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Gat gun fights. Stupid idea.
I vaguely remember the horror on my mum's face when arriving home form my grandparents with cap guns and pen knives 🙂
Thanks Gran!
I wonder what my son will bring home from his grandparents!
Ah yes, got a couple of opinels, a tiny flick knife and loads of bangers on trips to France. The big ones were pretty underwhelming, the size 2 and possibly 3 were best bang for buck. 1's were good for throwing at each other.
So not likely then.
Depends on who your mates are. I'd say as likely as any other childhood stupidity. All dependant on when common sense kicks in.
Gat gun fights. Stupid idea.
They are so bad you can't even hit the ground when aiming at it from 10cm away
Never had a gat gun but I did have a .177 Diana (which was similar) and I got a .22 Webley tempest for my 12th birthday along with a tiny 20cc chainsaw so I could help my dad brash and bing pulp in the wood. Being brought up in darkest argyll (achnamara/dalavich) was brilliant as a kid - a feral childs dream with motorbikes and hills, fishing and forest roads to explore.
And we (mates & myself) made the Scottish news in the mid 80's as we blew up a barn on my mates farm with the aid of home made explosives, gas bottles and a 50 gallon oil drum............got a telling off for that one.
These are the cap bomb things I referred to, though the little paper ones were great too.
These things you loaded with a little paper cap torn off the roll.
You could make your own with 2 bolts and a nut as someone described above. Never thought to put match filings into them!
We did make what we called Dutch arrows though: length of cane with playing cards as rudimentary fletchings and a piece of string as a launching device. You could get some distance with that, easily over 100 yards
We made those too, only with real arrows.
Wooden close pegs were our arrows!
Clothes pegs.
Anyone graduate onto Estes rocket motors?
I graduated onto Estes rockets. I've a caseful of them somewhere. The engines are probably dead now, it was years ago.
I had one of those lone star Luger's but was was chrome, much prefer the more original look in that link.
My favourite was a 38 Special but it didn't have the normal cap roll instead you loaded a plastic ring - a bit like loading the real thing.
EDIT Quick Google and realised they were called Super Disks.
Those Super Disks were the death of the cap gun age.😢 The average kid got through a pack of them in minutes.
The paper rolls were great value in comparison... even allowing for the odd tinkering to resync the caps with the hammer, remember that?😁
Bought one for my kids. Caps don't sound as loud as when I were little. Is there been some EU directive on cap power which we can now break free from?
Oh, remember owning catapults?!
My mate and I got on the train to Sheerness from near Hoo in Kent.
He came home with a Black Widow but I didn't have enough money so bought a smaller, less powerful one.
Remember playing on Upnor beach in the afternoon firing acorns at each other as they were all over the top of the beach. I was definitely under gunned, I remember that!
Everytime I walk along there I still think of that day. That's the beauty of things like this, the reminiscing.
and I’m guessing that other posters on here didn’t either
😆 Want to amend that ?. Seems this mob were up to everything, from creating crossbows to blowing up barns or flinging high velocity potatoes at passing members of the public 😆
So many memories stirred up by this thread! I used to do many of the things mentioned, I had various cap guns, and I used to buy a bunch of the packets of caps, striking them with my thumbnail, putting several into a gun for a louder bank, smacking a whole packet with a stone for even bigger bangs!
If we had a firework that failed to go off, we’d empty the filling out and light it, making a ‘genie’, a quick ‘woomph’ and a cloud of smoke. Had those little plastic bombs as well, great fun putting several caps in then tossing them as high into the air as possible, to try to get louder bangs.
I used to play around with bits of brass tube, crimping one end and folding it over, packing with scraped off match heads, then clamping the crimped end in a vice, pushing a bit of wire into the tube and holding a match under the tube…
Did try filling a bit of tube with powdered match head, crimping both ends, then hitting it with a hammer - my ears rang for ages after!
Used to do the Dutch arrow thing with a mate, oddly enough on the small green just down the road from where I now live, great fun trying to get them to the other side of the green. We used to make little darts out of matches, carefully putting two vertical cuts into one end, folding tiny squares of paper into triangular ’fins’ and carefully pushing into the slots, then pushing a pin with the head cut off into the other end and winding fuse-wire around for extra weight. Then we’d amuse ourselves by lobbing them at each other in the classroom when the teacher wasn’t there. So much fun to be had… 😆
He came home with a Black Widow but I didn’t have enough money so bought a smaller, less powerful one.
I bought a Black Widow (claiming it was only for fishing purposes, obviously). Obviously went straight out and used it to ping stuff at my friends. Insta-confiscated, never saw it again. 🙁
I used to play around with bits of brass tube, crimping one end and folding it over, packing with scraped off match heads, then clamping the crimped end in a vice, pushing a bit of wire into the tube and holding a match under the tube…
I did the exact same thing, only I used a biro pen and while it didnt have the rocket effect i was hoping for, i swear it did at least stay upright for 0.001 of a second.
Anyone graduate onto Estes rocket motors?
I wonder how many people have googled 'Estes rockets' over the last few hours 😆 I know I did, then spent an hour watching home made rockets on youtube.
Anyone else have a .177 air rifle they fired BBQ skewers out of?
@dyna-ti I'm beginning to think it may be a Scottish thing. I found those nail gun charges in a building site once, just starter pistol ammo with a fancy strap. Didn't throw a load in a gorse fire (the we really did not start, we were dicks but not complete fannies), honestly.
Think it was King of Random (Rip) who did a how to rocket motor using common ingredients and a nutri bullet to mix them then stuffed them in plastic pipe .
@somafunk you were the inspiration for the flashback in Complicity and I claim my 5 quid.
I wonder how many people have googled ‘Estes rockets’ over the last few hours 😆 I know I did, then spent an hour watching home made rockets on youtube.
They were a proper giggle. Sadly it was in the days before multimedia phones, I do have some photos... somewhere.
I used to make cap bombs - fold a whole roll of paper caps lengthwise so they all split slightly, then wrap it around a 2p coin. Cover the whole thing in a layer of sellotape, then fling it at something. Makes a great bang, and I never did find the coin afterwards! Probably came close to killing myself/someone with it a few times.
A friend tried making one with 3 rolls once, it went off in his hands as he was wrapping it!
Thankfully without the tape to provide compression it just went "whoof" with a cloud of smoke, I'll never forget his stunned expression though haha
I also used to have a few small mousetrap type things, you put a single plastic cap in it then put it underneath something, waiting for someone to lift it and release the spring... My mother was not amused 😀
Loved my cap pistols. My favourite was a Walther P38 I bought from Zodiac, a toyshop on Salford precinct. Hours of fun patrolling the ginnel behind my nana's house in vigilante mode.
My ammo dealer was Olroyd's the newsagent. For some reason caps were secreted under the counter as if considered dark contraband. Each roll came in a tiny round cardboard "box." I think they were two pence each in 1976ish. One day I spunked all my pocket money to enjoy a gunpowder weekend!
I placed six rolls of caps on the pavement, took aim and dropped an 8lb Accrington brick onto them. BANG!!!! Jesus. My ears were whistling and popping for hours afterwards.
Such an emotive smell from fired caps. Like Playdoh, Vosene and the pick-ups on my Matchbox Powertrack racing cars.
I wonder how many people have googled ‘Estes rockets’ over the last few hours 😆 I know I did, then spent an hour watching home made rockets on youtube.
I had those they were great fun. One guy had the Saturn 5, took it for its first spin and it was incredible, right up until it blew into a copse never to be seen again.
I bought my daughters (8 and 11) a box each of the little snaps when we were on holiday - loads of the on the counter in Toymaster. They had no idea what they were and then had a brilliant 15mins throwing them around.
Something I'm trying to find is a Dennis the Menace style pea shooter - any ideas where one can be found?
I also used to have a few small mousetrap type things, you put a single plastic cap in it then put it underneath something, waiting for someone to lift it and release the spring…
Christ, I'd forgotten about those. Great fun under toilet sets.
Did anyone else make "deathwatch beetles"?
I have a vague memory of a cowboy outfit, plastic stetson, fake leather waistcoat, plastic spurs, and big flappy leg things like trousers with no arse in them, they had frills round the outside that matched the waistcoat, and the main bit, a holster with plastic bullets and a cap revolver that had round plastic cartridge things, bout 15 shots and needed to go get more of those...and a plastic sheriffs badge.
Parents told me to keep the noise down and I arrested them and the woman next door at gun point, got yelled at and don't remember ever using any of it after that, toys last about 3 days max, once you stop getting a reaction you want something more scary, just get him a proper weapon and get it done with, that's what kids really want.
Apart from my O/U shotguns, Anshutz XIV .22lr carbine and lots of high end air powered stuff, my favourite gun was one I bought in Perranporth (Hill's gift shop IIRC) in 1979.
It was called Sekiden Automatic. I found a pic':
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Squeezing the trigger compressed the main spring then tripped the sear to fire a plastic ball. As fast as you could pull the trigger - it fired. Semi-auto even. Bruised a few mates with it!
had the luger, loved it though my favourite was a machine pistol with silemver and removable shoulder rest that came in a natty cardboard brief case...I, too date, have not murdered anyone.
black widows were great but we found a roll of lead flashing on a garage roof and used my mates mums saucepan to melt it and the little hole on pair of pliers as a mould. that was a bit dodgy test firing it against a garage door and it went clean through!
we reverted to bendy sticks and bits of clay on the end after that, pugging as we referred to it in Hampshire!