Fifty Dangerous Things

[Butch]

(you should let your childeren do)

That is the name of this book I chanced upon, on one of our shelves.
https://www.fiftydangerousthings.com/about-the-book

Awesome book. But it does not have all the stuff we did.
Smoke bombs of salt peter and sugar, hydrogen gas with drain-o and aluminum, explosives with iodine and ammonia, oxy-acetylene balloons...

It does have "Go Underground"; we had a tunnel we called "The Tresel" that is basically the creek that runs under the freeway and Foothill Expressway for at least half a mile. I should go see what has become of that.
We made hot air ballons with cleaners bags and candles. They would float away with live fire... We never burnt anything down. Amazing.

I'll dig up te receipe for smoke bombs. They are awesome. We used to stop all the traffic on Homestead road...

Breakglass, make a bomb, slingshots, the book has alot of good stuff.

You guys have any machinations worth sharing?

 

[ScorpioVI]

- Free-roam. Leave the house after breakfast and come back for dinner.

- Climb 50ft mango trees for lunch.

- Makeshift fireworks out of gunpowder (by pulling apart 5.56 cartridges).

- "Surfing" the streets during typhoons.

- Play "duck" by launching an arrow into the air, above the group, first one who runs or ducks loses.

- Being brainwashed by the Catholic church...

- Avoiding being blown-up/gunned-down by Islamic terrrorists...

Fun times... good thing I don't have kids.

 

[byke]

No dude, you pull apart shotgun shells.

Friggin' rich people.

 

[Ant]

Sliding down the ice plants with cardboard on the side of an expressway on acid.

 

[Butch]

Cubing.
Sit on a block of ice at the top of the hill at some golf course and ride it as long as you could. Make divots upon dismount.

Climb the tallest trees you can find, as high as you can. There was some scary shit there.

 

[bikeama]

Sliding down a rope from your tree house. Never forgot those rope burns.

I did make some great oxy-acetylene balloons. Best when tied to a helium balloon and set loose with a lighter fluid soaked string.

 

[ScorpioVI]

No dude, you pull apart shotgun shells.

Friggin' rich people.

More 5.56 than shotgun shells in the Philippines. Seriously. Not sure why, maybe the lack of bird-hunting. Also far easier to get your hands on an M-16 than a shotgun.

 

[Tally Whacker]

Sliding down the ice plants with cardboard on the side of an expressway on acid.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

 

[nakedape]

(you should let your childeren do)

That is the name of this book I chanced upon, on one of our shelves.
https://www.fiftydangerousthings.com/about-the-book

Breakglass, make a bomb, slingshots, the book has alot of good stuff.

You guys have any machinations worth sharing?

I went to TED LBC with Gever in 2009. If you're plugging the book, make sure to mention the school he runs! This Bay Area group is his target audience...

https://www.sfbrightworks.org/our-story

Our dangerous things included firearms and explosives. PVC pipe bombs with fast-burn powder we bought by the canister from Western sporting goods. The problem was we always ran so far and fast we never heard them go off.

Picking up tall used O2 cylinders from the old dump (now a Home Depot) and shooting them at the Vallejo flats with 12g slugs. Fun fact: they penetrate but don't make it out the backside. Zip guns. Folks locked up the guns but left the ammo out. Took a ricochet in the thigh. Claimed I got holes in my leg cardboard sliding.

 

[DrSwade]

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

Me too. You know that big hill surrounding the FDR School in Pacifica? Epic sliding.

And for gunpowder, my dad actually would buy me containers of saltpeter and sulfur from the local drug store. Never supervised as I tested different ratios and sources of charcoal.

I may read that book for the nostalgia.

 

[lizard]

I dated three Filipinas back to back to back.

 

[Tally Whacker]

Me too. You know that big hill surrounding the FDR School in Pacifica? Epic sliding.

And for gunpowder, my dad actually would buy me containers of saltpeter and sulfur from the local drug store. Never supervised as I tested different ratios and sources of charcoal.

I may read that book for the nostalgia.

My next door neighbor when I was a kid was a sculptor. One 3rd of July he blew off his pinkie finger mixing fireworks out of homemade gunpowder. After that I treated those ingredients with slightly more respect.

 

[dravnx]

Sleddilng down a hill, crossing a road and continuing down to the bottom. Nobody got killed but there were a couple of close calls. We would ice the road with buckets of water. Never considered that we could cause a wreck.
Cutting the forks off an old bike and beating them on to the forks of another bike to make a chopper. My brother broke his arm when the forks fell off.

 

[mean dad]

Oh shit I remember learning how to braze by putting 3 or 4 sets of forks onto each other to make choppers!
Holy hell I forgot all about that. Springy as hell to ride.

I've done a lot of the listed shenanigans. We used to pull the pellets out of shotgun shells and tape a steelie to the primer and throw 'em at the ground to make a big exciting boom.
Then we kicked it up a notch and started pouring extra powder into each one, THEN we decided to cut the plastic tubes off shells and tape them to the next one and fill it up with powder and it was so long that we had to tape fuckin fins to the end like a rocket so it would land on its nose and we finally got it to go FUCKING BOOM.

Tape a box of sparklers together with duct tape and leave one sticking out and light it and gtfo.

Finally just started using a piece of 1/2" pvc full of powder with some caps glued on. Put a lit cigarette onto the fuse for a 'timer' and enjoy the show.


Rode skateboards in the rainstorms in Arizona with sheets as sails, didn't hurt too bad if you crashed since everything was wet and slick.

Sliding down iceplant, check. Got a piece of iceplant shoved under my fingernail one time doing that. That hurt so fucking bad, went all the way to the quick.

Rode bicycles inside the mall until security would chase us. Those slick floors were fuckin dope for sliding around corners like a flattracker.

Dirt clod fights. BB gun fights, using trash can lids as shields. Leather jackets + helmets for pool cue fights.

 

[ScottRNelson]

You guys have covered most of the fun stuff...

We used to put spray paint cans in an incinerator* and heat them until they exploded in a fireball. One of them blew the base out instead and flew upwards about 60 feet.

My kids taught me about dry ice in a 2-liter bottle.

I did a lot of tree climbing. The best tree in the neighborhood, a tall elm at the neighbor's house, became off limits when one of their girls fell out of it and broke both of her arms.


* Incinerator: a 55-gallon drum with an open top where we burned stuff.

 

[HappyHighwayman]

Good spelling

 

[CDONA]

Woodards hill, the Chevy dealer, back when it was the only business out there. Everyone played on this hill, cars, bikes, trucks, cardboard,
There was a pile of bent sheetmetal from the body shop that got scattered, and used. Nothing like a trashed car hood, sharp edges and all for sliding down the dead grassy hill.
Although it took a car to drag the heavy hood back uphill for another go

 

[DrSwade]

Farm boys at our big outdoor parties would throw a box of .22s in the bonfire. That was usually a sign for me to go home or at least leave. Never heard of anyone getting hurt though.

In 7th grade my fascination with pipe bombs was quickly curtailed by one of my friends blowing himself up. On one of the few days I wasn’t there to participate, he ran out of cannon fuse and decided to use firecracker fuse. When it didn’t go off, he approached it to check and….
Came back to school a month later without an eye and a wicked scar around the perimeter of his jaw to jaw, over his forehead where they peeled his face off to remove the shrapnel.

What I learned later in the military showed me how close to a bad situation I was at 9 or so mixing my own gunpowder in a mortar and pestle.

Heat and pressure. Heat and pressure.

 

[berth]

Honestly, I think .22 in a fire is about as dangerous as popcorn.

 

[afm199]

Well, I grew up on army bases, and Fort Knox was where I was in junior high. Fort Knox was actually an armor base, and there were hundreds, probably thousands of acres of tank training areas.

There were also oodles of fifty caliber machine gun cartridge cases around, ammo boxes, and live rounds in .50 cal and 30/06.

We use to take the .50 cal cartridge cases and stuff them full of match heads. This was back in the day when paper matches were free and found everywhere.

So, you stuff the case full of match heads, and stick a match in it for a fuse. Crimp it closed on both sides, light the match, and run back 20 feet hoping that it would take off in the direction it faced.

These guys were good for hundreds of feet if launched around 30-40 degrees, with a fair amount of accuracy.

The only downside was the occasional misfire that resulted in burnt fingers.

Ahh the good old days. And the BB guns. Gawd.

I'll put in a memoriam for David Richards, my friend back then. He died of cancer at age 13. We had so much fun together. He taught me how to do the cartridge cases.