The "Back in my day" Thread

GaryM said:
And the more obscure transitional design that Coors used for a few years. Push in the small button to release pressure, then the big one to drink. It worked pretty well as the earliest commercial solution to opening a drink can without having to remove and discard a pull tab.

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It was Bill Coors who engineered that opening. He was also the engineer who pioneered the use of aluminum in making beer cans . Or so he told me at one of our chats at a growers meetings . Also said his biggest mistake was going national. Much better as a regional brewer.
 
Those plastic whiffle ball bats had a little hole in each end due to the molding process. If you enlarged the hole in the big end, you could put the stick for your bottle rocket in there and make a bottle rocket "rifle" for better accuracy in your bottle rocket wars.
 
KRyan said:
Those plastic whiffle ball bats had a little hole in each end due to the molding process. If you enlarged the hole in the big end, you could put the stick for your bottle rocket in there and make a bottle rocket "rifle" for better accuracy in your bottle rocket wars.
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I always used a section of 1/2 inch copper pipe with one end plugged. The proper technique included bending the fuse first upwards then downwards at the midpoint creating an upside down V that would hold the bottle rocket in place at the pipe rim while you lit it. When the fuse burnt half way, it would then drop into the pipe for precise aiming at your friend's eyes, ears or anywhere else that might cause maiming.
 
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Always reminds me of the Men In Black line: "This is a fascinating little gadget. It's gonna replace CDs soon. I guess I'll have to buy the white album again."
 
KRyan said:
Those plastic whiffle ball bats had a little hole in each end due to the molding process. If you enlarged the hole in the big end, you could put the stick for your bottle rocket in there and make a bottle rocket "rifle" for better accuracy in your bottle rocket wars.
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Mahneuvers said:
I always used a section of 1/2 inch copper pipe with one end plugged. The proper technique included bending the fuse first upwards then downwards at the midpoint creating an upside down V that would hold the bottle rocket in place at the pipe rim while you lit it. When the fuse burnt half way, it would then drop into the pipe for precise aiming at your friend's eyes, ears or anywhere else that might cause maiming.
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somewhere I have a video of, uh, some crazy kids that showed up at rough river and had bottle rocket duels on the runway at 2 in the morning. those crazy kids, I tell ya.
 
The center of the Estes model rocket catalog was the "technical section" with articles on how to balance your rocket, how to build a wind tunnel, etc. There was always a "don't do this" page devoted to the "basement bomber"... "Bobby built a rocket by putting 500 match heads in a half inch copper pipe and blew his fingers off when it exploded." We'd be saying, "Cool, Dad has some copper pipe... hey Brian, do you have any matches?"
 
There was kid a couple grades older than me in grade school who was into rockets who started 7th grade with only a thumb and partial pinky on his right hand from doing something similar.
 
Growing up mine was model 1897 pump 12 gauges, it’s a miracle (or more appropriately proper training and actual handling experience from a very young age to never have the barrel point at a person) that none of us accidentally got shot. The number of accidental discharges I can remember between my brother, dad, uncles and myself is really scary looking back. Cold weather, thick gloves, very light trigger pull, and a slam fire design… sometimes thick gloves wouldn’t let the trigger reset, and cycle the pump=boom. I still love them, but would only use one solo hunting now, not walk five guys abreast in tall grass 30 feet apart like we use to.
 
Pugs said:
I’m restoring my great grandfathers 52 Ford F1 and will put one in. I have a nice LC Smith double that will look nice.
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My father had a double barrel LC Smith. Choke on the left side was so tight a dime wouldn't drop in the hole ...
 
Zeldman said:
This totally what the other kids and myself would be doing back then.
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Homeland Security would have had a field day at my 9th and 10th grade chemistry classes. (We put those slate tables to the test.)
 
JackL-3J said:
Homeland Security would have had a field day at my 9th and 10th grade chemistry classes. (We put those slate tables to the test.)
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Yah, we pulled stuff that would have gotten us expelled or worse.
 
flyingron said:
Yah, we pulled stuff that would have gotten us expelled or worse.
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The schools had different concerns back then. They wanted to make sure we didn't make any fatal errors while learning. I wonder if learning is even a concern today.

I made (small quantities of) napalm and black powder with a teacher's supervision. We blew stuff up (from a safe distance) with acetylene gas we made from carbide. Students made flintlock pistols, halberds, and bowie knives in shop class.

My oldest son wasn't allowed to carry his grandfather's boy scout knife into the same gymnasium that I carried school owned .22 rifles through to get to the range set up behind the gym. The grandchildren of those a couple years ahead of me in school get warnings for looking at things that are "pointy" or "sharp" on school issued laptops.
 
JackL-3J said:
The schools had different concerns back then. They wanted to make sure we didn't make any fatal errors while learning. I wonder if learning is even a concern today.

I made (small quantities of) napalm and black powder with a teacher's supervision. We blew stuff up (from a safe distance) with acetylene gas we made from carbide. Students made flintlock pistols, halberds, and bowie knives in shop class.

My oldest son wasn't allowed to carry his grandfather's boy scout knife into the same gymnasium that I carried school owned .22 rifles through to get to the range set up behind the gym. The grandchildren of those a couple years ahead of me in school get warnings for looking at things that are "pointy" or "sharp" on school issued laptops.
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Of course it's a concern. However, litigation from our sue-happy society has forced them into keeping potential weapons out of kids hands. Far easier for schools to say "no knives" than it is to pay for millions in lawsuits so that Timmy can carry a pocketknife every day.
 
JackL-3J said:
Homeland Security would have had a field day at my 9th and 10th grade chemistry classes. (We put those slate tables to the test.)
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So, in eighth grade, I answered an add in the back of a magazine and got 91 feet of cannon fuse for $1. I cut it into 1.5 inch pieces and sold it at school for 1 cent per piece.

Science teacher was fresh out of the Army and very cool. So one day he shows us how to make nitrocellulose. A couple of days later, he takes the now dry material and some poster board to make a large firecracker. And commented, that if he had a fuse, he could detonate it.

I raise my hand and tell him I had fuse. So I gave him a couple of pieces. He lit one and mentally timed the burn rate. Then inserted another piece into his firecracker, then lit it. Talking about how we should not try this at home, it was dangerous, est. I am freaking as the fuse burns down.

Then he flicks up to the corner of the room at the ceiling and proceeds to blow up the ceiling tile.

As I said, very cool teacher.
 
I remember walking into a chemistry teacher and asking for sulfuric and nitric acids. I then asked if he had any cotton and he realized what I was asking for and said hell no. I went down to a biology teacher who I had done some assisting work for and asked if I could get some from her. She says sure, as soon as the chemistry teacher returned her ring stands. I go back to the chemistry teacher and says Biology teacher wants her ring stands back. He gives them to me and I go back and swap it for the cotton. Twenty minutes later the chemistry teacher catches me under the vent hood swirling the cotton in the acids. He let me proceed as long as I enumerated the issues involved in what I was doing.

We had in previous years made ammonium triiodide which is always fun. One of the other schools in the district had to be evacuated due to some kids not being careful in their preparation of this (they found a whole bowl of it drying out somewhere). After that they got picky about leaving the raw materials out where the students could find them.
 
Memory is a bit faded on this one, but the statue of limitations has long expired and the main facts are true: My best friend in grade school was in a family that owned farmland in a rural location in TN. His father leased part of that land to companies to extract sand and gravel. In one of those abandoned sand pits one of our buddies discovered a discarded dynamite case just inside the woodline that still had a few sticks in it. There was even some fuse line left. My friend and I took one of those sticks, went home and cut it in half, and stuck a cherry bomb in the yellow powder after attaching several inches of fuse to the cherry bomb. Then I taped it up. Forget how many we made. But a few days later it was Halloween, so one guy that had a car drove us around the very small town and I got the job of flinging out the redneck IEDs. The one I distinctly remember was a long throw to the top of a grassy hill overlooking a drive through dairy bar with a gravel parking lot. The lot was full of cars. We got a hundred yards up the road and heard the boom. Soon there were many headlights on the road behind us. Casually turning around we headed back to the dairy bar and there were only a couple cars left but a gigantic cloud of dust hanging in the air. Scared the crap out of everybody that night.

We may have 'bombed' a couple other locations but I can only remember that one for sure. After that seeing how loud (and dangerous) that dynamite was, we decided to get rid of the rest of it. Took the case with some remaining sticks back to the sand pit and put another IED in it with a longer fuse this time. Then we cleared out. The resulting explosion was heard in a town 15 miles away.

As one of my friends described it: "The night we threw dynamite."
 
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