a practical joker during bomb squad training
Posted on 03/30/2005 3:06:23 PM PST by Willie Green
Arlington Elementary School was evacuated Tuesday afternoon when a fifth-grader studying American history brought a 110-year-old artillery shell to class, Pittsburgh Public Schools police Chief Robert Fadzen said.
When the 11-year-old boy showed the shell to his teacher at 1:45 p.m., school officials evacuated the school and called the city police bomb squad, Fadzen said. The shell was taken for disposal.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
This reminds me of when I was in 1st grade in 1971. I brought my Time Bomb game (based on hot potato) by Milton Bradley to school. It was tossed into some grass and when the nun in the play yard noticed it she evacuated the the whole area. I never did get that back.
He should have brought in the MK 22 cannon shell I have sitting on my fireplace hearth . Would have really brought out the skid marks .
trebuchet bump!
My older brother made a breech-loader of rear-threaded galvinized plumbing pipe with a cap drilled for a fuse
Homemade 10X pine pistol handle with 2 steel barrel straps
Small Chinese firecrackers, paper-wrapped marbles
Match
Mudbank
Sucker would go pretty deep in the mud
Do not try this at home kiddies
a practical joker during bomb squad training
For example, in 1991 a total of 36 farm workers had died when their machines hit duds.
The main charge is what goes unstable on you.
We live in the middle of an old Civil War battlefield (the action at the Chattahoochee River between Kennesaw Mt. and the Battle of Atlanta, I guess technically it was part of the Battle of Atlanta) and people do still dig stuff up from time to time. Those of us who were born here know to stop and call Fort McPherson, but a lot of transplants have no idea what they're dealing with.
A trebuchet..ehh? Sounds like fun. I wish I had the plans for one. Cool kid.
Depends on the explosive filler...assuming it has any. Some explosives get more unstable as they "age". What you want to bet this was just a dummy "training" round, originally designed to allow loaders and gunners to practice with the possibility of blowing themselves, or some unintended target downrange, to smithereens? You see those for sale in Shotgun News all the time.
Was it an expended shell?
My friends and I read gun magazines in school in the late eighties. My best friend wore camo.Nowadays if we were still in school, we might even be booted out or sent to a psych doctor.
My co-worker said he used to carry guns to school in Louisiana in the mid sixties...
110 years old is not civil war era. 1895 would be Spanish American War era. Things then were actually not that much different, on a fundamental level, than now. We were still using black powder in our Krags, but the Spanish had smokeless for their Mausers. They also had machine guns, while we mostly had old Gatlings, and not many of those. It's a good thing our Navy wasn't as backwards as our Army.
Let's send Kerry over to France to help the farmers look for unexploded ordinance. I give him the UN's permission.
That is one of the funniest pictures I have ever seen. I have many friends in the UXO cleanup field who are going to like it a lot. Where did you find it?
If in fact it was a shell, they were very wise to get the heck out. If it was a cannon ball, it is unlikely to be filled with anything. I have several of the latter, most from Vicksburg. One never knows when a cannon may become available and one should have a ready supply of ammo!
LOL!! LOL!!
Fortune favors the prepared, eh?
That story always reminds me of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he's hitting bombs on the nose with a mallet at the end of the cartoon, and marking them "Dud" if they don't explode. He comments to the camera "I can retire with a pension in 20 years!" or something to that effect.
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