Flash wrote:
"Brian Whatcott" wrote in message
...
Maxwell wrote:
...
I saw a 6' joint of 4" heavy wall pipe launch a dead rat over 1000'.



Now I've heard plenty of gas torch brags, but doesn't this one
just beat the band?

:-)

Brian W

Not so, Brian. The shop I worked in in 1967, the Postal truck ran over
"Freddie", the three-legged cat shop mascot. Killed the poor fellow, and
the welder gave him a big send-off. At the time, he was fabricating a
sign-pole with a 20' piece of 6" pipe, and had already welded the cap on the
end, and had punched the hole for the electrical wires, four feet from the
cap. He stuffed a handful of paint-rags down the tube to the hole for
wadding and rammed Freddie's carcass down the tube, propped the pipe out the
window and sort of aimed it for the tree-line a hundred yards west of the
cornfield. He filled the charge through the electrical hole, and touched it
off. Freddie went well into the woods, while the pipe recoiled through the
wall into the executive washroom where a young (and somewhat nervous) shop
owner was, at the moment, taking his morning constitutional.

When the plaster dust settled, he came into the shop, with his pants still
unbuckled and mentioned in a very quiet voice, that he was taking the rest
of the day off, and sincerely hoped that such disturbances would be confined
to hours when he was at the golf course or the synagogue.

Then, there was also the 2-1/2 inch pipe that they fashioned distinctly for
use as a mortar, to launch Freddie's empty cat-food cans directly 150 feet
up. The crew used to do that just about the end of lunch hour, when the
sheet-metal guy and I were coming around the building returning from lunch.
After Freddie's unfortunate demise, there were no empty cans, so one hot,
humid July lunchtime, they used a full can of Freddie's favorite tuna
catfood. You would just know that the can exploded just as it cleared the
muzzle and we all spent the last of the afternoon smelling of - - -bad tuna.

My wife wouldn't believe anything I told her about it until the sheet-metal
guy and his wife stopped over and explained it all. She thought I had been
somewhere else for a *different* kind of lunch.

Oh, it works, alright.


Great story, Flash!

Thanks
BrianW