Stupid things you've done...

[Emanuel]

Oh man Emanuel. Every violinist in the world dream about playing a Stra..... and you actually destroyed one eh?

Close guess, it wasn't a Strad, but the maker was the other famous pupil of Nicolo Amati.

Still you're very right, most violinists would dream of playing one. According to my parents it clearly had a better sound than any other violin they've ever heard before or since.

http://www.kean.edu/pressreleases/2001/mozart.htm

Like I said, ....Ooops.

 

[Chris Meyer]

Too many to write about. It would take up pages, but here's my favorite...

I was about 12 years old and I liked to play with things that went bang. I took an empty CO2 cartridge and drilled out the plug. I cut the strike-anywhere tips off of kitchen matches and stuffed them into the cartridge until it was almost full. I even packed them in real tight with a small wood dowel. DOUBLE Somewhere, I had acquired some 1/4" safety fuse and stuck the end of about 3 feet of it in the cartridge and shoved it down a gopher hole. I lit it and backed off about 10 feet.

KABOOM!

I was showered with dirt and when I stuck a stick is the depression of loose dirt, I couldn't find the bottom. I still shudder to think what would have happened if it went off in my hand while I was tamping the matches into it.:barf:

When I was 14 years old I did a similar thing with match heads. I took an aluminum tube and plugged one end with a piece of wooden dowl. Then I spent hours cutting the heads off of a large box of stick matches and stuffing them in the tube. When I had it filled, I used another piece of dowl to seal up the tube. Naturally, I had forgotten to make a hole for the fuse. So, like an idiot, I took out my father's electric drill and started drilling through one of the plugs. As you may have guessed, when the hot drill hit the matches it ignited them. Fortunately for me, the matches burned rather than exploded and just filled my basement with smoke. At least I never tried that again.

 

[skyman]

There must be something about empty CO2 cartridges and match heads... When I was a young teenager, my brother and I were trying to make homemade rocket engines out of them, using, what else, match heads!

A neighbor girl was watching us make one in the carport one day, and I can't remember how it got ignited now, but ignited it got! For a fraction of a second it burned like it was supposed to and took off ricocheting off the walls and flying around the carport "like a rocket". But in an instant it exploded with a bang that caused all of our ears to ring for some time after.

Miraculously, no one was hurt by the shrapnel, but I remember being extremely sobered, even at that young age, by realizing what could have happened to us or an innocent bystander.

We didn't relinquesh our quest however- just continued with controlled experiments in a hole in the ground under plywood. We experimented with black powder, diluted black powder, etc., but never did come up with one that burned controllably- they all exploded.

Match heads did work good for spoke guns though. Remember them? Just reverse the hollow, threaded end on the spoke, stuff it with match heads, cram a no. 8 lead birdshot in the end to plug it, and hold a match or lighter under the barrel until it went off. It would shoot the birdshot through many layers of newspaper. Would have put an eye out also. But we were experts by then, of course. The good old days.