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I made myself a crossbow one school holidays
We made scotch arrows, only using real arrows. Take the pile (point) off to leave basically a pencil-sharpenered wooden point, cut a notch behind the fletchings, bit of knotted string and off we go. From an elevated position in the park we were clearing the length a football pitch when as if by magic the groundskeeper appeared demanding to know where we'd hidden the bow.
Throwing arrows! Yeh we made them too with a stick or bit of bamboo and a bit of roof lead on the front to add weight and seeing how far we could chuck them on the park behind our houses. Reminds me I got a visit from the police because by some miracle I managed to hit an 'incomer ' friend on his eye socket. Total accident, but the 'incomer' family obviously didn't appreciate the local kids deadly games when he went home with a big cut and bruise next to his eye.🙄 I think the copper just told me to be more careful.
Reminds me with the knacker stretch.... We looked after each other! When one mate got the sheath knife in his foot another mate took a manky old plaster off a cut he had somewhere to put on the foot for him! All fixed 😂
Did youse put stones in snow balls too just for giggles? 😂
Me and a friend used to play a game in his dads garden.. we'd take turns with the air rifle, five pellets each or whatever and then swap, whilst the other one had a square of MDF or something which was a shield to avoid getting hit by said pellets.
Oh, and Meth-ball. Wed get a football or whatever, wrapt it tightly in whatever absorbant material we could find, drench it in meths and set it on fire.
Then kick it at each other. I don't recall there being any rules to that game other than trying not to get burned.
Snowballs - there was a pile of coke for the HEATING! in the corner of the playground (still on town gas until equivalent of P5) Lumps of that were put in the snowballs.
My primary school was some old Victorian thing with an open roofed toilet block in the middle of the playground (honestly I'm only 54!)
Anyway a few friends decided the fun thing would be to collect up empty crisp packets, take them in the toilets (big porcelain wall to pee against) and fill them with pee, fling them up over the walls shouting bombs away 😂😂😂
Cue a special assembly where they were all lined up and caned in front of the school. A proper whippy bamboo cane too. Ouch!
One of the apprentices in my year was off sick for a week then came back with an eye patch and some visible scratches on the face. Corneal abrasion apparently, could have lost the eye. Turns out he was screwing a bass box into his boot and using the screwdriver for extra leverage, when it slipped. *twice*. I'd like to believe the eye was the second time. But I'm probably wrong 🙂
I did the 'How hot is the fag lighter' in my folks car. Stunk the car out with burnt finger and flung the lighter. Mad panic to find said red hot lighter, then flung open all the doors whilst my mum was in the shop, so the car didn't stink of burnt flesh.
This is reminding me of loads of stupid things...
Chicken burns/scratches? I didn't do it but remember the craze maybe 1980 for scratching the back of your hand until the skin was scraped off and bled. What the **** was that all about?
Also mid '80s hyperventilating, then holding your breath and crouching down and a mate pressed on your chest and you passed out.
We made french arrows with explosive tips fabricated out of crushed Swan Vestas match heads. Filled a felt tip pen lid with the crushed match heads and then gently inserted a cut down match wrapped in the striking material from the side of the box. Attach to french arrow and launch. Fantastic!
Until my mate decided that it would be fun to launch into a mass of schoolboys leaving the local railway station. Christ knows what might have happened if it had hit someone.
My stepdad was brought up in Manchester during the Blitz. He used to collect the misfired bullets that he found.
His party trick was to remove the bullet from the cartridge and replace it with a bolt. He'd then place it upright inside the local public toilets in Salford? Hiding in the brick built cubicle he would reach over the top and drop a brick onto the bolt and BANG the thing would ricochet around the public toilet. Mental!
Later on in life he gained a PhD in chemistry and worked for a number of Blue Chip organisations.
He was always pyrotechnic mad and between us we blew up so much stuff in rural Essex in the mid seventies when sacks of fertiliser were easy to get, as was weedkiller.
Local to home were a number of WW2 airfields. One in particular had loads of ammunition in the ground that was brought to the surface whenever the place was ploughed. We must have collected hundreds of .5 and .303 rounds, many still intact.
It's possible for a 14 y.o. to pull the projectile out with care, empty the propellant and then put the cartridge into a vice. It's just as easy to hit the percussion cap with a nail and hammer.
How am I still alive? 😂
I'm now the union H&S rep too.
One of my university house mates (who may now be a professor) once got a little too curious as to what it would feel like to put his finger in the end of my stick blender. Having previously checked to see if he could use it to trim his beard. No alcohol was involved.
The cut to the end of his finger wasn’t too bad but unfortunately he had/has a habit of fainting if he sees blood. When he saw his finger he blacked out, smashed his face into the kitchen cabinets above the bench then fell backwards and cracked his head on the table behind him. Took longer for his face and concussion to recover than his finger did.
Can't believe nobody has mentioned filling crisp packets with Acetylene when learning oxy-accetylene welding as aprentices. Then sliding them beneath someone in the adjacent arc welder bay that was busy arc welding. Soon enough some spatter would land on the bag and ignite it.
Or filling a long drain pipe with a Oxy + A mix. Cling film or similar over the end. Same.
Instructors ran out the office and went apeship when it made the bang and blew stuff over.
Did youse put stones in snow balls too just for giggles? 😂
Yeah. But only for throwing them at pensioners.
His party trick was to remove the bullet from the cartridge and replace it with a bolt. He’d then place it upright inside the local public toilets in Salford? Hiding in the brick built cubicle he would reach over the top and drop a brick onto the bolt and BANG the thing would ricochet around the public toilet.
A similar thing is to take two bolts and a nut.
Screw the nut to the end of one bolt, then in the cavity you fill with black powder out a Hilti nailgun. You then screw the other bolt on and very carefully tighten
Then launch into the air and run for cover.
On a side note I once thought of a quicker way to get the gunpowder out a hilti cartridge. I decided sawing it with a hacksaw would be a quicker option. Needless to say that didnt end well and i got blown off my chair when it went off.
I'm going to remind you lot of this the next time we have a Sur-ron thread 😂
We used to play chucking darts at each other in the garden. The aim was not to hit each other, just to get it as close as possible into the ground and jump out of the way. This game stopped for good when my brother ended up with a dart stuck in his kneecap 🤣
Me and a friend used to play a game in his dads garden.. we’d take turns with the air rifle, five pellets each or whatever and then swap, whilst the other one had a square of MDF or something which was a shield to avoid getting hit by said pellets.
We did something similar with barley corns. One of you had the rifle. On Go you would break the rifle and try to load a barley corn and shoot your friend while they bolted as fast as possible. If you didn't hit them it was their turn to shoot.
I still have a scar from attempting to stab a tree with my first penknife in 1984. I'd only just got it after weeks of pestering my parents so had to hide my finger (wrapped in toilet paper) until it healed.
Chicken burns/scratches? I didn’t do it but remember the craze maybe 1980 for scratching the back of your hand until the skin was scraped off and bled. What the **** was that all about?
There was a thing in the 1980s where you took a match, blew it out and then stuck it perpendicular to the back of your hand. I still have a very faint scar mark.
Also mid ’80s hyperventilating, then holding your breath and crouching down and a mate pressed on your chest and you passed out.
There was a resurgence of that with the TikTok generation, wasn't there?
he had/has a habit of fainting if he sees blood.
Years back I worked with a guy like that, he once fainted because we'd been merely talking about blood. We were in an office as he was walking past the window a couple of minutes later and blacked out mid-stride. He went down like a dropped plank, vertical to horizontal like Del Boy through the bar only face first. We initially thought he was screwing about, until we saw how much blood comes out of a broken nose.
We used to play chucking darts at each other in the garden. The aim was not to hit each other, just to get it as close as possible into the ground and jump out of the way. This game stopped for good when my brother ended up with a dart stuck in his kneecap 🤣
I came up with the jolly wheeze of surreptitiously unscrewing the body from a dart, then throwing the harmless shaft & flight at someone to shit them up. I stopped doing it when someone retaliated one day, impaling a fully intact dart in my leg.
So many good memories here. A friend and I took out a neighbours greenhouse with a Diablo catapult and some orange peel! Those things were mad. Anyone else do the setting fire to a plastic bag and seeing who dare let it drip on them?
Dripping burning plastic bag? Yup! But iirc it was more about the weird noise it made as it dripped into water.
We were always making little fires (loved in the country) and stealing bread or sausages from home to cook on them.
Building sites were fun places to hang around We used to play chicken with a front loading skip. You close the skip door and would all stand with your toes over the line made my the lowered door. Someone would pull the retaining pin out causing the door to drop and the last person to jump back would win ! Obvs one winner got a trip to A&E .
The barley corn rifle thing reminds me...
Someone had a Gat gun, little air pistol thing. One day we decided that it would be great to sit someone on the roundabout with it, spin them round fast with their eyes closed,we'd all space ourselves around the roundabout and then they'd randomly count down and fire the gun and we'd have to duck.
They had very little power and it seems to be fun with it hitting jeans or jacket if anything, until someone got clipped on the neck. They started crying and we all panicked and thought we'd better stop 😂
Re. Sur-rons... this is all good healthy clean character building childhood fun, not illegal motorbiking on the roads taunting the police 🙄😉 oh... er... someone might have had a knackered old scrambler we took to the old shale heaps at one point 🤔😂
snip...and then put the cartridge into a vice.
I might know someone who did this with a .22 rimfire cartridge to get the bullet out. Clamping a cartridge rim in a vice didn't, on that occasion, ignite anything. The penny dropped part way through and it wasn't continued!
Many of the above^^
Those "throwing arrows" we used to call them Dutch Arrows. My dad sold rivets, so we had loads of long sharp points to embed into the end of the arrows (the rivet fitted nicely into the bamboo, with the long pointy part sticking out as an excellent point.) Not me, but my little brother had been making one and I heard him screaming. Looked out the window and he had one of the points right through his middle finger. Luckily in the build process rather than the throwing.
My fun trip was when my big bro and his mates found a car wheel in the woods. They decided it would be fun to roll it down a bank, off the bridge and into the stream below. I thought the most excitement would be had standing at the bridge and watch it hit the water... they rolled... wheel hit me full on and I joined the wheel in it's glorious flight off the bridge into the water 10 or so feet below. Just badly winded as far as I remember. But I still have nightmares about wheels rolling towards me... arrGH!
(note, we weren't of voting age!)
wheel hit me full on and I joined the wheel in it’s glorious flight off the bridge into the water 10 or so feet below.
That happened to a mate of mine.
Only it was in the middle lane of the M62 and it hit him full in the chest, on a motorcycle.
Only it was in the middle lane of the M62 and it hit him full in the chest, on a motorcycle.
They really shouldn't be allowed on motorcycles.
Ahh stupid things, I have a very long list.
One of my friends dad had an air pistol. His dad went out to we decided to play space invaders in the back garden. We moved left and right whilst my friend shot at us. - note - air pistols hurt, don't do this.
Climbing buildings regularly which I look at today and think WTF was I thinking.
Mainly though I spent a lot of time trying to blow myself up with gas cartridges and fires. I used to like making things go boom!
in the middle lane of the M62 and it hit him full in the chest, on a motorcycle.
I think I saw it "Caught on Dashcam"! Happens surprisingly frequently on there. Including this poor sod: .
Had an ex who was an A&E doc who told me how many Willy (not the EastEnders dog) related mishaps she has to deal with was Darwinesq.
I spent a couple of years at an agricultural college which had a working dairy farm. At least one ambulance was called because a student had looked at the milking apparatus and thought, 'Well hello!'.
All this makes my racing (bike and foot)round the scaffolding on building sites in the seventies sound very run of the mill
Christ, that YouTube link above leads to some scary moments
There were a couple of scrapyards near where I lived as a nipper. The foolish owners put up signs stating ‘Danger’ and ‘No Children Allowed’ and then wondered why they spent a ridiculous amount of time chasing and yelling at kids! Those signs basically read ‘Welcome’ and ‘Amazing stuff this way’ to me and my friends.
I fondly recall me and my brother making man traps in the local woods after watching First Blood. Some of them were genuinely dangerous and I have no idea how one of us or a random stranger didn’t get injured.
I think I saw it “Caught on Dashcam”! Happens surprisingly frequently on there.
TBF, I expect speed differential played a part. Ie, whilst no doubt a shock to the system, it's less of an impact being hit doing 70mph by an object doing 60mph in the same direction. He said he kept it upright but it knocked the wind out of him and he wobbled to the hard shoulder to recover.
At least one ambulance was called because a student had looked at the milking apparatus and thought, ‘Well hello!’.
Automatic, and it doesn't stop until it has 3 liters.
Death stars.
We used to liberate the glass fibre tiles from our swimming pool roof . Snap them into 4 pieces with really sharp , jagged edges. These were about 10in square roughly. These were then frisbee'd either more or less straight up and the prevailing wind would determine the downward trajectory and hapless victim. Or for more extra danger , launched at full speed across the school playing field at head height.
Sometimes shouting "incoming"as a warning, sometimes not. Cue loads of school kids diving for cover to avoid being decapitated by squares of fibre glass.
Warlingham county secondary school circa 1985.
Chalk bombing trains
Breaking into the porn print works
Air pistol duels
School fight with Riddles down
Nearly killing Mr Latham with a huge water bomb
Draining the central heating to ensure sledging time
Drill chuck roulette
Filling the lab sinks with gas
Alcoholic anonymous were asked to host a special assembly
Fun times