Put a paper cap in it then throw it on the ground. Don’t remember the name of it though.
10
Yep, cheap but loud entertainment!
We used to play with capguns at school, nobody said a thing as long you kept it out of sight until recess and lunch.
9
Ahhhh, that awesome smell!
19
Take a whole roll of caps and smash ‘em with a hammer.
35
Wow. Blast from the past
12
I liked the rockets you fill with water, pump full of air and shoot into the sky……love those.
13
Caps and a toss onto a hard surface. And not always outside, which would get them confiscated.
5
Barky – we had those, but we used baking soda and vinegar for the propellant. The two didn’t mix until you turned it upside right. Later we graduated to Estes rockets!
8
Doug Wakeman–I did that too! Still love the smell,too.
8
I fondly remember, and I too used to do what Doug Wakeman did. Fun times until Mom made us clean off the black powder burns on the sidewalk.
5
Still recall buying 10-packs of caps! Liked doubling them up in these little rocket toys! Fun for hours …
6
Book matches – place a pack on a hard surface and smack it with a hammer. Yowsah.
5
we made our own with two bolts and a nut.
good times.
can you even buy caps anymore ?
i thought it was great fun when we all learned how to make smoke and stink bombs.
my mother wanted to kill us for it.
liberals ruin everything they touch.
especially childhood
9
I remember those, but the ones we had were die-cast metal
6
Yep, used roll caps in them
2
I made sure my kids had these and cap guns and all that wonderful old fashioned entertainment. Even *gasp* candy cigarettes.
7
Carbide Canon
I have seen those I think
3
Loved them, but it required a hard surface to land on. That really limited their use.
So we took the idea to the next level. We bought a bunch of those small plain emergency candles. In the Texas heat, they were 3 inches of soft wax we could mold around Black Cats and make our own grenades. Re-usable too! Turned grenade grey after a few uses.
Now THAT was fun! lol
Come to think of it, we did a lot of things the police would be called out for now. 😀
4
Match heads rolled up in tinfoil made fun rockets too.
3
How about Greenie Stick-M-Caps?
4
We had these but we also had similar ones that looked like hand grenades. I had a Mattell Tommy Burst sub-machine gun that you could put a roll of caps in and pull back the bolt and fire off about twenty rounds at a time. Caps are still available and my local small town grocery store sells them. I had one of those vinegar and baking soda rockets and man did those things fly high. They looked just like a V-2 rocket and would go clean out of sight. When we ran out of money for caps and such, we had dirt clod wars. We weren’t trying to hurt each other, just make the other guy sting a little. I guess the all-time most awesome thing we did was have bottle rocket wars. We made bazooka-style launchers and spent our time collecting coke bottles from ditches along the road to cash in for the rockets. We killed many Krauts and Japs playing army and built forts and caves and tunnels to defend. We even bought a telegraph key at the local Army surplus store and ran a working telegraph line to communicate with. Dang! Growing up sucks.
10
I was the kid that wound down on a half dozen rolls of caps in a vice in dad’s garage. Hit the front of it with a hammer and ’bout gave my mother heart failure. She survived.
She’s 81 and loves to go to movies. I hear the stories every week on the way to the theater…
4
What about M80s and D-cells in a length of 2” pipe. Howitzer, baby.
5
I got a black powder canon made out of brass from my school counselor, he confiscated it from somebody that blew it off in the school parking lot. He made me promise not to fire it off at school.
I made a pirate ship looking mahogany wood base for it in shop class. I still have it to this day half inch bore. Man It goes boom.
Now days incorrectly eating a pop tart or pointing your finger👉 in a certain way will get you expelled.
Home schooled all three of our kids ( the wife did all the teaching) so they turned out mighty fine.
1
Are you kiddin me, of course I do. I still have my too!
We used to take CO2 cartridges fill them with match heads after we cut the ends off and put them in a three-quarter inch pipe with a fuse and light them off at the school play ground, never saw them again though. Good times.
6
I remember those, but the metal kind were better – more weight. You were supposed to use a single cap, but we would stuff 3 or 4 in, then fling them up 25 or 30 feet in the air above an asphalt street or other hard surface. Boom!
When I was in Jr. High, some kid gave me an old Carbide Cannon (remember them?) that
only had the opening in the back where the “firing” mechanism was supposed to go. I wired
a couple of big washers over the opening and taped it over with duct tape so that there was only a small hole that a Black Cat firecracker would fit into perfectly, with just the fuse sticking out. Put a marble or steel ball bearing in the muzzle end, light the fuse,
and you got yourself a cannon that could fire a projectile almost half a block.
Good times…
6
I remember when superballs came out, and later small balls and mini balls. One superball cost $1, or you could get 4 small balls or 6 mini balls for the same amount. That was a lot of money to me at 9 years old.
We had a driveway that sloped down to dense bushes. My brother and I learned to never bounce balls down the driveway because they would inevitably get lost in the bushes.
One time my grandmother came to visit. She came outside while my brother and I were playing. Unbeknownst to us, she had brought about 10 superballs to give to us as presents. Her way of giving them to us was to bounce them down the driveway! We started screaming at her to stop, but she was laughing and laughing. My brother and I were desperately trying to intercept the balls before they reached the bushes, with no luck. My grandmother just kept laughing and laughing while we were pleading with her to stop.
Of the 10 superballs, we only recovered two. The rest are still somewhere in those bushes.
3
@Quinn: Lots of guys have lost their balls in the bush that way.
😉
5
Toenex, one of my brothers made rockets out of CO2 cartridges and match heads also. He would take them up to the junior high field about a block from our house and shoot them off out of a piece of metal pipe like a mortar, those puppies would go 3-400 yards. If he was to do that now he’d be in heap big trouble. And I could’ve burned the house down making smoke bombs in my bedroom when I was 14 and they went off filling the room entirely full of smoke. It was also the last time my dad paddled my ass for being so stupid. It’s a wonder we all survived childhood with all our extremities intact. My dad and his older brother would steal some of my grandfathers dynamite that he used to blow up stumps back in the 30’s and early 40’s and use it to go fishing at Hayden Lake in N. Idaho. Needless to say they caught a lot of fish illegally that way.
‘
1
My boys made potato cannons. They would gather all the Axe samples they could and use the electric starter from a gas grill and pvc pipe.
They used to make bombs with a toilet cleaner and balled up tin foil in soda bottles. Then they would go to a field and the woods and make war movies.
A big trebuchet once too. Then they turned that into a big cross in the yard.
1
Lye and aluminum foil mixed together with a little water inside a plastic bottle made great little bombs with a balloon to lift it up to blow off garbage can lids in the alley behind my house but my brother and his buddy were the primary suspects since our garbage can lid was the only one not blown off.
1
We had an annoying neighbor when I lived with a bunch of guys when I was single back in the mid 70’s who always got up around 5-5:30 in the morning and would rev his motor up real loud, he had like a GTO or some other hot rod. One of my roommates finally totally took care of that by jamming a potato up the exhaust pipe of his car and blowing his muffler to smithereens when he went out to rev up his car one morning. After that we had no more problems with him and he never found out who did it.
3
One of my favorite summer memories was lighting up “Sidewalk Snakes”–little black cylinders that stunk like hell when you lit them and they burned into “snakes”; they also left marks on the sidewalks that took years to wear off.
1
@beachmom: a friend of mine made one of those lye/foil bang bangs years ago. Of course alcohol was involved, he was in his 30s. He tossed it in the road and waited. Nothing happened. He went out and tapped it with his foot and it went off, lodging a chunk of plastic in his neck. Someone saw what happened and got him to ER… he nearly bled out.
2
First rule of bomb making: Never touch a dud.
5
We’d tape 4 or 5 coke cans together after taking off the tops and bottoms with a can opener (when they still had seams), leaving the last bottom on with a small hole in it. Put in some lighter fluid, swing it around to coat the walls, then put in a tennis ball. Light the end with the hole – WHOOMP – tennis ball flies 25 yards. Good times.
1-1/2″ PVC pipe, CO2 cartridge in a Coleman lantern adapter, and a ball valve. Potatoes fly 75 yards easy. We made two replica Civil War cannons for a marching band show using sheet metal with wooden carriage and wheels. Used powdered sugar to simulate smoke. Looked real and the band boosters won an award for most realistic props. Of course, we had to “test” them first, dontcha know.
1
I had two cousins in San Antonio who literally blew a telephone pole in half with a homemade explosive. The cops showed up at their home and told them to never do that again. That was about 1965.
Put a paper cap in it then throw it on the ground. Don’t remember the name of it though.
Yep, cheap but loud entertainment!
We used to play with capguns at school, nobody said a thing as long you kept it out of sight until recess and lunch.
Ahhhh, that awesome smell!
Take a whole roll of caps and smash ‘em with a hammer.
Wow. Blast from the past
I liked the rockets you fill with water, pump full of air and shoot into the sky……love those.
Caps and a toss onto a hard surface. And not always outside, which would get them confiscated.
Barky – we had those, but we used baking soda and vinegar for the propellant. The two didn’t mix until you turned it upside right. Later we graduated to Estes rockets!
Doug Wakeman–I did that too! Still love the smell,too.
I fondly remember, and I too used to do what Doug Wakeman did. Fun times until Mom made us clean off the black powder burns on the sidewalk.
Still recall buying 10-packs of caps! Liked doubling them up in these little rocket toys! Fun for hours …
Book matches – place a pack on a hard surface and smack it with a hammer. Yowsah.
we made our own with two bolts and a nut.
good times.
can you even buy caps anymore ?
i thought it was great fun when we all learned how to make smoke and stink bombs.
my mother wanted to kill us for it.
liberals ruin everything they touch.
especially childhood
I remember those, but the ones we had were die-cast metal
Yep, used roll caps in them
I made sure my kids had these and cap guns and all that wonderful old fashioned entertainment. Even *gasp* candy cigarettes.
Carbide Canon
I have seen those I think
Loved them, but it required a hard surface to land on. That really limited their use.
So we took the idea to the next level. We bought a bunch of those small plain emergency candles. In the Texas heat, they were 3 inches of soft wax we could mold around Black Cats and make our own grenades. Re-usable too! Turned grenade grey after a few uses.
Now THAT was fun! lol
Come to think of it, we did a lot of things the police would be called out for now. 😀
Match heads rolled up in tinfoil made fun rockets too.
How about Greenie Stick-M-Caps?
We had these but we also had similar ones that looked like hand grenades. I had a Mattell Tommy Burst sub-machine gun that you could put a roll of caps in and pull back the bolt and fire off about twenty rounds at a time. Caps are still available and my local small town grocery store sells them. I had one of those vinegar and baking soda rockets and man did those things fly high. They looked just like a V-2 rocket and would go clean out of sight. When we ran out of money for caps and such, we had dirt clod wars. We weren’t trying to hurt each other, just make the other guy sting a little. I guess the all-time most awesome thing we did was have bottle rocket wars. We made bazooka-style launchers and spent our time collecting coke bottles from ditches along the road to cash in for the rockets. We killed many Krauts and Japs playing army and built forts and caves and tunnels to defend. We even bought a telegraph key at the local Army surplus store and ran a working telegraph line to communicate with. Dang! Growing up sucks.
I was the kid that wound down on a half dozen rolls of caps in a vice in dad’s garage. Hit the front of it with a hammer and ’bout gave my mother heart failure. She survived.
She’s 81 and loves to go to movies. I hear the stories every week on the way to the theater…
What about M80s and D-cells in a length of 2” pipe. Howitzer, baby.
I got a black powder canon made out of brass from my school counselor, he confiscated it from somebody that blew it off in the school parking lot. He made me promise not to fire it off at school.
I made a pirate ship looking mahogany wood base for it in shop class. I still have it to this day half inch bore. Man It goes boom.
Now days incorrectly eating a pop tart or pointing your finger👉 in a certain way will get you expelled.
Home schooled all three of our kids ( the wife did all the teaching) so they turned out mighty fine.
Are you kiddin me, of course I do. I still have my too!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-JARTS-MISSLE-GAME-OUTDOOR-LAWN-DARTS-Box-Only-/232809809725
And that’s just the box!
We used to take CO2 cartridges fill them with match heads after we cut the ends off and put them in a three-quarter inch pipe with a fuse and light them off at the school play ground, never saw them again though. Good times.
I remember those, but the metal kind were better – more weight. You were supposed to use a single cap, but we would stuff 3 or 4 in, then fling them up 25 or 30 feet in the air above an asphalt street or other hard surface. Boom!
When I was in Jr. High, some kid gave me an old Carbide Cannon (remember them?) that
only had the opening in the back where the “firing” mechanism was supposed to go. I wired
a couple of big washers over the opening and taped it over with duct tape so that there was only a small hole that a Black Cat firecracker would fit into perfectly, with just the fuse sticking out. Put a marble or steel ball bearing in the muzzle end, light the fuse,
and you got yourself a cannon that could fire a projectile almost half a block.
Good times…
I remember when superballs came out, and later small balls and mini balls. One superball cost $1, or you could get 4 small balls or 6 mini balls for the same amount. That was a lot of money to me at 9 years old.
We had a driveway that sloped down to dense bushes. My brother and I learned to never bounce balls down the driveway because they would inevitably get lost in the bushes.
One time my grandmother came to visit. She came outside while my brother and I were playing. Unbeknownst to us, she had brought about 10 superballs to give to us as presents. Her way of giving them to us was to bounce them down the driveway! We started screaming at her to stop, but she was laughing and laughing. My brother and I were desperately trying to intercept the balls before they reached the bushes, with no luck. My grandmother just kept laughing and laughing while we were pleading with her to stop.
Of the 10 superballs, we only recovered two. The rest are still somewhere in those bushes.
@Quinn: Lots of guys have lost their balls in the bush that way.
😉
Toenex, one of my brothers made rockets out of CO2 cartridges and match heads also. He would take them up to the junior high field about a block from our house and shoot them off out of a piece of metal pipe like a mortar, those puppies would go 3-400 yards. If he was to do that now he’d be in heap big trouble. And I could’ve burned the house down making smoke bombs in my bedroom when I was 14 and they went off filling the room entirely full of smoke. It was also the last time my dad paddled my ass for being so stupid. It’s a wonder we all survived childhood with all our extremities intact. My dad and his older brother would steal some of my grandfathers dynamite that he used to blow up stumps back in the 30’s and early 40’s and use it to go fishing at Hayden Lake in N. Idaho. Needless to say they caught a lot of fish illegally that way.
‘
My boys made potato cannons. They would gather all the Axe samples they could and use the electric starter from a gas grill and pvc pipe.
They used to make bombs with a toilet cleaner and balled up tin foil in soda bottles. Then they would go to a field and the woods and make war movies.
A big trebuchet once too. Then they turned that into a big cross in the yard.
Lye and aluminum foil mixed together with a little water inside a plastic bottle made great little bombs with a balloon to lift it up to blow off garbage can lids in the alley behind my house but my brother and his buddy were the primary suspects since our garbage can lid was the only one not blown off.
We had an annoying neighbor when I lived with a bunch of guys when I was single back in the mid 70’s who always got up around 5-5:30 in the morning and would rev his motor up real loud, he had like a GTO or some other hot rod. One of my roommates finally totally took care of that by jamming a potato up the exhaust pipe of his car and blowing his muffler to smithereens when he went out to rev up his car one morning. After that we had no more problems with him and he never found out who did it.
One of my favorite summer memories was lighting up “Sidewalk Snakes”–little black cylinders that stunk like hell when you lit them and they burned into “snakes”; they also left marks on the sidewalks that took years to wear off.
@beachmom: a friend of mine made one of those lye/foil bang bangs years ago. Of course alcohol was involved, he was in his 30s. He tossed it in the road and waited. Nothing happened. He went out and tapped it with his foot and it went off, lodging a chunk of plastic in his neck. Someone saw what happened and got him to ER… he nearly bled out.
First rule of bomb making: Never touch a dud.
We’d tape 4 or 5 coke cans together after taking off the tops and bottoms with a can opener (when they still had seams), leaving the last bottom on with a small hole in it. Put in some lighter fluid, swing it around to coat the walls, then put in a tennis ball. Light the end with the hole – WHOOMP – tennis ball flies 25 yards. Good times.
1-1/2″ PVC pipe, CO2 cartridge in a Coleman lantern adapter, and a ball valve. Potatoes fly 75 yards easy. We made two replica Civil War cannons for a marching band show using sheet metal with wooden carriage and wheels. Used powdered sugar to simulate smoke. Looked real and the band boosters won an award for most realistic props. Of course, we had to “test” them first, dontcha know.
I had two cousins in San Antonio who literally blew a telephone pole in half with a homemade explosive. The cops showed up at their home and told them to never do that again. That was about 1965.