovered:

• That a pencil conducts 5000 volts right up to and including the eraser holder.
• That a concrete garage floor conducts 5000 volts.
• That shoes are not a good dielectric at that level.
• That 5000 volts are painful (even at very low amperage).

One comes to mind straight away but there were many others.

I had a 50cc Honda motorbike and was not allowed to have it. It would be another 2 years before I could ride one legally. It was hidden so dad would not find out. We were a weird mob and anything that was not nailed down was taken for a ride.

To stop this from happening, I disconnected the brakes of the bike at nights. Sure enough, Heinz, a good friend really, pinched it one day. He pushed it away from our house and started it up a distance away. My brothers and I still heard the noise when he started it up and he took off with it. Those 4 stroke Honda's could make quiet a ruckus, especially with the muffler disconnected as well.

The street went straight for about 600m and then hit the main road T section. That is were he must have noticed that the brakes were not something to rely on. On the other side of the exit was a 2m high hedge. He must have reached 60 kmh by that stage. We could still hear the bike revving for a while and the sudden stop of the engine indicated to us that my theft mechanism had worked.

I collected the bike and the thief was nowhere to be seen. The next day, at school, I saw a rather scratched and bruised Heinz. No damage done really but it could have been bloody deadly if he would have hit a car or something else. "I didn't do it" was no excuse, he had the marks to prove it. We all pissed our selves laughing.

Another day another story, Ky.

Did alot of foolish or dangerous things as a kid, I'll refrain from any explosives......don't won't to think this site is made up of "Ted Kaczynsky's"

One memory comes to mind, we had a large wooden slate barrel, where my twin sister and I would roll down the hill with us inside it. Did this a number times until the hoops started to come off ....at the middle of the hill, our vehicle of disappeared from around us. but we were still tumbling. We had laugh for about 15 minutes straight.

We then move up to tractor tires, we crawled inside but we had to brace ourselves against each other feet on the other persons shoulders and pushed and we weren't old enough to fully do this, so we told our older brother (about 4 years older) about it that we needed one more person....and to our surprise he thought it'll be fun too.

We did this about 2-3 times and was a blast. Then on the next time, I started to look at the scenery. I looked and my sister and laughed. She looked and me and started to laugh too......needless to say she laughed so hard she lost her grip and that caused the rest of us to do also......

I was the only one hurt with a sprained or a pulled neck muscle.....what ever it was I could not move my neck for a week, missed (2) little league games which ticked me off. but it that was one of the most fun and exhilarating rides I remember as a kid.

p911

Playing "chicken" with Jarts or Roman Candles, at 20 paces in the back yard.

Sodium metal and a water hose was always good for a bang.

Ice skiing by grabbing ahold of anyones car bumper wearing sneakers - some of their expressions were priceless.

There are countless others involving electricity, some of which I can still taste.

I do remember being told (a LOT!) not to tough empty light sockets, or stick things in electrical outlets...I did both...I was always asking "why?", and not getting adequate information.

I used to go ice sledding...in high school (does that count?) we would get a block of ice, a piece of cardboard, and all go up to the local cemetery, which was up on a steep hill. You put the ice down, cover the top with the cardboard, sit down, and vroom! down the hill, trying to steer clear of the statues and monuments. Got caught a few times by the cops, but never did any damage, so we were sent home.

My sister (6 years older) would sit me down on her skateboard at the top of Wilbur, a steep street next to our house, and sit behind me. Then she would push off, getting off the skateboard just as it started rocketing down the hill, me hanging on for dear life. The only way to stop was to crash, and the only things to crash into were a cinderblock wall, trees or cars.

It truly IS amazing that I never even broke a bone!

It seems that we as older people, grew up doing dumb stunts like these and survived. Some didn't survive so well; kids losing fingers, eyes, etc stand as testaments to these risky activities. Kids today don't seem to get involved in the same wacky, dangerous, dumb activities that we used to. Today's kids have a new set of things that challenges their survival and that is drugs and alcohol, something we never got involved with in our early days. I think overall, we old timers had it better than todays youth. We may have been mad bombers, but we also had a sense of morals. We didn't take guns to school and kill other students. We didn't kill our families. We were much more innocent than today's youth. I'm sure glad I grew up in the period of time I did. I've tried to bring my kids up with my moral values and if they want to fool around with amateur bomb making, it's ok with me, but I'll be there to watch over them and keep them on a straight path. My kids are all grown now, so I have my grandkids to "educate". Fortunately for them and me, we live within a stones throw of each other.

I'm just a few years younger than you, and agree with you. We did a lot of stupid things, but they were stupid in that we could get hurt. Once we survived, we were OK. No drugs that are OK once or twice, but you're in trouble sooner or later, no guns except for plinking in the woods or along the river.

We were not quite dumb enough for car surfing and some of the other "jackass" type stunts.

GA to you Ronseto!

Each child has its rights to have its own injuries on learning.

Not crippling (sometimes parents or others should watch), but as part of learning extremely useful.

Who did not try 220V with bare fingers knowing that the touch should be short and never a grasp?

Who did not try the long list of explosives and the school books did not have a list of safety requirements for the specific stuff?

RHABE

This is all a learning experience. What I believe has changed is when we got into trouble or hurt, it was our own fault and paid the consequences and learned by it.

Such as common sense and owning up to you mistakes.

Seems today, when someone gets hurt because of their stupidity of doing stupid things, it's someone else's fault and that someone else should have to pay for their own foolishness or stupid acts.

No one learns.

p911

All of mine were bb gun fights, gasoline and lots of explosives, some really good ones. One of the stupider things we did as kids, was to crimp aluminum pipe about 2 feet long, fill with gasoline light open end and fling it, like flame throwers. More than once we got to use the stop, drop and roll technique! It is amazing that any of us are still alive and not crippled. Now I'm afraid to jump off the tailgate of my pickup, (while stopped), for fear of throwing out my back or my knee. How times change!

One we used to do was fill a water pistol with lighter fluid and hold as match in front of the muzzle as we pumped. it would throw a flame 20 ft. We didn't direct it toward anyone.

we did that with a bug sprayer, that was the flame thrower when we played with our little toy green and grey soldiers.........wiped up a whole battlion.

I was told to kill the rats around the corn crib by putting a small chunk of calcium carbide down each hole and running some water into them. This releases acetylene gas which is an anesthetic. The rats just drift off to sleep and then asphyxiate.

This was not nearly exciting enough for my ten year old self so I tried pitching a lit kitchen match down one of the holes thusly treated.

The effect was instantly gratifying, did you know that rat holes connect under ground?

Did you know that high speed dirt and flames hurt when they hit you?

It did big work on the rats by the way.

I would pay to see that!

A flaming rat Calliope!

Yea, well I hope you wouldn't pay much! The concert didn't last long at all.

We used the carbide to fuel carbide cannons that were supposed to keep the birds away from the grain fields. The only problem was, the birds would get used to the noise after a while and then they would require retraining. I wore out a Remington 870 "training birds" to be afraid of gunfire. I used to get the 12 ga shells at Western Auto when they ran their "Sizzler Sale". I don't know what cheap outfit made those shotgun shells for WA but they weren't worth more than about a dollar & ninety seven cents a box.

Have FUN!
TT3

I used to make landmines for flies. Nitrogen Ti-iodide I think is what its called, made from ammonia and iodine scales.

As long as its still wet with ammonia its safe, as soon as it dries, even a hair drawn across it causes it to change violently into iodine gas. No burning though....it does not get hot.

We use to put tiny amounts on our school desks, it would dry and a fly would think it was food and get its head blown off.

Or I put some on my bedroom lightswitch, my Mother comes into the room, switches the light on, big bang and she has a stain that looks like she smokes a 100 cigs a day!! The wall also had a big brown stain.

Mother goes apeshit.

I tell her to wait an hour and the stain will be gone... it was!!!

Thanks Andy. I didn't know that one.

Never make large amounts, we maxed out at about a teaspoon full, it started to get dangerous well before then.....

It was good that our pocket money "restricted" how much we could buy/make.....

Hi,

I did make too much of this (near 1 ccm) and it exploded still wet.

One ear was damaged in the 2.5 to 3 KHz band permanently, both were ringing for 3 days. Fortunately I carried the stuff on a piece of paper carefully with a stretched out arm.

I did make nitro-cellulosis that failed once being too warm and starting boiling and foaming.

I tried electrolysis by 220V AC in a salt solution and got a wonderful blue arc.

First time in the mountains we built a dam to withhold some 3 cubic meter of water and suddenly release this to the local road.

Shooting apples and light-bulbs with pebbles from nearby.

Climbing birch-trees until the smaller ones bent and broke with us some 3 to 4 m high plunging into sand and dust.

RHABE

Hi RHabe,

you wrote:-

I did make too much of this (near 1 ccm) and it exploded still wet.

WOW, that much could have REALLY done some damage if you had had it nearer to your body!!!!

I must admit that we treated it as being not dangerous if still wet, look how wrong/lucky we were!!!!

Have you any idea what caused it to explode? (Paper folding under the weight may have been enough....!)

Hi,

no idea what caused the explosion,

the JN3 was on a sheet of paper (intended to be used as a filter) so that the water was sucked out of the wet explosive.

Nothing done except careful transportation by one hand.

Suddenly a 10cm hole in the paper, a violet cloud of vaporised iodine and my ears ringing.

No idea about catalysts to stabilise or destabilise the stuff.

Similarly unstable copper-acetylide is used by tons as catalyst.

Don't try silver-acetylide - this is worse than hell and worse than nitro-glycerin.

Don't try any nitriding of the lighter than glycerin alcohols - very likely to blow up during nitriding.

As a rocket fuel we had kitchen-paper and similar cellulosic stuff impregnated with potassium chlorate and sometimes nitrate. There was a poor guy in our class at school that imitated this, kept this stuff in his trousers pockets and inadvertently or unknowing had a match in contact with this.

Matches at that time contained some red phosphorous and could be lit without difficulty at contact with this impregnated towels.

This he experienced at his way to school - arriving one week late, having burnt more than his trousers. Nothing serious remained - loosely stuffed will burn not too violently.

RHABE

Made some NI3 once. Must have made too much because after filtration I dropped another filter paper on top of the filtrate and that was enough to set it off, at about my waist level. Quite an interesting stain for a while.

A friend did an apprenticeship as a boiler maker. The shop had a small wharf onto Sydney Harbor. They used to knock the top off oxygen bottles and send them, torpedo like, across the harbor.

Their other favorite was, when welding on grid flooring, to go to the floor below another welder and weld the steel "horse shoes" of his boot heels onto the grid. Many warships wound up with empty boot souvenirs in the engine room.

Another friend apprenticed as an electrician. They used to charge a capacitor then throw it to someone. He would automatically catch it, with a satisfying result.

My own consisted of numerous attempts at rockets.

Favorite fuel was potassium permangenate and aluminium powder, although zinc dust and sulfur was also good.

Lit one with a match and it went up with my hand still under it. Luckily it lifted too fast to expose the hand for long enough to get more than a minor singe.

Tree climbing and transferring from tree to tree, often bending the branch enough to get to the next tree, also with similar bendy branches. Never fell out, but did have a few branches break under me.

I used to do 'tree bending' .
There was a plantation of Silver Birch and you could climb up to the top of one and swing out. If you judged the size of the tree just right it would start to bend, the more it bent the further out you swung and the more leverage so it bent further, until, you ended up gently placed back on the ground.
Of course if it was in a cartoon you'd hand the tip of the tree to your little brother who'd be catapulted over the horizon.

Del

This seems somehow related to your bow making!

That reminds me, I knew a kid that told of using a tractor to pull the tip of a tree down to launch kids into a pond. One day, they were about to start the tractor when some kid appeared above them, at first just a tiny speck in the sky, screaming in a British accent "LOOK OUT". They left without looking back, but did hear a splash.

The filthy little buggers deserved it!

How about changing your name to "Unrepentant"? (It would fit me better too!!)

It fits better!!

its nitrogen tri-iodide.

Its stable as long as its wet. used alcohol to keep it wet and also allow it to dry quickly.

Used to make it and swing it around in a handkerchief on about a 6 foot string till it dried out and blew up. it would knock you down. The handkerchief is what we used to filter it out of the mixed ammonia, iodine and alcohol.

Also once put it in a glass baby food jar and left it on a wood fence post. Drove the post completely into the ground. Luckily no one got hurt by flying glass.

Many others That my mom never learned about.

Used to make hand grenades by pulling powder out of a case of 22lr shells and putting them in previously made wood fired clay cup and then covering the hole with more clay and threw them in a fire. got in real trouble once for a fire that burned 40 acres. that was the last time.

We tried making our own fireworks from existing fireworks ... ... in my friend's bedroom. We would cut open various fireworks and even shotgun shells for the powder and then re-pack it into a new package. One time some of the powder flared up from static or some other random spark - fortunately no one was hurt. The sad thing was that after a little break we were right back at it. We didn't even move out of the house to the garage or shed.

I am 61, and there are things I still will not speak of.

But, We lived in NYC. One street was a 10 lane road that ran through an area we lived in. The road was divided into a main road, and a service road, three lanes in the main, two lanes plus parking in the service road. There was an intersection every block. We would tow disabled cars with tow straps. The fun was weaving in and out of the main and service roads as fast as we could.

There was a steeply curved on ramp to an expressway. There was this Vauxall Victor. The game was to see how fast we could make that curve. The four of us could just roll it back onto it's tires when it slid into the curb too hard.

There was an apartment complex that had these lovely sidewalks that connected the six buildings together. The fun part was to drive the hillman Minx up and down the walkways with the horn blasting in the middle of the night.

The parking lot of the all night dinner we frequented had an ell shaped parking lot. If your tactics were good, you would back up into the short end of the lot, slam it into first(or drive) and stand on the gas as the car would slowly come to a stop, and then go forward, and then drive around the corner of the lot and as far down the block as possible with the tire screaming for mercy On a damp windless night, the smoke was there for 3-4 min.

Drag racing in the streets? ANY PLACE, ANY TIME! Once fish tailed into a light pole mounted on the center island, and left tire tracks 3 ft up the pole. ( bent a rim, a 12 bolt Pontiac axle, destroyed the quarter panel, and ripped out a hard to find gas tank from a 57 Ford) We were ahead of the Nova until the pole.

In the 60s NYC police cars were full sized Plymouth Furys with slant six motors. Pursuit was not their strong point. At this particular time my car was exploring the economy of running without the added restrictions of exhaust pipes. We were cruising on the above mentioned 10 lane road (Queens Blvd) well ahead of us is a police car doing an unacceptable 25-30 MPH. One just could not drive that slow with open headers. So we put the clutch down and turned off the engine, coasting up past the police car. Stuck it in second, hit the starter, then the throttle, and then the clutch and just roared away from them. A few days later, I was parked in the service station I worked in when the same police car drove in and wanted to know WHO OWNS THIS CAR? I fessed up to owning the car, but blamed the incident on "my friend Moon , that used the car that night"

If this is still active in a few days, I'll send more. Why am I still alive?

Vauxhall Victor, Hillman Minx, I never knew they exported them to the USA!!! Or were there US built cars using the same names as the UK?

I had a friend who bought a good secondhand so called "Clutchless", proper name a "Manumatic", Hillman Minx. Normal gearbox, automatic clutch.

But the gear change linkage was a bit worn and you did not always get the gear you wanted.

He was "roaring" / purring? past me, trying to show off. Got to about 30MPH and accidentally selected reverse!!!!

The automatic clutch system worked fine, never stalled the motor (as you would expect) and violently slowed the car down.

(By the way, it was before all cars had safety belts, this car had none....)

He was plastered onto the steering wheel AND his right foot was forced onto the gas pedal and was giving the motor full power.....

The car ground to a halt and then shot immediately backwards, he travelled maybe 75 yards backwards before he managed to get off the accelerator and stop.

Was he pissed and my girlfriend of the time almost peed herself from laughing, which rather ruined his "racing image" that he was trying to promote!!!!

Luckily nothing was coming up behind!!!! Except a small river, which he did not quite make it to.... sadly.....

Back in the sixties, and before it seems we would let anything off of the boats. I remember working on Austin Princess, and America. DKWs. A Jensen Healy. At one time I owned a Hillman Husky, and had plans of putting a Ford 289 or 302 in it.

I'm on a roll now. Got the ole neuron woke up and remembering.

The most dangerous thing I ever did was get married. I knew my first marriage was a mistake when I woke up one morning to find her crying and cussing 'cause she couldn't figure out how to load my shotgun.

But, when I was a callow youth, I lived near the foot of the Blue Ridge. There was a nice three lane road, with good shoulders which must make maybe a dozen switchbacks. There's only one official road leading onto the whole length, so I would go up at night and see how fast I could drive it, using all five lanes (shoulders too). I got to where I could average around 100 mph, which wasn't too bad considering the speed limit runs either 25 or 35. Even today, motorbike guys occassionally get the road closed off and do rallies up (I think Hooker rides this). It was more fun when it wasn't closed off; you had to always keep watch two turns ahead of wherever you were. If a you saw a car coming, you could brake well enough going uphill to save yourself, though it must have scared the daylights out of some drivers who were suddenly passed on the wrong side!

And, when I was a teenager, I had an old flat head Ford that would fly. The trouble was the brakes were pretty rotted and I was pretty broke. So, I would blow a wheel cylinder and have no brakes, and no money to buy a new one. I drove up and down mountains pretty regularly with no brakes at all. The only time I got really convinced that might be dangerous was when I went out onto an interstate highway. They were brand new then, and it only went a few miles, so I had to stop at the end. Whew!

Well, this sounds a little tame compared to some of these posts. In my early teen years we wanted booze. There were some big old frat houses in the town where I grew up and they'd have parties with lots of it. We'd stick a cherry bomb fuse into a lit cigarett and hide it near an open window of of the frat house. We'd plan it so that when the bomb went off and the guys came tearing out on the bomb side to see what was up we'd slip in on the opposite side and grab a bottle of whatever was closest and run. Then we''d drink to much puke and sneak on home. What fun.

Have you ever puked stuff that glowed in the dark?

I once went to a conference relating to to fire equipment. There was a sales person that was selling these "new" light sticks. He offered a round of drinks at the bar. In there he secretly opened one up, took some in his mouth and then sipped his drink. Spit it all out on the bar where the light stick liquid did glow on the bar. Good joke right? Not to the bartender and his friends. Big fight. Bartenders should be required to have a sense of humor.

Lit up a 3 V bulb using 240 V Mains... :-)

Many things. Most putting my self in to risk - getting killed, seriously hurt, being caught red-handed, and so on. Escaped death in fraction. At age six tried to heat water by directly passing 230V ac; at age 13 Crossed railway track when train was moving at more than 40KM/Hr speed (from bellow the train); With the help of a small air tube swam 1-5 KM in to deep waters and rushed back as air started to leak without learning how to swim; Fire crackers blasted in hand while experimenting; many more; every time I escaped fatal death on many occasions; Entered neighbours house to see her without cloths but could escape from being caught. Now I am feeling how risky it was. I think some one should carefully compile and make a book. I can share all my experience but not on public forum to prevent some one hurt.

I think some one should carefully compile and make a book.

I believe they already have: The Darwin Awards

Nope, Jaxy. The Darwins can't be awarded to survivors. Only those who REMOVE their genes from the pool. And I know I haven't. My sons have tried their own stuff. Pity THEM, two of them have a total of 7 kids, and each has one boy. But some of the girls can curl your hair, already, and none is over 8 years old.

No Darwins for me. At least not yet. But I'm still trying.

Now there is some more funny stuff. Thanks Jaxy.

I wonder how many of those guys are CR4 members?

Yes, you are right. I did know that. But I don't think any of us WANTED to be in the Darwin's. That would have just been an unfortunate byproduct of our curiosity. Well, mine, at least. I was always saying "I wonder what would happen if ...". And then finding out. Often, the hard way. Now that I think back on it, it usually was what my parents said would probably happen. Amazing how smart they were. Wonder why they didn't try harder to stop me? Oh, well, I probably DON'T want to know the answer to that one.

I worked at a bowling alley years ago

& had purchased several large illegal 1/4 sticks

I convinced the guy in the pro shop to drill an old ball & glue the 1/4 stick in

we put it in a 5gallon plastic bucket thinking it would contain the blast

luckily we hid behind a large transformer when we lit the fuse

we found plastic schrapnel 2 blocks away

my ears rang for the rest of the day...

yeah, were is Trans when you need him

I also underestimated the power of an M80.

A Friend of mine walked out of his house with one and I remarked that the fuses were waterproof, pointing to his brand new 55 gal drum/rainwater reservoir.

He at first rejected the idea, claiming his Mom would kill him if it was damaged.I convinced him that the water would absorb the explosion. We wrapped a length of solder on the cracker to make it sink, lit the fuse and tossed it in.

There was a loud thud like a giant belch as the side of the drum split. For a moment the water held back like the red sea before cascading down the drive.

"Cheap drum" I said, exiting the scene as his Mom flew out of the door like a woman possessed.

Part 2

I had rained about 6" in the afternoon & the parking lot at the apartment complex I lived in was covered in about a foot of water.

we were throwing the 1/4 sticks [4" x 3/4"] off the balconey

as the day progressed [there may have been some beer] my room mate got more casual, & started throwing them out the sliding glass door, from his bed

He finally missed & bounced one off the door frame

melted a 6" hole in the shag carpet, the downstairs neighbors were pretty sure it was the end of the world, everyone's ears were ringing for the rest of the evening, my room mate lost part of his hearing too

Riding around the streets of NYC in an old 4wd truck. Dropping lit M80s through the hole in the floor for the transfer case shifter. You know it was inevitable to miss the hole. God looks out for fools and drunks.

My ears are still ringing, I suspect they will stop when I do.