I've been literally lol-ing watching a video that popped up in my feed, and then going to the website and watching more vids. The first one was for this cool toy. Okay...to call it "cool" might be bad considering what it represents and mines are especially horrible, plus the fact that war is a terrible thing, but taken strictly as a toy, and one that involves pyrotechnics, it rocks.
It's apparently an authentic replica and it actually works. It uses the plastic bang caps that have been around forever. I wish I had a nickel for every bang cap I shot as a kid. I'd be fabulously-wealthy. I figured it was a vintage thing; especially considering it doesn't seem very "PC" at all. Actually it's a modern toy and it's made right here in the USA. Who knew? It works by (carefully) pulling back the spring lever and putting the cap on top of a post, and locking down the whapper. It's exactly like you'd bait a mousetrap. We had similar stuff when I was a kid but nothing specifically made to be triggered by a tripwire (or pull-wire). I'd have gone berserk with this thing and probably gotten in some pretty big trouble. Judging by how hard I was laughing earlier I'd say that's a safe bet.
The first thing that made me laugh was when the guy said "You can use your imagination as to how you can use this," and I did. What was funnier was that it reminded me of something I saw in a catalog years ago. There was a page about stun guns and they were listed in order of price and power. They each had a description and they each got a tad more serious in tone as the price, and voltage, went up. Maybe it was like "The model-A will slow down an angry grandmother. The model X-5 will piss-off a biker. Model Stunno-007 will make the bad guy woozy. The XL ZAPRUDER Model with stop a guy unless he's high on PCP, and so on. No, actually it was all pretty dry until the last model. They'd list the voltage and specs and it might say something like "This one will stop an attacker long enough for you to go get help." It was the same thing until they got to the flagship model. It said, simply, "We call this one 'The Laxative.'" I didn't expect that and it cracked me up.
The video showed the toy in action and also in super-slo-mo and it was just bad-ass. The knocker unit that fires the cap is metal and similar in size and weight to a pair of nail clippers. The cap knocked it into the air and had it spinning around. I was impressed. The narrator said that it will scare you even when you're ready for it and I believe it. Those caps are loud for their size. It's not about how much powder you use but how tightly it's packed and sealed. The plastic ones had the same amount of powder as the regular paper caps, but the paper caps only had to blast through thin paper while the others had to go through plastic, so they were much louder. The paper ones weren't too shabby though. A roll had about 50-60 shots maybe. I'd put an entire roll on a nice sturdy rock and smash it with a hammer. It was just balls-loud and it's a miracle I can still hear at all. Well, lo and behold I found out that that was just their little trademark toy, and they made real shit.
It said the the regular blank cartridge, shown here, puts out a three-foot flame and puts out about 120db. Not bad. I clicked on the Products link to see what other shells besides blanks they might have, and oh, joy...they have some good ones. They had another blank round that had a bigger flash and put out 172dbs. That'd fuck you up for a minute. They had shells with pepper spray. If I were a cat burglar and I walked onto someone's front porch and was greeted with an unexpected shotgun blast and a face-full of mace I'd probably think twice before messing with that particular residence again.
They mentioned that you could even use the toy version for protection by rigging it to hotel doors. A little cap would be loud enough to get a few other guests to open their doors and would probably send the perp scurrying off down the hallway. Maybe they'd crash into the ice machine for good measure. I don't reckon you'd want to try it with this version. If you did I doubt the perp would ever even mess with the same hotel chain again, but at the same time you wouldn't want to give yourself a heart attack from the surprise. Dang. My mind started wandering just thinking about all the fun (also known as trouble) I could have gotten into if I'd had one of these units in my formative years. It could've become an issue.
We'd build custom "fireworks rockets" where we'd take a regular Estes rocket, which was pretty cool by itself, and pack it full of fireworks and run fuses to everything. We'd put extra rocket engines and stabilizers and such to make up for the added weight. They were most impressive. The rockets flew so high that they were basically like real fireworks-display fireworks. They'd go up in the air and then halfway up more engines would kick in and send them for the Moon, while the fireworks would ignite. At the top of the flight, which was pretty high up, our little rockets would explode in a blaze of M-80 and cherry bomb glory. I couldn't even guess how many times we had the cops called on us but that was just part of the deal.
Speaking of scaring the fuck our of somebody, I'm sure any of these products would do the trick, especially with the tripwire thing. I've always been a bit of a prankster, and I've been known to go to great lengths to set up elaborate pranks for some of my best friends, but it was always fun stuff. I never tried to scare or hurt anyone obviously, but I'd have no problem scaring the shit out of a bad guy. They get what they deserve. And I know what it's like basically to have a shotgun blast go off five feet away when you aren't expecting it. It will change your mood in a heartbeat.
Back in the day we used to camp out at the Cahaba River. Usually I'd go down there in the afternoon to gather wood and build a massive fire. There was a trail that went alongside the river. We'd go about half a mile down so that the fire couldn't be seen from the road. Some older guys did the same thing, only they had Jeeps and four-wheelers so they'd go further down the trail. Once in a while they'd steal out wood but usually they'd respect us and drive around the massive tepee structure I'd built. One night they'd done that, but they'd left us a little gift. I leaned over to light the kindling and I was blowing on the fire when BOOM, an M-80 went off right in my face. No, it didn't startle the fuck out of me or anything like that. Payback is hell though, and when I looked to see if they'd put in any more surprises for us I found about half a dozen unexploded M-80s.I carefully plucked them from the fire, and around 5am when the older guys came past us going home I lit the remaining M-80s and tossed them on the hoods of their vehicles. It was all in good fun and I think they appreciated us getting them back.
So I can definitely imagine what it would be like for a bad guy, who was already jumpy because he or she was committing a crime, to be startled shitless by an unexpected 172db blast going off in their face. Speaking of shitless, I'm guessing the perp would shit himself. The cops could just follow the trail of shit all the way to the perps residence and make a bust. In any case I had a blast, so to speak, discovering all the wonderful pyrotechnics this brilliant company has to offer. Yep, yep...so many pyrotechnics...so little time. Sure this stuff is great for its intended purpose, but oh, the hell you could raise. A shell that shoots a 300' flame at 5,000F? Seriously? Get the fuck out of here. FLAME ON!
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