Heck, my father encouraged us to play with incindiaries, explosives and firearms and I knew kids who had ready access to dynamite. Most of us lived and the ones who didn't learned valuable lessons.
"Oh crap I shouldn't have done that ow". Admittedly they didn't get much time to apply the lesson.
The only blowed real good death I remember from High School was the guy who noticed a pinhole leak in his car's gas tank, so he drained it and then tried to patch it using some hot instrument. I don't recall if it was just a soldering iron or a torch but whatever it was was hot enough to ignite the air-fuel vapour left in the tank. Usually people died in car wrecks or in hunting accidents.
I do recall hearing about a group of teens who were blasting stumps who got to the last stump with half of their supply of explosives still unused. Obviously this would not do so they put half of what was left under the stump and the other half in a hollow within the stump. This was apparently very impressive to watch in action but the farmer whose stump it was then insisted they clean up all the wood chips scattered across the field.
Yeah, one of my brothers was chainsawing a tree trunk, hit a knot and had the chainsaw buck back towards his face. He managed to stop it before it made contact.
Modern chainsaws are designed so that when you let go, they turn off but I am not sure that was true back when.
As I mentioned elsewhere, back in the distant days of my youth, you could buy such items as sulfur, potassium nitrate, powdered charcoal, powdered zinc, ammonium nitrate, potassium perchlorate, etc, off the shelf. Even as a minor.
And my best friend had custody of the family .38 Smith and Wesson at grade-school age. With his father absent, he was the man of the house.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2008-12-28 11:30 pm
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The only blowed real good death I remember from High School was the guy who noticed a pinhole leak in his car's gas tank, so he drained it and then tried to patch it using some hot instrument. I don't recall if it was just a soldering iron or a torch but whatever it was was hot enough to ignite the air-fuel vapour left in the tank. Usually people died in car wrecks or in hunting accidents.
I do recall hearing about a group of teens who were blasting stumps who got to the last stump with half of their supply of explosives still unused. Obviously this would not do so they put half of what was left under the stump and the other half in a hollow within the stump. This was apparently very impressive to watch in action but the farmer whose stump it was then insisted they clean up all the wood chips scattered across the field.
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Or something horrible involving farm equipment.
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Modern chainsaws are designed so that when you let go, they turn off but I am not sure that was true back when.
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And my best friend had custody of the family .38 Smith and Wesson at grade-school age. With his father absent, he was the man of the house.
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My high school stocked picric acid at one point (because until the 1970s, most Ontario high schools did).
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