Unsupervised
It was summer. My two older brothers and I had access to a stick welder. And we had a pile of scrap metal. And we had just watched Conan the Destroyer. And there was no adult supervision. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Wilt Chamberlain took out the baddies with giant swords. We would made swords. Not those flimsy foam ones you get at the Dollar Store the dog likes to eat. Real metal swords. We took bar stock & welded on a handle, took the angle grinder and sharpened a point, then ground down both sides of the bar stock until it was sharp enough to chop wood (we tried, an axe worked better). Then we had real sword fights. With real swords. We mimicked Monty Python's Holy Grail a thousand and one times. They also worked great for throwing. The good guys always did that.
Then we heard about fencing. Which has nothing to do with fences. Back to the scrap metal pile. We found a thin metal rod, welded it on a 3-inch diameter cutlass and welded on a handle and sharpened the tip. Done. We could go fencing now. They also worked great for throwing. The good guys always did that.
Then we got our hands on a multi-pump BB gun rifle. My brother thought he would try it out, aimed it at me and pulled the trigger from 10 feet away. The BB hit me square in the forehead right above the bridge of my nose and embedded itself under the skin. We had to squeeze the BB out like popping a zit and hope my dad wouldn’t notice the hole in my forehead at the dinner table.
Then we got our hands on a 500 pack of Bottle Rockets. We inserted them into the barrel of our pellet guns, which normally only fired pellets. But this day, they fired rockets. We had made our very own Rocket Guns. Soon tiring of shooting off bottle rockets, we quickly discovered it was way more fun to shoot bottle rockets at each other. Since it was too easy to dodge a single rocket, we added two more long thin tubes to our barrels with electrician’s tape. A triple barrel Rocket Gun! Quick reflexes were a plus and thankfully, there were only 500.
Then we dragged out a long length of rope we found in the barn and hung it from the huge box elder tree next to the house and added a large tractor inner tube. By including an additional 6-foot length of rope at the top of the inner tube, we could whip each other around in circles, then let go with a slingshot effect for extra height. My brother gave me some extra boost one time but released at the wrong moment. I flew towards the house rather than away and rocketed through the window next to the kitchen. The glass exploded all over me, strangely, not a scratch. My dad took me to the hardware store and I learned how to putty in a new plate of glass into a window frame that day.
Then we saw a ninja movie. Ninjas could jump buildings. It seemed plausible. We would give it a try. Our fence lines were thick with trees. We would climb up a tree and then jump to the next tree. If you went to the top and leaned, it would bend in the direction you wanted to go. We spent the afternoon jumping from tree to tree and made it nearly a ¼ mile without touching the ground. Maybe we really were ninjas.
Ninjas always had throwing stars. If we were going to be ninjas, we had to have throwing stars. We tried cutting them out of sheet metal with tin snips, but that never worked very well to keep them symmetrical. They would fly off in all sorts of random directions. Then we discovered a pile of old circular saw blades. We sharpened both sides all the way around with the angle grinder and those worked great. My dad came home from work that day and the side of our shed was covered in saw blades sticking out. He never said a word.
Kids sword fighting, throwing circular saw blades through the air or firing triple barrel Rocket Guns at each other. That was a normal summer day. Somehow, we all lived.
Got any unsupervised stories?
It was summer. My two older brothers and I had access to a stick welder. And we had a pile of scrap metal. And we had just watched Conan the Destroyer. And there was no adult supervision. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Wilt Chamberlain took out the baddies with giant swords. We would made swords. Not those flimsy foam ones you get at the Dollar Store the dog likes to eat. Real metal swords. We took bar stock & welded on a handle, took the angle grinder and sharpened a point, then ground down both sides of the bar stock until it was sharp enough to chop wood (we tried, an axe worked better). Then we had real sword fights. With real swords. We mimicked Monty Python's Holy Grail a thousand and one times. They also worked great for throwing. The good guys always did that.
Then we heard about fencing. Which has nothing to do with fences. Back to the scrap metal pile. We found a thin metal rod, welded it on a 3-inch diameter cutlass and welded on a handle and sharpened the tip. Done. We could go fencing now. They also worked great for throwing. The good guys always did that.
Then we got our hands on a multi-pump BB gun rifle. My brother thought he would try it out, aimed it at me and pulled the trigger from 10 feet away. The BB hit me square in the forehead right above the bridge of my nose and embedded itself under the skin. We had to squeeze the BB out like popping a zit and hope my dad wouldn’t notice the hole in my forehead at the dinner table.
Then we got our hands on a 500 pack of Bottle Rockets. We inserted them into the barrel of our pellet guns, which normally only fired pellets. But this day, they fired rockets. We had made our very own Rocket Guns. Soon tiring of shooting off bottle rockets, we quickly discovered it was way more fun to shoot bottle rockets at each other. Since it was too easy to dodge a single rocket, we added two more long thin tubes to our barrels with electrician’s tape. A triple barrel Rocket Gun! Quick reflexes were a plus and thankfully, there were only 500.
Then we dragged out a long length of rope we found in the barn and hung it from the huge box elder tree next to the house and added a large tractor inner tube. By including an additional 6-foot length of rope at the top of the inner tube, we could whip each other around in circles, then let go with a slingshot effect for extra height. My brother gave me some extra boost one time but released at the wrong moment. I flew towards the house rather than away and rocketed through the window next to the kitchen. The glass exploded all over me, strangely, not a scratch. My dad took me to the hardware store and I learned how to putty in a new plate of glass into a window frame that day.
Then we saw a ninja movie. Ninjas could jump buildings. It seemed plausible. We would give it a try. Our fence lines were thick with trees. We would climb up a tree and then jump to the next tree. If you went to the top and leaned, it would bend in the direction you wanted to go. We spent the afternoon jumping from tree to tree and made it nearly a ¼ mile without touching the ground. Maybe we really were ninjas.
Ninjas always had throwing stars. If we were going to be ninjas, we had to have throwing stars. We tried cutting them out of sheet metal with tin snips, but that never worked very well to keep them symmetrical. They would fly off in all sorts of random directions. Then we discovered a pile of old circular saw blades. We sharpened both sides all the way around with the angle grinder and those worked great. My dad came home from work that day and the side of our shed was covered in saw blades sticking out. He never said a word.
Kids sword fighting, throwing circular saw blades through the air or firing triple barrel Rocket Guns at each other. That was a normal summer day. Somehow, we all lived.
Got any unsupervised stories?
