We did once, but we got them wet first because we didn’t want to accidentally start a fire. No joke.
That was another one. Tape a wooden match to a hairspray can with the tip in front of the nozzle. Heh. Mighty fine flame thrower.
It actually did take me a while to learn how to stop trying to immolate myself. You know how polystyrene smells when it burns. Plastic jet planes go down burning in a seriously realistic fashion.
Yep. I also would break thermometers and play with the mercury. :smack:
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
You have made me realize that either my parents were seriously insane in their trust in our abilities to not burn everything up, or they actually didn’t know what we were up to.
Plastic models were made to be consumed in fire, helped on by quantities of airplane glue, fireworks, flame throwers and of course, home made gunpowder.
Yes, gunpowder.
Oh the memories, the running and the screaming …
This is an awesome thread.
You mean me? If so, I’m not saying that it wasn’t fun, but my parents sure got tired of it after about the fourth one. 
What? I had a small pill bottle full of that stuff! You don’t touch it (much), and you put it back in the bottle after playing with it on your desk. Then you wash your hands. What could go wrong?
After setting the garage on fire at 6, I had a healthy respect for flammability. When I was older, we’d rake leaves into a pile and burn them. One week when I was 15, I had to gather the leaves in the back yard. It was a couple of acres, so I had made 3 huge piles that week. I tried to burn the first one, but since it had been raining for a couple of days, and was drizzling at the time, it just wouldn’t light.
What we need is some kind of accelerant…
So, I got a gas can, dumped about 3 gallons all over and around this pile of leaves.
Of course you need to be careful with gasoline and fire, so I took the gas can back up to the house, far away from the pile. Pretty smart, eh? Well, I guess I overlooked the volatility aspect of gas, and didn’t think of gasoline vapors invading every nook, cranny, and void in the pile while I walked 80 yards up and 80 yards back to the pile.
My BFF Tommy was up at Stan’s house on the corner almost half a mile away, and maybe 100 feet higher than our place. He said he heard the “whump” and turned to see a black mushroom cloud rising over the trees.:eek:
Yes, I managed to un-rake all the leaves I had spent so much time on, but worse was my Dad. He came running, and when he saw I was alive, albeit hairless, he began to yell and stomp, and it just got worse from there. I suppose I’d do the same if my son narrowly escaped immolation by stupidity.
Tommy, Stan, and a couple of other guys showed up then, and my dad went back inside. They helped me rake for a while, but it started raining, so we all went home.
I was grounded for a while, and still had to rake leaves.
The lesson? Use kerosene or diesel. And not so much. 
Yes. I never touched it. I usually used a pencil to push it around. I was a naughty girl.
No, matches scared the neck out of me. I’m still terrible at using both them and Bic lighters; my chance of burning myself with the latter is practically 100%. I only ever use the long-barreled “trigger” lighters.
Geez. The worst I ever did was to use wooden matches as dominos.
Yep, yep, yep…
Kinda of.
I cut open shotgun shells to try to make fireworks.
Nice to be here today with all my eyes and fingers, yes, yes it is.
Guilty. As. Charged.
All of the above.
Proximity to Mexican fireworks, so I had plenty of gunpowder.
Made my own gunpowder also. Mom got me some Potassium Nitrate somehow.
Used to grind up Century Rocket motors for the contents.
Used to make golf-ball sized bombs that would explode on contact.
Used to glue wheels to rocket motors and send them down the street.
Etc etc etc
We were camping recently and no one knew how to get a fire started.
. . . Until I showed up.
What didn’t we do?
Danny, the kid around the block burned down the neighbor’s garage by burning dry weeds a bit, then stomping it out. Waited too long once.
My older brother was the ring leader. He did most of the crazy stuff like take bullets apart to collect the gun powder. He taught me how to make pipe bombs and stuff. So, it was only natural that he became a fire fighter.
Once in Grade 8. For some reason 4 of us were alone in the science room and we found a box of wooden matches in the teacher desk drawer. We then proceeded to light about a dozen in hilarious ways - off our teeth, with our fly zipper, etc. - funny as hell. It never occurred to us that the smell of sulphur was drifting into the school hallway. We got in a world of shit when the teachers found out who it was. As a grown-up now it just occurred to me that there were taps in that room that gas came out of…oh my God.
I’m more likely to play with them now than when I was a kid. And even now it’s going to be in the sink or something.
Mostly it’s just to see how easily something burns. I’ve never really thought fire was just cool on it’s own.
Matches, lighters, small fires to bonfires in the back yard (with the old man’s permission for the bigger ones). We used to build plastic WWII airplane models. Very cool, very fun to detail (used a safety pin to create bullet holes to great effect), but then dead boring just sitting there on the dresser. See the model on the dresser, turn head 90 degrees to look out into the back yard from my second floor bedroom–maybe 100 yards to the treeline with a nice downhill pitch. Quick as a flash there is a monofilament zipline running from the eaves over my window to the trees and a Revel 1:45 Corsair heading into the trees in a smoking blaze of glorious defeat (model glue was the accelerant of choice)! Fortunately, in the Pacific Northwest you really have to put forth some effort to ignite a Douglas fir.
Then there was the time I dropped a pint mason jar (with flaming cloth wick) off the roof and onto the brick patio below. Turns out gasoline makes a hell of an alarming splash when it exits a shattering jar. I have no idea how the house failed to burn down. 30 minutes with bleach water and a scrub brush cleaned the soot off the side of the house up before mom got home.
Assuming kid extends to pre-teen/teen years, yes, though nothing terribly dangerous or interesting as many of the stories others have shared.
Mainly just would take a book or two of matches from a restaurant (back before the anti-freedom gestapo made it illegal for owners of such businesses to allow smoking and thus they had such things sitting around) and light the matches and watch them. Most fun/dangerous thing was probably to light one then use it to light all the remaining matches in the book in one huge flash of awesome.
I didn’t play with them as a kid, but I loved fire. My mom would let me strike the matches and light whatever candles she had (under her observation when I was little), or if we were going to have a fire in the fire place she would let me light it. I guess being allowed to do it kept me from doing it when I shouldn’t.
No, but I have done other things to mess with fire.