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holy moely, experimenter


fortune
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After I came across this video by chance I looked at some other similar clips. I never realised that there were so many lunatic crackpots out there, Perhaps they are the inventors of tomorrows world, that’s it they haven’t blown fingers and heads off before they get older.

On a more basic level there was a guy making paper tube shotgun cartridge cases and this was a thing that my grandfather used to do during the war. This was because there were no shotgun cases available or they were a rarity to obtain so he used the bases from cartridges that the paper tubes had delaminated to the point that they were falling to pieces. They worked ok and it helped him to harvest valuable meat for his family and a source of swaps for stuff that was hard to come by.

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Good lad! I know it could be a bit dangerous but it doesn't sound like a high pressure load and lets be honest, it looks fun. The world is far too "health and safety" these days!

 

When I was a lad I made a makeshift musket. I started off with the steel balls that I used to use in my catapult (about 9mm) and trotted off to B&Q on the train to buy some pipe. I found some that was a very loose fit so bought it, along with a large tube of chemical metal. Well after some home engineering (you're talking to a lad who got an angle grinder for his 14th birthday!) I ended up with the steel tube glued inside several layers of other random pipes (CB antenna and water pipe).

 

To cut a long story short the gun used party poppers as the primer (you had to pull the string to set it off) and varying amounts of paper caps as the charge. I muzzle loaded it with a steel ball patched with tissue paper and the full power "proof" load of a whole reel of (100) caps, wedged it in a workmate and tied the party popper string to more string so I could hide round the corner of the house to fire it. When it fired it knocked the workmate back a good few inches and exploded a piece of 6x2 that I had aimed at. It also went through the shed door that the 6x2 was leaning against, right through the shed (including some soft contents) and out of the back leaving a clean hole. I have no idea where the ball ended up but when you think that a .22lr wouldn't do that, to put it mildly it was pushing some serious energy for something made by a child with pocket money amounts of stuff from B&Q and toys r us!

 

I spent a couple of years playing with that thing in the woods. By the time I got bored of it I had even made a makeshift stock and improved the firing mechanism to actually have a trigger to pull the string with. It was accurate to a point too, I could hit a tin can at 25 yards and if using a load filled with 4.5mm BBs I could (and did) even take a few Ducks and Rabbits with it!

 

I'm not suggesting that sort of thing is a good idea, but at the same time I probably fired my thing a good couple of hundred times without getting hurt. These days anything remotely risky is considered a no go but if you go back a good few years there were kids magazines that had instructions on (for example) how to make a hang glider out of paper and wood. A kid with half an ounce of common sense could quite possibly even fly a small distance once he'd completed his project! These days the poor little ******* aren't even allowed near the stairs on their own! :lol:

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