How close is YOUR closest?

[Reedus]

This one applies to all you adrenaline junkies out there. What is the closest you have come to hosing yourself and taking you out of the gene pool? I'll go first: 16 years old and invincible. My brother was facinated by explosives and devised his own pipe bomb. It was a 4 inch piece of conduit with threaded ends. He filled it with Pyrodex smokeless powder, but had no fuse for it. So, improvising, he drilled a hole in one end of the cap and imbedded a black cat fire cracker in the powder with the fuse sticking out of the cap. For those of you that have messed around with black cats, some of them have a fuse that lasts for about .5 of one second. I had many numb fingers from those bastards. Anywho, with the completed bomb, no one had the cahones to light the fuse and take off running without gettin your arse chuck full of shrappnel. So again, improvision stepped in. He took some gas and poured a 20 foot line of it leading up to the BC fuse. Me and my buddies were about 50 yards away behind some big rocks. He lit the gas and took off for a hiding place. We could see that the gas had burned down to the fuse, but nothing had happened. After waiting a full ten minutes for the fire to burn out, I was the curious george who went to investigate. I picked it up and started back towards my friends with it. I got half way there and all hell cut loose. It went off and blew the ever living %$@# out of my hand. My middle finger was blown 70 feet from my body. The rest of my hand was a mangled mess of tendon and flesh. Thanks to Dr. Clayton and 10 hours in surgery at Utah Valley Hospital, my hand was restored to full use minus the birdie. (That finger only got me into trouble anyways.) Moral of the story, don't be a curious george.

Reedus

[rockgremlin]

OUCH!!! I'm really impressed at what modern medicine can do. I have seen pictures of hands blown up by fireworks/pipebombs etc (www.ogrish.com), and it's really a miracle that they can restore them. In that respect, medical doctors are really worth every penny of the six figures they make a year.

Is your mobility limited? Do you have full feeling in your fingers?

[James_B_Wads2000]

This one applies to all you adrenaline junkies out there. What is the closest you have come to hosing yourself and taking you out of the gene pool? I'll go first: 16 years old and invincible. My brother was facinated by explosives and devised his own pipe bomb. It was a 4 inch piece of conduit with threaded ends. He filled it with Pyrodex smokeless powder, but had no fuse for it. So, improvising, he drilled a hole in one end of the cap and imbedded a black cat fire cracker in the powder with the fuse sticking out of the cap. For those of you that have messed around with black cats, some of them have a fuse that lasts for about .5 of one second. I had many numb fingers from those bastards. Anywho, with the completed bomb, no one had the cahones to light the fuse and take off running without gettin your arse chuck full of shrappnel. So again, improvision stepped in. He took some gas and poured a 20 foot line of it leading up to the BC fuse. Me and my buddies were about 50 yards away behind some big rocks. He lit the gas and took off for a hiding place. We could see that the gas had burned down to the fuse, but nothing had happened. After waiting a full ten minutes for the fire to burn out, I was the curious george who went to investigate. I picked it up and started back towards my friends with it. I got half way there and all hell cut loose. It went off and blew the ever living %$@# out of my hand. My middle finger was blown 70 feet from my body. The rest of my hand was a mangled mess of tendon and flesh. Thanks to Dr. Clayton and 10 hours in surgery at Utah Valley Hospital, my hand was restored to full use minus the birdie. (That finger only got me into trouble anyways.) Moral of the story, don't be a curious george.

Reedus

Speaking of blowing your hand up, I have a very similar story. I happened to my friend Travis but I was an accomplice. Travis and I spend many summer days between elementary school years learning how to make explosives out of ground bloom flower fireworks. Many a G.I. Joe met their fate with one of these improvised explosive devices strapped to them. As we got closer to Jr. high we began to make dry ice bombs, bombs made of model rocket engines and hydrogen gas bombs. Then Travis got his hands on some black gun powder used for muzzle loading. We too used pipes with caps, but I belive it was threaded

[Reedus]

My index finger can't quite straighten all the way and the right side of it has never regained feeling. Other than that I would say I was pretty damn lucky. I was holding against my stomach when it went off. All I recieved there were a few powder burns that have since disapeared. What is really sad is that I never learned my lesson. In highschool, we got a hold of some M80's that the forest service issues farmers to scare elk off there land. I have been told that they are 1/4 stick of dynamite. We get the bright idea to flush one down the toilet at the high school in hopes that it would get down into the pipes and explode making it necessary to dig it up to repair it. We were hoping to get a day off of school from it Well, I was the hit man. My buddy stood watch at the door. I lit the fuse and tossed it into the john and then flushed it. Well, the damn thing just sat there and spun around and around. I saw that it wasn't going to make it down and high tailed it to the door. Just as I opened it, the percussion blew me out the door. I looked back to see half the toilet sitting outside the stall and water flowing everywhere. That was the end of my explosive days due to the fact that I did 10 days in the slammer for that one. I still get a kick out of things blowing up though. I would have killed to have been up Spanish Fork canyon on the hillside somewhere high when that Semi full of TNT went off.

Reedus

[Reedus]

Here is a picture if anyone is interested. Look pretty...... Bart Simpsony

[rockgremlin]

Wow!! That DOES look like Bart Simpson! Kinda cool how they were able to just sew the first and third fingers together like that.

You should go into mining -- we blow stuff up on a daily basis.

[basilone0331]

Reminds me of a kid I saw in Fallujah

[rockgremlin]

I'm calling photoshop on this one.

[basilone0331]

I'm calling photoshop on this one.

I would too if I hadn't seen him myself.

[rockgremlin]

Well I'll be damned! He should play baseball - he'd make one helluva great catcher!

[accadacca]

Well I'll be damned!

[DickHead]

That's creepy shit there. I guess the arabs moved on from Sheep and Camel to 1st cousins....


I've had a few close calls. Mostly not my fault.

Pitched out of the back of a 6x6 at about 45mph. Absolutely no serious injury....bruises and scratches.....
AV8B nearly hit the tower once....so close he knocked our secondary antenneas off the roof....
12ga full of birshot vs. metal sign at about 10'.....shot ricocheted back in my face, nice sunglasses saved my eyes.....
Carefully built and assembled BP pipebomb....under an upside down washer. Beautiful explosion sending washer 20' up in the air.....washer motor came off and landed just a few feet from me.....
Nearly hit by a sandrail while riding a 3wheeler in Glamis....jumped over me while I was riding in the bottom of a bowl and missed me by just a few feet.....
Married 11 years.....

Woman at a gun range had a malfunction and came over to me, pointing her pistol at me, pulling the trigger asking me if I can fix the gun.....

55mph on my roadbike in millcreek canyon when a convertible pulled out right in front of me.....

[Wasatch Rebel]

When I was a kid, my friend came over to my house, and disappeared into the basement with my brother. An hour later, he came up screaming, said he'd burned his face bad. Seems he'd gotten into my dad's black powder with the help of my bro, then filled a homeade play dough bomb with the stuff, ran a trail of powder to the bomb for a fuse then lit the thing. I guess he thought that it'd be like the cartoons, you know, take a few seconds for the trail to burn and he'd have plenty of time to run. No way. That black powder goes up in a flash. He was burned all right. Spent a day or so in the hospital, and he was taped up to look like a mummy. When my dad found out about it, I got the heck beat out of my butt---because I was oldest and so I should've known about what was going on and stopped it. So that was the nearest I've come to death.

Other than that, I've been hit in the leg by a javelin, thrown by a would-be track star who didn't watch what he was doing. Only a flesh wound though. I heard of one guy who was sitting on the field at a track meet and a javelin came and flew straight through his upper arm, pinning him to the field. It went right between the muscle and the bone, so it didn't cause much damage--luckily.

And here's one more. In my early days I liked to go down to Draper a lot, back when it was a sleepy little town. One night, really late, I thought I'd see how fast I could get my car to go on one of the little side roads. I got it up to over 100. Just seconds after I'd slowed down, there was a horse in the middle of the road. Now was I watched out for, or what?

[rockgremlin]

-Accidently headbutted a double-paned glass window, breaking out one of the panes with my forehead. Took 14 stitches to close that one up.

-Circular saw kicked back on my thumb. Very lucky that I didn't sever it. Mangled it pretty good. Got about 10 stitches and my thumbnail removed.

Nothing life-threatening, just painful.

[donny h]

I was in a 67 Ford LTD going near 100mph that rolled 8 times off of an overpass, coming to rest 300' from the point of impact.

In a four wheel drift at the crest of the overpass, the view out of my window (rear passenger) was a pickup at a dead stop, which impacted directly behind my door, sending us into 360s, then end-overs, then a tree stopped us and we barrel rolled.

The only sober guy was gravely injured, and the three drunken idiots walked away.

The wreck started in one city, ended in another, and crossed a freeway, so between all the cops of 3 jurisdictions, emergency personal, tow trucks and cranes, there were over 40 vehicles at the scene.

27 page police report.

That is the short version of a not funny long story, so I don't tell the long version, I do have a funny long one, that would be the time Rudy Altobelli caught be red handed on his property, and chased me off me a shotgun.

I'll save that story for another time, it's a novel.

Who is Rudy? You'll have to look it up.

I have enough war stories sometimes it sounds like I dodge a bullet every other weekend, when in fact all that stuff happened in my teens, I was just damn lucky to live to 19, and it's been mostly smooth sailing from there.

Good times. Even the bad ones.

[donny h]

Hmmm, not sure I should have shared those stories, I should know better than to post after drinking a bunch of rum.

Classic 20/20 hindsight.

The Rudy story is not my proudest moment...

[greyhair biker]

Closest I've come lately was putting in roof bolts underground & having a slab of rock come out between the bolts while my hands were on the controls & land on my arms, cutting them up pretty good...just rub salt in your wounds next time your cut open. Another time I was leaning up against the rib (wall) & a chunk about 200# + came in on my head & pinned me up against the rib...yet another time I was driving a shuttle car...16 tons of equipment with 12 tons of rock in it and a slab came down about 50'long & 14 feet wide burying the car & me inside the cab...yet another one I had just walked through an intersection -litterally seconds later the entire intersection came in - probably 20'wide by 40' long by 5 feet thick. But enough with underground...I was cliff diving off the Kaanapali coast - west Maui side & after diving for a few hours a park ranger came running up the beach to show us the sign we missed...Maui Channel - worlds' largest population of Great White sharks...we'd been swimming in it --I didn t go back in the water for weeks!

[DaveOU812]

Well lets see, Aside from all the exact duplicates of the other "Youthfull stories", I've got a couple of war stories. Last year just outside of falluja, a base the size of a city block called Baharia, we got hit by 13 155mm rockets. (Big ones) No one was killed but they did blow up a port-a-pottie. A close friend was on Tank watch and one flew past his head and knocked him over.

Again, Camp Falluja, 155mm rocket flies past another buddy in a guard tower, hits directly under the Chapplins trailer, doesn't explode, and burries itself 6 feet under it. It took two days to dig it out. I kept saying, "What ever religion that guy is, I'm switching to."

The list goes on...

[James_B_Wads2000]

I guess the arabs moved on from Sheep and Camel to 1st cousins....

WTF? Are you for real? Tell me your joking.

Woman at a gun range had a malfunction and came over to me, pointing her pistol at me, pulling the trigger asking me if I can fix the gun.....

NRA4EVR!!!!!

[Reedus]

His comment about sheep and camels is only a reflection of the anti-arab sentiment that seems to be going around these days. Why is it that people hate the US som much? Whatever happened to tolerance of peoples beliefs?

Reedus