L is for ... Grenade Launcher

Keeping to the theme of ridiculousness for A to Z, it's time for another thrilling post of childhood memories!

If you read about the camper-bus, you may have gleaned that my dad liked to build stuff out of other stuff. Kind of like McGyver, but with less spies and more random danger.

It all started with him repacking his own bullets. If you didn't know you could do that, you can. You get bullet fixins and assemble yourself with a tiny scoop for gunpowder, and a tiny hammer for taptaptapping the slug into the shell (Which freaks everyone out. What's the first rule of bullets? Don't hit one with a hammer, duh.).

From there, it progressed to mixing his own gunpowder. This is also dangerous, so he commandeered a rock tumbler(just the rubber container bit), and then built a little machine to spin the tumbler out of old typewriters and a sewing machine motor (we didn't have that bit for some reason), and took it all out to an old shed in the back pasture--where it wouldn't hurt anyone if, by chance, it exploded. After that, he had lots of gun powder! Which, thankfully, never randomly exploded.

This lead to the idea that he maybe could make his own model rocket engines(coming R post). And from there, the natural evolution . . . the realization that it might explode the rockets. One day all this came together in a flash of I-COULD-BLOW-STUFF-UP brilliance, model rocket engines we already had were added, along with the bent metal tube from an old vacuum cleaner... and later a few smallish holes in the front yard. I think he may have also exploded an old tree stump with it... Good thing we lived way out in the country.

So all that stuff about country people being crazy? Probably truer than we'd like to admit.

But I cling to the fact that no one in the family has fixed a dead deer head to the hood of a car. Yet.