Oh man... Where to begin?
Luckily, I got it all stupidity out of my system with bb guns, air rifles, and model rocketry as a kid.
- Balanced a raw egg on the muzzle crown of my vertically held Daisy Powerline 880, then shot a pellet through it. Messy.
- As a boy, I had seen a book that had a picture of the Krumlauf device for the German Stg44 assault rifle that allowed shooting around corners. I had the brilliant idea I could do the same with my friends Daisy Woodstock bb gun, and a scrap of clear heavy gauge vinyl tubing that had taken a permanent 90 degree bend from the spool it came from. It actually worked pretty well, of course, only until the "mounting system" (my hand) failed, and I shot myself in the thumb point blank.
- Too impatient to wait for shooting to make empties, I was emptying Crossman brand CO2 capsule/canisters (for an even stupider "project" I won't even discuss here...) with a pin. I soon got bored with the slowly hissing capsule that froze, and wanted to release the gas more quickly, so I tried a larger implement, this time, a nail.
The CO2 capsule bounced off the living room window, somehow miraculously failing to shatter it, and then rocketed straight into the wall, making a hole about 6" away from the head of my friend who'd been watching from the couch. I knew that I had to own up to the hole, and that to be plausible, the cover story had to be almost as stupid, or it wouldn't be believed.
So I said that the friend and I were sparring with broomsticks and I parried into the wall. (We survived the super-stupid secret project that the CO2 capsules were for as well.)
- I had several extra "D" model rocket engines, and after all my misuse and misadventures, no rockets to launch them in, so I began lighting them off sans-rocket. The first one I simply laid on the patio spun and hovered about six feet in the air in a most entertaining fashion, making a corkscrew of smoke.
The second I tried, but this time with the cardboard tube peeled off wasn't so great. The molten gunpowder residue that splattered everywhere really burns, and scrubbing the sulfur stains out of my parent's patio with a brick was a chore too...
The third D engine worked in pretty spectacular fashion, because I had stuffed it into a 10' long piece of scrap gas pipe I had found in the garage. It flew straight into the air for about 100 feet before it tumbled, making a twisted little contrail just like a failed NASA launch.
The fourth was put to some "use". I found the pointed half of a replacement rake handle in the garage scrap pile that was left over from some ad-hoc repair my father had effected on his small sailboat. It went into the gas pipe. The D engine went in behind it. The pointed stick went about 150 yards in a beautiful arc like an Olympic javelin throw, right over the tree line where I lost sight of it.
When the leaves fell that fall, I could see where it went. Sticking at a 45 degree angle of a neighbors roof, where it had been impaled all summer. I guess it was in there so tight it didn't leak.