"Flash" wrote in message
...

"Brian Whatcott" wrote in message
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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 handfull 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 setttled, he came into the shop, with his pants
still unbuckeld 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.


OK Flash. You are responsible for what you do in public. You are going to
be sued by a couple of guys who read your cat cannon story and it caused
them to rip some stitches from a recent operation. We'll get their names as
soon as they quit making funny noises and rolling around on the floor. The
ripped stitches were bad enough but somehow it affected bladder control as
well.