The things kids do........

Model rockets with the nose cones filled with BP and glued down - parachute ejecter charge goes off - Boooom!

Mortar that shot the old steel torpedo top brake fluid cans. (It was impressive)

Various other things that were filled with BP and went BOOM.
 
Powder, ammunition and even fireworks were unavailable to us kids.

We used match heads instead.
We'd buy a box of matches for a dime, cut the heads off hen stuff them into empty Crossman CO2 cartridges.

We made a bazooka out of an old stilt ( hollow aluminum pole) and used the foot rest as a handle.
I'd rest it on my shoulder while someone stuffed the CO2 "rocket" in the back and lit it.
@ 20 feet or so, it would go through both side of a metal trash can & it would bury itself abut half way into a redwood picnic table.

One day we decided to cut costs and used the green seltzer bottle CO@ cartridges instead of the Crossman ones.
Bad idea.
They blew apart.
The first one we tried split the aluminum stilt about three feet and mushroomed it all out like you see in the cartoons.

We quit doing it when one of the guys got the bright idea to make a pipe bomb.
It went off on him while he was packing the match heads into it.
Luckily, he had just started and all it did was burn him badly.
 
Revamped post, apologies to any offended previously!

Yep. I grew up in a rough neighborhood in a big MidWest city during the turbulent 1960's.. Lots of "issues" on the streets. This meant a lot of fighting, just to get home from school. So I fiddled with various gun and ammo parts to make a primitive zip gun, .22 short or bird shot cal. Old car radio antennas fit a .22 shell inside the lowest part of the telescoping antenna. (the shapes and sizes of aerials changed later). wood grip. Firing mechanism was a sleeve that fit over the "chamber" and powered by thick rubber bands or gum rubber from old inner-tubes or wrist rockets. Pull the sleeve back, point and let fly. It worked, thankfully never had to prove it in combat. Just the sight of it put potential adversaries to flight, much to my satisfaction. :D Had I thought more about it, I could have rigged a double or triple barrels..
Of course the above is pure fictive writing for entertainment. I, like all others here, am strictly law-abiding- would never consider breaking the law!
:eek:
 
When I was 10 or 12, "some kids I knew" took a freon horn bottle and filled it with match heads, sulphur, saltpeter and magnesium. They used a real fuse, and fortunately had about 4" hanging out of it. When lit, it created a flame about 3' across and 6' long. Really cool but it almost started a fire.

No improvised guns, but later we did discover that you can dramatically increase the flight time of a bottle rocket by firing it from a piece of antenna mast (a pipe about 6' by a little over 1"). Be sure to air the mast out between launches or eventually the rockets will fail from lack of oxygen. If you angle it right they'll go bang several houses away. If you're really lucky, you get to watch a neighbor come out of his house and look all around. I have no idea how we didn't get caught.
 
Someone I knew used D-cell rocket engines stabilized with a stick or sometimes a straw, with a marble+shotgun primer on the front .... fired from a cardboard tube ...... called it his RPT (rocket propelled thing) ....
 
We made matchlock muskets,,,

Using a piece of pipe,,,
A pipe cap with a fuse-sized hole drilled into it,,,
Black Cat or better yet TNT firecrackers as a propellent.

Stuff a marble with a cloth patch down the pipe,,,
Light the fuse with a punk held in our teeth,,,
Try to hold on target while the fuse burnt.

I dunno how we survived our unsafe childhood,,,
But my friends and I kept all of our eyes, fingers, and toes.

Aarond

.
 
We probably all know someone who was hurt or maimed by something we did as youngsters.
I had a Black Cat blow up in my fingers. Luckily it caused no permanent damage, but couldn't feel a thing for a few days.:D
 
flopsweat said:
No improvised guns, but later we did discover that you can dramatically increase the flight time of a bottle rocket by firing it from a piece of antenna mast (a pipe about 6' by a little over 1"). Be sure to air the mast out between launches or eventually the rockets will fail from lack of oxygen.
Click to expand...

What kind of bottle rocket are you using that has an air-breathing engine? Does it have a little intake duct on the front? The only bottle rockets I've ever seen used some variation of either black or smokeless powder, both of which contain their own oxidizer.
 
Never built any guns, but made some booby traps for around the house.

An armory was being built close to our house and before it really got secured, they hauled in a load of land mines and boxes of detonators.


Don't know if the landmines were loaded or not but there were boxes of pencil type detonators and some that looked like small electrical boxes.

The detonators were not dangerous until the initiator was screwed in.

The initiator had a cap on one end and a firing pin that could be pushed back to a locking point and triggered by pulling a small ring or you could rig a piece of fishing line and allow someone walking by to trip it.

What WAS dangerous was the other end of the initiator that would screw into the mine.

When the pin was released to strike the percussion cap, the explosion would send a jet of flame through the opposing end and into the mine and detonate it.

I was amazed just how loud and powerful those initiators were and had one gone off in our face, we would have been blinded or killed.

My uncle saw what we were doing and he told us to get those things out of the house and back to the armory. He also told us what would happen if we didn't.

We never touched those things again. We got off cheap.
 
I can only imagine how, Little-Miss-manners-take-all-yer-guns-away-lady, is reading all this? And from men whom actually survived childhood to boot. Tisck, tisck.

Off to Sensetivity Training for all you bad boys. Hurry right along.
 
45 Auto said:
What kind of bottle rocket are you using that has an air-breathing engine? Does it have a little intake duct on the front? The only bottle rockets I've ever seen used some variation of either black or smokeless powder, both of which contain their own oxidizer.
Click to expand...
Beats me - it was several decades ago. I don't remember a plastic tip. I do recall that we could never get more than 3 or 4 in a row to work, and running some air through the pipe seemed to fix it. Could have been a few duds and a strong coincidence, I suppose.

You're missing the main point, though - they went really high up! :D
 
My Pop was an electrician by both skill and trade, having originally enlisted in the Air Force as a turbine engine mechanic.

After Vietnam, he settled down and earned a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering from GA TECH and went into the electrical contracting field.

So, I grew up in an electrical shop with all sorts of nifty machine tools available. And earned the Electricity, Electronics, and Plumbing merit badge.

One Saturday afternoon while Dad was watching his yellow jackets, I was about 14-15, I attempted to building an electronically actuated zip gun out of parts laying around the shop. I was fuddled by Pops intercepting me walking out of the house with his "good" soldering iron, as I studied my crudely drawn wiring diagram. Pops studied my design, pronounced it unsound, and we proceeded to attempt to fix it to his "standards" until we were both banished from the project by Mom, citing danger, stupidity, enough guns already, and "getting arrested by the FBI." I wisely chose not to say that it would more than likely by the BATFE.

We will still draw and discuss it to this day when Mom isn't around.:D
 
What kind of bottle rocket are you using that has an air-breathing engine? Does it have a little intake duct on the front? The only bottle rockets I've ever seen used some variation of either black or smokeless powder, both of which contain their own oxidizer.
Click to expand...

No need for it to have been an airbreathing engine. Sounds like the poster stumbled across the concept of a piston launcher. Granted, his wasn't optimize or anything like that, but many of the same concepts would apply. It's not airbreathing, it just is a more efficient use of rocket exhaust.

The O2 part of the equation would have been further efficiency as most propellant forumulations used for pyrotechnics are oxygen poor. They WANT the propellant to not be fully burned when it comes out because that makes for cool looking afterburning. So in the poster's tube design, he would have been taking advantage of that afterburning and harnessing it for energy rather than mere asthetics.
 
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Straightshooter, is a spoke gun an Ohio thing?

I grew up in the sixties, and in Ohio. I didn't know anybody else that made them but me and my friends.
Click to expand...

Actually, we made them when I lived in Kentucky, alog, long time ago...roflmao!
 
Not Guns

But used a spring rat trap to make crude booby traps, with shot shells and pipe nipples.
Most of my home built stuff went towards vehicular projects, motorized bicycles mini-bikes and go-karts. As a gearhead stuffing engines into things that didn't really have engines in the original designs, or much larger and more powerful motors.
:cool:
 
InigoMontoya said:
No need for it to have been an airbreathing engine. Sounds like the poster stumbled across the concept of a piston launcher. Granted, his wasn't optimize or anything like that, but many of the same concepts would apply. It's not airbreathing, it just is a more efficient use of rocket exhaust.

The O2 part of the equation would have been further efficiency as most propellant forumulations used for pyrotechnics are oxygen poor. They WANT the propellant to not be fully burned when it comes out because that makes for cool looking afterburning. So in the poster's tube design, he would have been taking advantage of that afterburning and harnessing it for energy rather than mere asthetics.
Click to expand...

That piston launcher is really neat. Now if we had only had a Holocost Cloak... ;)
 
I know a certain Marine who in 1975 found and dissasembled a 81MM willie peter round, set it in the middle of the parade deck and lit it. Turned night into day.
 
A car antennae, a cork a spring from a pen, a split shot bb fishing weight and any 22 shell makes for a fun and not so accurate shooter....
 
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