Old War Relics Found

Man_of_Stoat · December 10, 2005, 4:29pm

No, it won’t go any significant distance. You’re at more danger from brass shards than anyone downrange is from the bullet.

Firefly · December 10, 2005, 5:47pm

arhob1:

Although worried about what the effect of using a hammer/nail to fire a round would be on me, it never once occured to me that even if the case didn’t explode I would then launch a .303 round that could have passed through the back gardens of neighbours for a mile or more.

On the one hand that could have been fun (all those neighbours with washing out which suddenly sprouted mysterious .303 diameter holes appearing in them) or could have been quite serious.

Which brings me on to when at age 13 I made a fully working flame thrower (flames thrown about 20 feet) which really up-ed the ante when playing soldiers in the woods. The only casualties were a few burnt trousers and trainers but which ever side possessed the flame thrower was guaranteed victory.

Sorry mod for going off topic and reminiscing.

Out of interest the flame thrower was an old paraffin camping stove. You pumped up the pressure in the container carrying the paraffin and thsi produced a steady flame. To convert this to a flame thrower all I needed to do was to use epoxy resin to jam the pressure regulator so that instead of only a very mild few psi of pressure being possible you could just pump it up to a seemingly unlimited pressure. Then remove the rose that the paraffin diffused through and you had a thin jet of neat paraffin that at high pressure would squirt a good 20 feet. You then just needed an accomplish with a gallon container of paraffin and a match and off you go. The only draw back I remember was that once lit there was no turning it off until the fuel ran out (2-4 mins). I remember once setting the woods on fire and whilst stamping that out another bit went on fire and so on and going home singed, blackened and stinking of paraffin all over. Happy but grossly irresponsible days. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

Jesus, laffing my Ass off right now, imagining you trying to put out the fires, you bloody maniac!

Kovalski · April 30, 2006, 2:04pm

I decided not dig in woods after my schoolmate almost lost his eyes. The day after he bought a metal-detector we went to woods few miles away from my home town. We were 16, so it was a great toy for us. We heard rumors about some german unit’s HQ there. We found nothing but some shells and pieces of metal. One of these pieces turned out to be a fragment of some bomb. It exploded just in front of my mate’s face. He was really lucky. He had to stay in hospital for a few days, because doctor had to remove some tiny pieces from his forehead. We didn’t tell the doctor what really happend. If we did there we would have a lot of troubles with police. It was the last time I went to woods to look for some “interesting stuff”.