Sunday, January 11, 2009

SULLY CAPS

Banquet Manager brings up something I never heard of....Sully Caps.
Apparently he spent part of his youth melting crayons into bottle caps, creating some kind of toy to be played with, won and collected.
I have to wonder where the heat source for this project may have come from and whether production of the Sully Caps was under any adult supervision.

Me and my peeps undertook a related project one summer.
We set up a 6 inch cast iron pipe, sparked a fire underneath it and lowered lead fishing weights into the top of the pipe using steel wire. When we pulled the wire back out from our Lead Smelting Plant, the lead would be gone. Then after the fire went out and the ashes cooled, we would find a nice shiny hunk of lead.
We tried to get our furnace hot enough to melt copper.
After a time we gave up and went back to using cans of Hairspray and Deodorant stolen from our mothers and sisters as blowtorches to incinerate ant-beds and stuff.
Pretty cool.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heat source? Good old matches...remember we were kids.

Rick O'Shay said...

It's a wonder we survived childhood. I had a friend who got his eye shot with a bb gun and now has a glass eye. So I guess mothers do have something to worry about.

Anonymous said...

Molten stuff is cool.

UF Mike

Peteski said...

I was once melting lead weights on the old stove down the basement with a blowtorch. Trying to light one of the stove's burners with the blowtorch, I turned the wrong dial, turning on the stove's bottom oven part instead. I couldn't figure why the burners weren't igniting, gave up and started using the blowtorch directly on the lead - which was in a small pot.

There I am, leaning over a pot filled with lead that's starting to melt and an oven that's filling with gas, holding a lit blow torch.

The explosion blew open every door in the house and almost blew my t-shirt completely off - like in a cartoon.

I was 12.

bulletholes said...

B-man-Yes we were kids and kids do the darndest things.

Ric- A glass eye! How cool is that!

Mike, Mercury is gool too! Did you know it will remove Gold plate? and Nitric Acid, man don't even get me started!

Peteski, you and I would have had us a time!
i have experienced the gas oven myself, but not to the degree yo did.
My X mother in law however blew herself out the front door. Not a hair left anywhere on her.