All I’ve got is that I had an old malfunctioning VCR that stopped working, for the final time, with a rental tape still inside it. So I had to break it apart enough to get the tape out, without damaging the tape. Which was harder than one might think.
[slight hijack]
Didn’t Kubrick fling a camera out of a window to film the POV of Alex jumping in A Clockwork Orange?
[/slight hijack]
Maureen – you and me and the rest of the class would like to know, too, but so far he won’t relent :mad: 
I once destroyed this thread.
I bought a '58 Cadillac for $20.00 from a used car dealer. He said he’d get me the title later. He never did. With a big piece of iron pipe, some friends and I bashed every square foot of it. Then we towed it out into a field and blew out the windows with a homemade bomb. I later found out that minor parts of that car would have been worth big bucks. :smack:
Bungee cords exsisted a long time before some idiot decided it would be fun to jump off a cliff attached to one.
Dammit, I’ve spent at least 8 minutes llooking for the date of the investion of Bungee cords and I can’t find it. Anybody know?
According to this site, the first bungee jump was made in 1979.
Not so much deliberately destroyed, as destroyed with deliberation. I worked on a several million-dollar flight simulator, and managed to kill a major component – the ground and special effects section of the the digital radar land mass – by tinkering with it while trying to ‘fix’ a problem. Turns out the problem was that a little-used effect was defaulted ‘on’ in the boot software, but by then I’d moved so many boards and settings around that nothing worked right anymore.
Required the two guys who designed and built it to fly out and replace about a dozen $20,000 circuit boards, then adjust the system for 3 days. The old boards were eventually repaired and useful as spares, but this was still a six-figure escapade.
Moral: If it works, don’t eff with it.
Yeah, I think that’s what inspired me to try it.
I know, but I thought Roland was refering to bungee jumping, which was not on my radar in 1979 - so it just didn’t occur to me to try to bungee jump, or make some sort of bungee harness for the camera. Besides, figuring out how long and thick a bungee I’d need would mean hours of, like, math and stuff, so it is way easier to just chuck a camera. Especially since, like I said, you can get them at garage sales so cheap.
Anyway, we’re talking about destroying stuff.
My friends and I once threw an old speaker off the roof of our school gym.
It apparantly cost somewhere around $2000 new.
Well, I didn’t actually **destroy **anything, but I might as well have.
When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9, I took my father’s collection of old silver dollars and **spent **them. I didn’t have the sense to sell them for what they were worth, but just spent them at face value. They were worth several thousand dollars back then (mid-50s), and would probably be worth a couple hundred thousand now (and I would have inherited them by now).
To the best of my knowledge, my father didn’t go to the store to try and get them back; he just remained very, very angry for a very, very long time.
$125,000.00 house. Very much on purpose. One small back-hoe and about six hours. The house was built without the proper permits. The builder thought if he had it finished the town would let it stay and issue the paperwork. When I found out that he had a habit of doing things like this, something “twitched” (snapped is too strong a word) Hot wired the backhoe and a little trial and error training, Poof, Rubble. Over Twenty years ago and I still feel I did the right thing.
YMMV
I lived in a town where demolition of illegally built houses was standard procedure, so I’m not shocked or surprised at all by what you did.
A little envious, though.
This is going to sound really lame after the house thing, but the most expensive items I’ve ever deliberately destroyed (in fact, the only items I’ve ever deliberately destroyed) were several cheap, plastic audio tape storage thingies – with the tapes in them. This was back in the mid '80s, when audio tapes were still popular and “cassingles” were in their heyday. I had a lot of audio tapes (and still have quite a few). Anyway, my mom and I fought frequently back then, and one day I got really pissed off, went into my room and slammed the door shut, and started throwing the first things I could find that would break easily and make a lot of noise. I think I threw four or five of them at the wall, breaking storage thingies and cassette tape cases alike. It was my very first object lesson in thinking through the consequences of my actions.
I have never deliberately destroyed anything else, though I’ve had the urge several times.
Can’t speak for dollar value, but things I have destroyed:
When young and stupid, a friend and I took a distress flare, put it into a length of guttering pipe, and fired it into the window of a public toilet/changing shed at a local beach, and burnt it to the ground.
Same friend and I bought a load of IBM golfball typewriters from my office {word processors were just coming in, so old golfballs were going cheap}, and took turns driving down a steep hill in his old Volvo, one of us sitting in the open boot and dragging them behind the car by their cables until they fell to pieces. They were built quite sturdily, so it took a few runs.
Same friend and I scoured the neighbourhood on the night of the inorganic rubbish collection for old toilet bowls. {A lot of people threw them out, because there was a renovation boom in the area at the time and they couldn’t be sold second-hand} Took them to the local dam, and threw them down the spillway, one by one. Damn, but those things explode into a thousand points of light.
The funniest thing was that my friend {then a rising young lawyer, now a legal hotshot} was the chairman of the local residents’ association, and after our late night antics he would regularly field calls from aggrieved locals about the recent spate of hooliganism in the area, and what was being done about it?
We also got drunk on another occasion and lay on our backs by the side of the road, trying to shoot out the streetlights with my airgun. Fortunately we couldn’t see straight, so no damage was done. Ditto the time when we poured petrol on his driveway and lit "landing strips for UFO’"s. Again, nothing was damaged, so I guess it doesn’t count.
I miss being young and stupid sometimes.
I smashed my teenage daughter’s Nokia cellphone with a hammer(after receiving a $350.00 bill)!!
My mum used to give me old computers from her work to pull apart. One day me and my brother got to dismantle an old washing-machine sized mainframe. You can bet that cost a pretty penny new!
My $200 dollars DVD player (when it was new anyways). After one tough week of work, I destroyed it because it wouldn’t open fast enough. Picked it up and chucked it against a wall.
I only deliberately destroy cheap things. Like the COBY portable cassette player that worked once. I threw it to the ground repeatedly, then stomped it beyond its component parts.
I almost inadvertently destroyed my Pioneer DVD player, my Gamecube, and my Dreamcast by putting them into a duffel bag and putting them through the baggage claim in an airport. The plastic display window on the DVD player is now busted (but it works), the Gamecube has a chunk of plastic broken off of it (but it works), and the Dreamcast came through unscathed (but now the controller ports don’t work.)
Like Mangetout, I destroyed a plotter.
The office was moving, the plotter was obsolete, the boss could not find a school or museum that would take it, and it was too large to go into the dumpster.
A sledgehammer and a screwdriver later, it was trash. Original cost: in excess of $17,000.
When I’m late, don’t yell at me, “Don’t you know what time it is?”.
It’s not like a three hundred dollar watch can’t be fixed after beaning you on the forehead?