It’s been since I was a kid but when we broke the tips off of store-bought target arrows we could make a new “hunting tip” out of a tin can lid by putting it on the tip of the shaft and then bending it over several times and then beating out the folds with a hammer or rock.
Ever do such a thing yourself?
Do you have any other tricks like that to salvage busted toys or playthings?
Okay, then. What about tin can telephones?
Never heard of tin cans - we used pop bottle caps when I was growing up.
We tried to tie Indian arrowheads onto regular arrows. Never worked.
The reason I even asked the question was that I had just removed one of those little tinfoil sealers from the lid of a can of mixed nuts. It was circular and had a little tab to hold while you peel it back. The tinfoil was quilted and when I folded it in half along the midline of the tab and smoothed out the foil with my fingernail the quilting was mashed out and it got all shiny and smooth. Another fold began to resemble those old arrowheads and the idea hit me that maybe others had had that experience at some point in their bow-and-arrow days.
Never thought to use bottle caps, though, epbrown01, so how did that work? Folding of some sort?
And yeah, TriPolar, we never got them to stay on more than one shot, even if we split the end of the arrow shaft and tied them on real tight.
In those days you could buy slip on hunting tips which did work, and that may have given us the idea to try the can lids. If not, it was just kids’ ingenuity.
There must be other inventions like that from clever kids.
Yep, we’d squeeze it until it clamped the end of the shaft as a sort of cone, then hammer it flat to pretty much standard arrowhead shape. The crinkling of the rim helped hold it in place and gave you a bit of a serrated edge. Worked okay for the kind of goofing around we did as kids.
Sounds like a smart move. It’s been years since I shot my bow, but when we were little it was a big thing to shoot arrows straight up and dodge them when they came down. One time, one of those tincan-head arrows stuck up in the roof and I was too embarrassed, ashamed or afraid to tell Mama about it. So it just stayed up there. Must have been 15 years later when they were demolishing that house (we had moved away long before) that I saw that arrow was still there!
We made throwing stars out of tin can lids using a can punch.
Excellent!