Pics have no gore, just pictures of a 40 year old homemade suicide helmet constructed by a teen without aid of the internet.
The description says he put shotgun shells with a metal tube over the firing cap and a nail at the top of the tube and the nails were wired using coat hangers to an arc welder which when activated would ignite the primer.
So why the nails and metal tubes? why not directly wire to the firing cap? Will electricity consistently cause a shotgun shell to fire?
I admit when I first viewed it I assumed an air compressor was hooked up to the metal tubes with nails inside, causing them to act as firing pins.
I looked at the imgur. Here’s how I think this thing works.
I think the metal tubes are both to trap the propellant gas and to align the shells the desired angle. Shotgun shells, like most bullets, have to be confined in a tube in order to be accelerated to significant velocity.
The arc welder is essentially an extremely high current source. That high current, when passing through materials that are not as conductive as a thick copper cable, will cause the material to heat up very rapidly. Essentially, the nail is the fuse or the paperclip in the short circuit. I think the nails would have rapidly heated to red or white hot.
Gunpowder is flammable and will deflagrate just from heat. You do not need impact with the primer to set it off - the hot nails would have ignited the gunpowder in each shotgun shell, and if they were well contained, the propellant gas would have sent the slugs moving fast enough to piece someone’s skull and kill them.
It’s a sad device - as the author of the imgur points out, whoever came up with it was at least a little clever, as it appears to be a unique design and even the angles of each shell were aimed appropriately, and one would think this person could solve their problems and use his talents to make a comfortable living. Then again, the brain can be faulty in many different ways, and some of the deficits are probably not realistically treatable.
According to a thread on this board it was available at farm stores ( in the USA, other countries may have been more timid ) until 1968. I’m sure the memo hadn’t got to every rural backwater seven years later.
1975 was the year Microsoft was born. They could easily make something better than this.
Sure. And, again, just because you can gin up a clever way to kill yourself instantly doesn’t mean that being short, or having bad social skills, or bad B.O. or whatever doesn’t make you the run of the litter. Perhaps I’m stereotyping, but male high school teens end up in a pecking order. No different than when wild animals lock horns to find out which one is stronger. Women attempt to mate with the ones at the top, and everyone treats the runts at the bottom like crap. I don’t know where this teen fell in the pecking order but it seems very probable he was somewhere near the bottom, regardless of any skills or talents he may have possessed.
Thing is, if you’re going to kill yourself…if the people at your high school have made you feel so shitty you want to take your own life…well. And everyone at the school seems in on it (people send each other social signals and sort of act in a pack)…
Anyways, if you’re going to die, for sure, and experience the oblivion of death. And, you feel the problem isn’t yourself, but those people who are treating you like crap. (this part is possibly a cognitive error, yes). Then why not take some of those people with you? If you look at it this way, mass murder/suicides aren’t totally nuts - they make a kind of sense from the perspective of a person who is going to die anyway. The cognitive error is that most of the people who get killed in these mass murder events never had anything to do with the harm to the shooter. That kid who shot a Senator? He had been treated badly by a Community College, not the Senator. Etc. The “guilty party” isn’t who ate a bullet.
(I’m not saying it’s right to murder someone who screwed you over. I just wish that mass shooters could aim at the people who did the screwing over, and not random people, since I don’t screw people over yet could potentially be a victim if a mass shooter comes to me when I’m watching a movie or going to school, etc)
You could order ammonium nitrate gel charges through some local hardware stores in Alabama through the middle 90s. Pickup the charges and blasting caps the next day. I’d do demolition work for farmers and homeowners in the Huntsville area and picked up the material in Guntersville.
So you could just casually order up as much explosives as the military packs into a JADAM? (2000 lbs of high end explosives, I guess that would be some multiplier to convert to the gel charge equivalent) Or was there some practical limit without a lot of paperwork to a “hand grenade worth” (about a pound of the high end stuff) or something?
Depended on how many tree stumps, rocks, old foundations had to be removed. Ordered for specific jobs, I didn’t “stock” anything since I lived in the city. I had an explosive license for my part time business though the farmer/landowner would often get the material themselves based on what I thought would be required. If you ordered a large quantity, I’m sure the sheriff would ask you some questions. I never worked with more than 25 lbs. of charges at a time.
We’re not talking C-4 explosives. The usual charges were an ammonium nitrate explosive in gel form packed in plastic “sausages”. Dupont made the gray ones; Hercules ones were kind of a light red. The commercial blasting caps had a larger booster charge than typical military caps to reliably initiate the charges.
I did “bombs and bullets” for the US Army as my real job including basic EOD work.
Now, if the creator had been really clever, he would have arranged a helmet that destroyed itself along with his head. Just a frame strong enough to hold the shells and arrange the shells to go through the skull and still have enough energy (and choke/distribution) to take out the frame.
Let the folks who clean up the mess figure out 8 empty shells and blood/bone/brain splatter.
