Suppose you decided to end it all and wanted to make it memorable. Would it be possible to slice off your own melon using nothing but a hand-held instrument of decapitation, such as a sword or an axe?
Note that for the purpose of this question I am disallowing the use of any sort of machine, be it motorized or not. So no guillotines, no chain saws, no elaborate systems where you tie piano wire around your neck and attach it to a tree and drive away really fast. No, I wanna know if I can take a bladed weapon up in my hands and chop my own head off. Can it be done?
Well, anything is possible, I guess. But you’d start bleeding out and weakening well before you got close to finishing, and the spine is pretty tough to sever. The whole reason the guillotine was invented was that even skilled swordsmen had difficulty reliably separating other people from their heads in one strike.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, I’d say it’s very unlikely.
About the only way I can concieve that you might accomplish it would be to jam your sword across a doorway at neck height and take a running start at it.
Well, how about piano wire? A loop around your neck, another loop for your foot to go through, and a quick downward thrust of your leg. I can see it happening. Helps to have an well- developed lower body, and an underdeveloped upper body.
If you wanted to use piano wire I’d think your best bet would be to climb into a tree, tie one end around your neck and the other end around a sturdy branch with enough slack that you could fall 10 or 15 feet before the wire goes taut.
Yeah, but that’s not really in the spirit of the OP, is it? “So no guillotines, no chain saws, no elaborate systems where you tie piano wire around your neck and attach it to a tree and drive away really fast.”
But maybe the piano wire in itself is not in the spirit of the OP either. We need RickJay to adjudicate.
Everything I’ve read indicates that it’s not particularly easy to chop off someone else’s head–it takes an extremely sharp weapon, a good swing, and a snap of the wrist for extra acceleration at the end–so I’d imagine it would be darned near impossible to chop off your own.
The OP said No Machines, which rules out anything that uses leverage to increase the force of the blow. So I would have to say no, you couldn’t do it. Even harnessing gravity by throwing a blade into the air would be limited to how high you could throw it. The higher the throw, the lighter the blade would have to be.
My husband is a firefighter, and incidentally, this happened recently.
This is how he did it:
[SPOILER]He put a circular saw in a vise that he had rigged up at his neck level and taped down the power button. He stood in front of it and fell forward onto it, effectively cutting off his head, though apparently he didn’t cut all the way through.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon how you look at it, he had called his wife just before he did it and told her not to come into the garage when she got home, or let their kids come into the garage. She immediately called 911 (he was battling depression and she had a good idea of why he had called her and said that) but they were too late.
He was a fire fighter as well and his hall was the hall that responded to the call.[/SPOILER]
And in the spirit of the OP, I have no idea. I keep picturing a quickly fading guy frantically sawing away at his neck to complete the task before he’s passed out and died.
