Yeah, that didn't work - your great ideas that weren't
Discussion
Mucking about with my Dad's multimeter and some broken hi fi separates I was trying to diagnose. Aged 11? Put it on the 10 amp setting and bridged the main input terminals to see what would happen. Biiiig flash and I was sitting on the floor about 10ft away feeling a bit shaky;)
Destroyed the probes completely but remarkably the meter itself seemed none the worse for the experience. He still has it.
Destroyed the probes completely but remarkably the meter itself seemed none the worse for the experience. He still has it.
The Dictator said:
Castrol for a knave said:
When I was a kid, growing up in the northern post apocalyptic wasteland of Bradford, I used to play in an old mill next to the house.
Parts of the mill were still in use, and there was often much treasure to be had rooting through the skips. I decided one skip would be best if I set it alight. I promptly did so and as the burning match caught, an almighty whoosh of flame fired out from a metal can of adhesive. This then spat hot adhesive in my direction, a large lump of which came to rest, right in the centre of my head, just above my hairline.
I managed to put the fire out, but by now I had a burned, bald patch about the size of a beer mat.
Since this was the very early 80's and we all had long hair, I formulated a plan. I got home and evaded my formidable grandmother, despite smelling like the Hindenburg and cut a fistful of collar length hair from the back of my head.
I then took some Superglue, and glued it on the bald patch. No flies on me!
Except...
I glued it the wrong way, so the newly adhered hair ran across the grain, so to to speak.
It remained this way for at least 3 days until it either flaked of or I pulled it off, which made school interesting - most of which was spent stood in the middle of hall, for being a retard or some other trumped up charge.
I laughed at this far more than I should have done.Parts of the mill were still in use, and there was often much treasure to be had rooting through the skips. I decided one skip would be best if I set it alight. I promptly did so and as the burning match caught, an almighty whoosh of flame fired out from a metal can of adhesive. This then spat hot adhesive in my direction, a large lump of which came to rest, right in the centre of my head, just above my hairline.
I managed to put the fire out, but by now I had a burned, bald patch about the size of a beer mat.
Since this was the very early 80's and we all had long hair, I formulated a plan. I got home and evaded my formidable grandmother, despite smelling like the Hindenburg and cut a fistful of collar length hair from the back of my head.
I then took some Superglue, and glued it on the bald patch. No flies on me!
Except...
I glued it the wrong way, so the newly adhered hair ran across the grain, so to to speak.
It remained this way for at least 3 days until it either flaked of or I pulled it off, which made school interesting - most of which was spent stood in the middle of hall, for being a retard or some other trumped up charge.
Allegro_Snapon said:
1) 1980. Battleship game / Airfix. For some reason decided to try and paint the two red and blue battleships game parts in UK and Nazi ship colours using the paints from my Airfix plane collection. Looked crap. Decided to use paint remover to take the paint back off. Melted the plastic as well, very quickly. Left with two blobs of read and blue plastic melted into my bedroom visco-cotton carpet. Moved the bed to help hide it. Was of course found out. #amatuer mxingchemicalisabadidea
2) A bit later in the 1980s a group of us from school had discovered when the new bypass cutting was built it had breached an old minor adit for a coal mine. So we made that our den, 50 yards deep into the Derbyshire coal seam. All went well until one day late summer, it was getting a bit colder in there and someone had the idea to line the floor with the dry grass from the cutting embankment. Which was OK, until some fat lardy bottomed bloke knocked off a candle in the entrance tunnel. Which meant those of us deep in the hill were now being slowly chocked by smoke. Fortunately we all got out, but the fire spread to the embankment of the dual carriageway as well shutting the road on a Bank Holiday. #howtimehas flown..........this image, where the truck is is just by where the entrance to the adit was. There were no trees there at all in the early 1980s...... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gosforth_L........the Firefighters were interested in why a group of smokey smelling lads were hanging around on the footbridge ......
3) "Sheffield mild-gun". On the back of the Sheffield Supergun Scandal we tried (15 at the time) using recycled material to develop our own "gun". We had a fire pit we dug into the ground on a friends property, just next to the Midland Main line. Said fire pit was used to generate heat and cast iron pipes used for barrels of the gun. We experimented with various projectiles (full containers petrol - just a messy fire, half empty gas canisters - blew the cast iron apart, until we found that Lynx deodorant tubes, dropped in a cast iron pipe into a charcol firepit after between 60 - 120s would be ejected more rapidly than a Brown Otter from ones Chocolate Starfish after a night on the egg phaals in Rusholme. Remember on line 2 I mentioned about the MML railway. We we'd managed to clear the embankment several times to the fields of the sewage works the other side the railway....but could we clear a train?????????? We got the fire hot, worked out our detonation time, reckoned that you could just about hear the Southbound 125 HST exit Bradway Tunnel a mile and a half before and that should be the time to drop the package into the device and see what happened. Yep we broadsided the Sheffield - London Kings Cross Master Cutler with a can of Lynx Africa. So we did invent a cheap field deployable weapon but it turns out an HST that has been hit on the driving cab with an exploding deodorant can is able to a) hit the brakes at 90 mph and stop within a mile b) call BTP about the group of lads in a field with a fire c) was worth looking at laughing at and oh s
t here are the fire brigade guys from when we set fire to the bypass and the police as well......Bugger. Got a caution (spent three decades ago now) for that.
Anyway, fire and explosives and mixing chemicals, 30 years as a Chemical Engineer in the professional world beckoned, so it was all just "work experience".
Brilliant 2) A bit later in the 1980s a group of us from school had discovered when the new bypass cutting was built it had breached an old minor adit for a coal mine. So we made that our den, 50 yards deep into the Derbyshire coal seam. All went well until one day late summer, it was getting a bit colder in there and someone had the idea to line the floor with the dry grass from the cutting embankment. Which was OK, until some fat lardy bottomed bloke knocked off a candle in the entrance tunnel. Which meant those of us deep in the hill were now being slowly chocked by smoke. Fortunately we all got out, but the fire spread to the embankment of the dual carriageway as well shutting the road on a Bank Holiday. #howtimehas flown..........this image, where the truck is is just by where the entrance to the adit was. There were no trees there at all in the early 1980s...... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gosforth_L........the Firefighters were interested in why a group of smokey smelling lads were hanging around on the footbridge ......
3) "Sheffield mild-gun". On the back of the Sheffield Supergun Scandal we tried (15 at the time) using recycled material to develop our own "gun". We had a fire pit we dug into the ground on a friends property, just next to the Midland Main line. Said fire pit was used to generate heat and cast iron pipes used for barrels of the gun. We experimented with various projectiles (full containers petrol - just a messy fire, half empty gas canisters - blew the cast iron apart, until we found that Lynx deodorant tubes, dropped in a cast iron pipe into a charcol firepit after between 60 - 120s would be ejected more rapidly than a Brown Otter from ones Chocolate Starfish after a night on the egg phaals in Rusholme. Remember on line 2 I mentioned about the MML railway. We we'd managed to clear the embankment several times to the fields of the sewage works the other side the railway....but could we clear a train?????????? We got the fire hot, worked out our detonation time, reckoned that you could just about hear the Southbound 125 HST exit Bradway Tunnel a mile and a half before and that should be the time to drop the package into the device and see what happened. Yep we broadsided the Sheffield - London Kings Cross Master Cutler with a can of Lynx Africa. So we did invent a cheap field deployable weapon but it turns out an HST that has been hit on the driving cab with an exploding deodorant can is able to a) hit the brakes at 90 mph and stop within a mile b) call BTP about the group of lads in a field with a fire c) was worth looking at laughing at and oh s
t here are the fire brigade guys from when we set fire to the bypass and the police as well......Bugger. Got a caution (spent three decades ago now) for that.Anyway, fire and explosives and mixing chemicals, 30 years as a Chemical Engineer in the professional world beckoned, so it was all just "work experience".
The Dictator said:
Castrol for a knave said:
When I was a kid, growing up in the northern post apocalyptic wasteland of Bradford, I used to play in an old mill next to the house.
Parts of the mill were still in use, and there was often much treasure to be had rooting through the skips. I decided one skip would be best if I set it alight. I promptly did so and as the burning match caught, an almighty whoosh of flame fired out from a metal can of adhesive. This then spat hot adhesive in my direction, a large lump of which came to rest, right in the centre of my head, just above my hairline.
I managed to put the fire out, but by now I had a burned, bald patch about the size of a beer mat.
Since this was the very early 80's and we all had long hair, I formulated a plan. I got home and evaded my formidable grandmother, despite smelling like the Hindenburg and cut a fistful of collar length hair from the back of my head.
I then took some Superglue, and glued it on the bald patch. No flies on me!
Except...
I glued it the wrong way, so the newly adhered hair ran across the grain, so to to speak.
It remained this way for at least 3 days until it either flaked of or I pulled it off, which made school interesting - most of which was spent stood in the middle of hall, for being a retard or some other trumped up charge.
I laughed at this far more than I should have done.Parts of the mill were still in use, and there was often much treasure to be had rooting through the skips. I decided one skip would be best if I set it alight. I promptly did so and as the burning match caught, an almighty whoosh of flame fired out from a metal can of adhesive. This then spat hot adhesive in my direction, a large lump of which came to rest, right in the centre of my head, just above my hairline.
I managed to put the fire out, but by now I had a burned, bald patch about the size of a beer mat.
Since this was the very early 80's and we all had long hair, I formulated a plan. I got home and evaded my formidable grandmother, despite smelling like the Hindenburg and cut a fistful of collar length hair from the back of my head.
I then took some Superglue, and glued it on the bald patch. No flies on me!
Except...
I glued it the wrong way, so the newly adhered hair ran across the grain, so to to speak.
It remained this way for at least 3 days until it either flaked of or I pulled it off, which made school interesting - most of which was spent stood in the middle of hall, for being a retard or some other trumped up charge.
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