Comments on: 12/18/10 – Planning a Party

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 16:12:40 +0000

I never got farther than adding baking soda to Pepsi!

“Always has dynamite lying around”… hmm… Are any of them in college by any chance?

By: Ronald

Ronald — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:28:15 +0000

Isn’t this a situation Blake and Vachel would’ve been in every prior December? What did they usually do then? ;-)

By: War Pig

War Pig — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:18:02 +0000

We used to find older boxes of railroad torpedoes. They were used to signal a train of danger ahead. They were placed on the tracks and when the train ran over them, they exploded, making a very loud noise and a darned good flash as well. They started in the days of coal powered steam engines but were still apparently used until the 60s. We’d put them on country bridges between girders and when big trucks came over they’d flex the bridge and set them off. Trucks stopped, looking for blown tires and such. Great fun for a 14 year old, We never tried to take one apart as we’d heard from reliable sources it was almost impossible to do without the thing going off in your face. Many people in the early days (before 1950) lost eyes and hands to mishandling those things.

By: Harena

Harena — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 18:12:47 +0000

I used to build up fires left by construction workers as they were building my childhood neighborhood. Never found any dynamite, more’s the pity….

By: christopher

christopher — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:19:24 +0000

@War_Pig, I am amazed you have survived. That’s pretty amazing. Best thing we ever found by the tracks was a huge flare stick, which we lit and watched for a while.

By: War Pig

War Pig — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 07:32:54 +0000

Actually, mom investigated the closet of the bedroom my brother and I shared. There she found 4 sticks of TNT we had “found” near the railroad. We were going to sweat it for the nitro. I have no idea how my brother and I survived our teen years. Later on, I learned in the public library how to make fuel-fertilizer bombs and we blew stumps and large rocks out of the ground for our grandfather, the farmer. Then when the authorities found out who was doing the blasting, they stopped selling papaw blasting caps so we had to learn to make our own fulminate caps to set off the charge. Papaw had a large jug or mercury so we made mercury fulminate. Not all that hard, really, then we learned to make a crude form of PETN (which anybody can learn to do, really) and that solved the blasting cap problems. A small firecracker would set it off. A little on the touchy side, though.

However, in the military later on, our explosives expertise and marksmanship skills saved each of our lives more than once, but our guardian angels must have worn out five sets of wings during our teen years. A couple of hard cases and hard to handle.