Stupid stuff I have done

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was reading a similar post on another forum when I was reminded of this long ago disaster. I’ll post it here since you guys are friendlier. This happened in my late teens so I should have known better.

My parents threw out an old dresser so I took it to the burn pile. Hmm, sez I, this could be more fun then just a bonfire. Instead of just burning it I poured a little gasoline in each of the drawers except the bottom one. Closed em up real good. Then I lit a firecracker with a long fuse, dropped it in the bottom drawer and slammed 'er shut. What I anticipated was a delay followed by a POP followed by the dresser vigorously burning down. What happened was I was instantaneously wearing 4 flaming drawers in my lap while the casing flew backwards with a healthy whoosh! A few seconds later the firecracker finally went off.

Within a few months I has hired at NASA. Coincidence? I think not. In my first year I spent some time with assisting my supervisor giving safety demonstrations. During one of them things went awry and he nearly shot someone in the audience when he didn’t read all the instructions. I felt better after that.

2

I’m about 14. I’m the ringleader of about 10 kids from my age down to about 10. This is in sunny warmish SoCal in early January. It’s time for all the grown-ups to take their desiccated browning real pine Christmas trees out to the curb for the trash guys. So we collect about 20 of these trees from the neighborhood. Lots of the houses had two-story living rooms, so big impressive trees were common.

There was a nature preserve behind our houses with a large sandy clearing in it. We erected a big teepee-shaped pile of mostly brown pine trees. Added a nice pile of wadded up newspaper (remember what those were?) at the base and lit 'er off.

I had never seen 75 foot tall flames live in person before. We got far, far, more fire than we expected.

The good news was it burned out pretty quickly. Like 5 minutes, not 50. The better news was we didn’t start a brush fire. The clearing was plenty big, and the former Christmas trees were dry enough they didn’t launch embers; pretty much the needles all went off in a single giant woof and the rest of the fire as the twigs, then branches, then trunks were consumed was much less … vigorous. Good thing.

3

Well, the previous stories here are more dramatic than mine, but here goes.

I was replacing a Moen single-handle faucet in our half-bath, something I have done multiple times per year for the 35 years we’ve lived in this house (not all in that half-bath, we have the faucets all over!). This entails:

  • turning off the water
  • removing the faucet handle
  • removing a collar
  • removing a cotter pin-like clip
  • pulling the old cartridge
    …and reversing the process.

So I get it all back together, turn the water back on, and pull the handle to be sure I have it on the right way (you can put it on such that cold/hot are reversed: easy fix, take it off and rotate it 180 degrees). Then I realize I forgot to put the collar back on.

Remove the handle, go to put collar on–and it won’t go. Look closer and realize the clip isn’t quite seated, so I pull it out.

This was the first mistake. As I stare at it in wonder, the cartridge emerges from the socket, driven by water pressure. It pops out entirely, flying over my shoulder, and now I have water gushing out. I instinctively put my hand over it to route as much of the water into the sink as possible.

Then I reach down to turn the water off. Only…I’m left-handed, so it was my left hand that I used to divert the water. Which means I turn off…the cold.

Now I have boiling HOT water shooting out into my hand–this is the bathroom that’s closest to the water heater, so it gets hot fast. Oops.

At that point I abandon the divert-the-water effort, turn off the hot, and spend 20 minutes mopping and drying. Still makes me laugh when I think about it.

Took me a couple of weeks to tell my wife, who didn’t think it was as funny as I did.

4

This was perhaps the first of my several major screw ups

The 14-year-old neighborhood hoodlums and I were in the habit of (at my direction) making “Carbide” bombs.

The small baby food and peanut butter jar explosions soon became passe, and it was decided we needed something more impressive like…an empty gallon pickle jar. Yeah, it was my idea.

First went in the water, then a handful of calcium carbide, then the lid, then a length of cannon fuse through a hole in the lid, we lit it, and ran like hell.

The fuse burned down,… and nothing! We waited awhile,… and nothing! After more waiting and careful consideration? we (meaning I) decided it was safe to approach for investigation as to why it was a dud.

I crept up to the jar like it was a rattlesnake and I noticed a small white flame coming out the fuse hole. “Hey, y’all come and look at this!”

What possessed me in my next act of stupidity, I’ll never know.

Not waiting for my friends, I grabbed the jar and unscrewed the lid with the flame still flaring out the hole!

I heard a distinct hissing noise and needless to say, it exploded in my face.

“Far out, man!” my friends said as they helped extract glass shards from my face, neck, and hands… I bled like a stuck hog…thankfully my eyes somehow were spared.

55 years after the fact, I still nick myself on the scars when I shave.

5

You want I should start with today and work backwards, or enumerate the Youthful Indiscretions first?

6

Perfect answer. Thread
:trophy:

7

True.

But I do notice that the nature of my youthful, middle aged, and now geezery Stupid Stuff™ are quite different.

8

When I was 14 or 15, three of us slept out one night. We decided it would be fun to break into the house of some people we knew were away on vacation. We tried, and thankfully, failed. Thank God nobody saw us. Thank God we lived in a small town with only one cop, and he was probably sleeping. I shudder thinking of the consequences had we been caught, but not as much as I shudder at how stupid we were.

9

I’m seeing a trend here…

When I was 14, I made bombs. The year before, a guy my age who lived across the street showed me how to make gunpowder. Our gunpowder was mixed badly, with chunky pieces of broken-up charcoal briquets for the carbon. When we lit it, it sputtered and sparked, but was otherwise not too dangerous.

After he and his family moved away the following year, I kept experimenting with getting the proportions of each ingredient right, and using a mortar and pestle to make true powder. I lost the little hairs on the back of my lighter hand and almost my eyebrows the first time I lit a little pile of my new, improved gunpowder. But that did not deter me-- I’d fill empty CO2 cartridges from BB guns with powder, insert a rocket launcher, and run wiring from it. I only had 3 or 4 feet of wiring though. How to set off the bomb without blowing me up? Simple, I went to the local elementary school and ran the wire around the corner of the brick building (it was summer, so no other kids around-- safety first!). Then I touched the wires to a battery- BA-BOOM. I did this several times over that summer. Other kids I recruited to watch the explosions, standing dozens of yards away, would say they felt little pieces of shrapnel hitting them.

I finally wised up because there seemed to be a story in the news on a regular basis of some kid who made a pipe bomb and blew their fingers off. The clincher, I think, was a story of a kid who set off a pipe bomb on an empty playground with his friend sitting on a swing watching. The friend was hit in the temple with a piece of the pipe shrapnel and it made her brain dead. I think that finally got through my stupid 14 year old brain-- I retired for all time from gunpowder and bomb making, very lucky not to have seriously hurt myself or anyone else.

10

When I was 19 I turned down a full-ride scholarship to nursing school because I was in love with my new girlfriend and I couldn’t see myself spending that much tine away from her.

25 years later and I’m still dealing with the financial implications of that one decision.

There’s a few more but that’s the big one.

11

It’s an ideal age for impactfully bad decisions. You’ve got an adult-capable body with adult reading skills attached to a mind with substantially zero experience or judgment capability. Mayhem ensues.


I & my scurvy krewe of wannabe suburban pirates didn’t build bombs exactly. But we did discover the joys of oxyacetylene balloons. Fire up a welding torch, adjust the mixture to stoich, then quench the fire & use the gas flow to inflate a rubber party balloon.

They detonate with a great bang and no dangerous shrapnel. Unless put inside something frangible like a glass bottle.

You can also use pure acetylene. Those go off with a great FOOF and large cloud of roiling black smoke and soot.

But how to set them off? We hit on a stroke of genius based on model rocketry practice. Get some fine copper wire like telephone wire, strip off the insulation and wrap it around the balloon just above the knot area. Take an ordinary household extension cord and cut the female end off. Strip those wires and attach them to the pigtails of your phone wire.

Now plug the male end into the wall outlet and 1/2 to 1 second later the phone wire melts, burns, ignites the balloon rubber, and BANG! Hooray!

We set off a lot of those that way, with no thought to what that dead short was doing to the temperatures of the wiring in our house walls. The only reason we didn’t burn the house down was that it took long enough to wire up the next explosion that the temperature rise in the walls never got out of hand. And we evidently didn’t have any bad connections on that circuit.

But did we think of any of that at the time? Of course not.

12

Yep, for sure. My own son at 14 got into model rocketry with his friends. I assumed they were cardboard rockets, the equivalent of paper towel tubes with a cone and fins. I did tell him to be careful, to which he scornfully replied, “of course dad! Do you think I’m stupid?!?” He had always been pretty responsible, so I wasn’t too worried.

Then one night, when my wife and I were watching TV, we heard ‘BA-BOOM’ from the backyard, a sound that immediately brought me back to my own 14 year old misadventures. I ran back in a panic, to find my son white as a ghost, but otherwise unhurt. Turns out he had made a rocket out of a piece of copper pipe, with one end closed off and filed into a cone shape. He thought with one end open it couldn’t explode. He was wrong. I told him even if it had worked as expected, what he had made was basically a giant bullet, and he could have really hurt himself or somebody else. I said he was done experimenting with rockets. He said don’t worry, I’m never going to do that again.

13

When I was 11 I had to take two wooden folding chairs down to the basement. Instead of doing it one at a time, I tucked one under each arm. Not sideways but vertically, like they were crutches, with the tops tucked into my armpits. I was not a tall child, so as soon as I started to step down I found that the chairs prevented my foot from reaching the second step. Unfortunately, by the time I realized this I had leaned forward enough that it was impossible for me to step back. I went sailing all the down the stairway to the basement floor, landing arms first on the concrete surface, The chairs clattered down the steps after me.

After a bit I realized that my right wrist hurt like hell, but I was miraculously otherwise uninjured. I was about to call for help but then realized there was no one else in the house. So I pulled myself to my feet, went up the stairs and out the front door. My mother was across the street talking to a neighbor; I went up to her, cradling my right arm in my left and told her that I think I hurt my arm. The neighbor drove us to the ER, and it turned out that I had a greenstick fracture to one of the bones in my wrist. I had to spend three weeks with a cast on it. Unfortunately, one of those weeks I had to go to Boy Scout camp, where my ability to participate in some activities (like swimming) was severely curtailed.

I was lucky that I hadn’t been more severely imaged. However, for years I had a fear of carrying things down stairs when I couldn’t see where I was putting my feet.

14

Stupid stuff I have done:

Joined the Army
Married my first wife

15

You’re now the age (again) where that’s a legit fear that will stand you in good stead. I never go down stairs carrying something that occupies both hands or obscures my view.


Ref @Loach, marrying the second wife was my stupid mistake in that department. My late #1 was great.

16

With the current shape my knees are in I avoid stairs as much as possible. Taking the trash and recyclables out to the bin is an exercise in balance. If a bag is heavy I will set it on the steps, go down a few steps, then pull the bag down another step or two, step down to ground level, then pick up the bag and carry to the bin.

17

The homemade explosive story I have is about my son rather than me. When he was about 15, he and his friend got the idea that they could make homemade fireworks using ground up match heads as fuel. They got a box of matches and a couple of mortars and pestles and sat down and started grinding up the heads of the matches. After a few minutes they each had a little bowl of powder. Also, their hands were dusted with this highly flammable powder. Soon the inevitable happened, and the friction of the grinding ignited the powder in the mortar that my son was holding, as well as the powder coating his hand. He ran screaming into the house with fairly serious burns on his hand. He still refers to that incident as one of these stupidest things he has ever done.

18

When I was 16 years old, I needed to make a 1 inch diameter hole in a small piece of sheet metal.

So I found a 1 inch drill bit, and put it in the chuck in may father’s drill press. I turned on the drill press, held the small piece of sheet metal in my hand, and proceeded to make the hole.

I still have the scar on my hand from that one.

19

Work horseplay:

While in the welding/machine shop under the pretense of working on a “government” job, I used to take the above mentioned torch setup and fill an inverted 12oz disposable Styrofoam coffee cup with gas, then slide it across the floor and locate it near my chosen victim’s welding bench, then stand back and wait for the excitement. All it took was one little spark off his project melting thru the styro, and BOOM! The shock would knock the dust off the overhead crane rails, not to mention scare the stuff out of the welders.

I was old enough to know better.

Their payback usually involved a balloon delivered to the instrument shop.

20

Good times indeed

The difference between men and boys is a) the size of their toys, and b) the ounces & pounds TNT-equivalent yield of their pranks.

I salute your good works!!