Have you ever made a gadget that didn't quite perform as expected, ending in a fireball and an enormous BOOM!? Has your escape plan ever put you straight into the teeth of the authorities? Have you ever lost expensive camera gear to an improvised tripod or worse? If so, the MacGrübër award may be the perfect nomination for you and your fails.

I went and shot pictures of the abandoned Marge Schott house at 1 am. Went home and realized I forgot to put film in the camera.

Freemont, Played, Porcelain Doll, & I spent around 20min taking apart a pressure gauge to get to the pool of mercury inside. After taking apart the whole thing by hand, I see there is a button on top that gives you direct access to drain the mercury out...

While at a remote site, I decided to make some hydrogen gas. I had the glass whiskey bottle all set up with the stuff bubbling inside but hadnt been able to bring any balloons, so I found a condom in my backpack and was trying to fill it with hydrogen.
Then this guy and his dog showed up totally out of nowhere. So I threw the empty condom on the table at the campsite, and put the cap on the whiskey bottle and acted like nothing was going on.

So the guy starts talking to us, and he wont go away, he's like a drifter or something. It wasnt till a couple minutes later I realized its just a few of us guys there, no women, and there are condoms and torn condom wrappers lying all over the table.

While talking to the guy, the dog wandered over by the whiskey bottle (which was *still* generating hydrogen, unbeknownst to me), and a minute or so later, the bottle completely exploded. (not fire and flame exploded, just blew itself to pieces, because of the pressure building up inside)

The guy was actually pretty cool about it, but when he went to wipe the stuff off his dog (he thought it was whiskey, I didnt say what it really was), he caught his finger on a piece of the glass and started bleeding. One of the guys began pouring GALLONS of water on the dog, trying to wash the junk out of its fur.

Then he left, pretty soon afterwards, prolly thinking we're a bunch of crazy people with exploding whiskey bottles, and a sausage party with condoms lying about.


At that point we had no hydrogen left to fill condom-balloons with, or to blow up any other way either.

EPIC FAILURE

Posted by Therrin While at a remote site, I decided to make some hydrogen gas. I had the glass whiskey bottle all set up with the stuff bubbling inside but hadnt been able to bring any balloons, so I found a condom in my backpack and was trying to fill it with hydrogen. Then this guy and his dog showed up totally out of nowhere. So I threw the empty condom on the table at the campsite, and put the cap on the whiskey bottle and acted like nothing was going on. So the guy starts talking to us, and he wont go away, he's like a drifter or something. It wasnt till a couple minutes later I realized its just a few of us guys there, no women, and there are condoms and torn condom wrappers lying all over the table. While talking to the guy, the dog wandered over by the whiskey bottle (which was *still* generating hydrogen, unbeknownst to me), and a minute or so later, the bottle completely exploded. (not fire and flame exploded, just blew itself to pieces, because of the pressure building up inside) The guy was actually pretty cool about it, but when he went to wipe the stuff off his dog (he thought it was whiskey, I didnt say what it really was), he caught his finger on a piece of the glass and started bleeding. One of the guys began pouring GALLONS of water on the dog, trying to wash the junk out of its fur. Then he left, pretty soon afterwards, prolly thinking we're a bunch of crazy people with exploding whiskey bottles, and a sausage party with condoms lying about. At that point we had no hydrogen left to fill condom-balloons with, or to blow up any other way either. EPIC FAILURE

Well you just lost coolest noob. Cool people don't fail that hard. ;) <3

Only a small failure on that one note...

The "in general" blowing-stuff-up-in-the-desert went very well actually. Just ask Robk700 =P I think we even have some amazing videos of my work.

And, Therrin the Gear Whore really put out during that trip and the vertical junk went very nicely.

So I'd rather have the "coolest noob" award than the "MacGruber" award, if I get to pick. The hydrogen making soiree was epic fail though, I admin that.

Back in 1983 me, and 7 other people decided to infiltrate our high school at midnight and play some non-destructive but rather elaborate pranks on the administration. We planned for months on exactly what each persons job was going to be, how long it was going to take, etc. We made a test entry a month before, running through the halls and yelling, then parking down the street at a stop and go and watching for the cops for an hour to see if there was an alarm.

We managed to acquire master keys to the school, surgical gloves so we wouldn't leave any prints, and went around to garage sales and thrift stores and bought up cheap as CB frequency kids walkie talkies -- this was before cell phones kids.

We parked on a side street and made our way across the practice fields to the back of the school. Tomorrow we would be the unknown heros of the school. Lookouts, as planned, deployed around the building and on the roof to warn us over the radios if the police were closing in. Or they would have if we had remembered to put batteries in the radios.

2 hours later, I sat in the back of a police car. They got 7 out of 8 of our group.

I couldnt figure out whether to type "WIN!!!" or "FAIL!!!" when I read this..

that's a hilarious story =)

I'm gonna go with "almost win"

lol...it made the papers. My first felony arrest.

They did drop charges after seeing that we didn't do any real damage. Just a few grand lawyer fees, bail bondsman fees....It's a lot funnier now.

it wasn't quite a boom, but it was incredibly graphic and resulted in at least three boy scouts being completely traumatized. Many years ago I was staff at Sid Richardson Scout Ranch (SR2 from here on out.) I was the rock climbing instructor for the high adventure program. At SR2 the high adventure program ran every other week, so on the weeks when we weren't doing high adventure program I was stuck in regular camp with the uncool, non-high adventurey, regular staff. Naturally my highly trained outdoors skills were best used teaching wilderness survival merit badge. On Wednesday we had our overnighter, where the campers had to build their own hovels shelters, using only what they could find in the area. no tarps, no tents, no plastic; think 'survivorman.' After hiking the kids out to their campsite I set them to improvising their shelters. To amuse myself and teach the campers a few things, i broke out my copy of "SAS, Survive Anywhere Safely." This is a very useful and very dangerous book. It can teach you all you need to know about surviving anything from a zombie apocalypse to a particularly nasty hangnail. It can also teach you all about making snares. Now I know how to make a variety of traps from simple things, but I'd never made a loop snare. a loop snare involves a bent sapling, a slipknot, and a simple tripwire. They are really easy to make. The problem I encountered was with the term 'sapling.' apparently the book meant "a small tree shoot between 1 and 2 1/2 feet tall." To me a sapling is any flexible tree, six feet or shorter. To make a long story short, a 2 foot sapling will snare a rabbit and keep it there. a 6 foot sapling will pull the rabbit's head and a section of spine out. When the trap sprung, the campers and I went running to the trap, to find the rabbits head and a section of spine hanging from the cord, but no body. never did find the body.

Getting trapped while UEing counts for a MäcGrübër award? I've got one for you then...summer of 2007 I was exploring this place: http://www.uer.ca/...ow.asp?locid=24968

There wasn't much for camp staff to do after work that year, those of us who were over 18 would go to the Thirsty Moose pub a few times a week, most of the rest would congregate in a cabin set aside as a staff lounge and watch anime, me and a few of my friends would explore the 13-square-mile property (which included 3 1/2 abandoned camps).

One night we decided to go all the way out to the biggest of the abandonments, Commissary Hall. Somewhere on an overgrown road into Forester, things went stupidly wrong. I got a piece of it first, and flailed into it as one might to swat away a spider web. This knocked down the entire trap on top of us, a situation which our continued flailing only worsened. Decently trapped and epically confused, I lustily cursed whoever or whatever made this thing...

...somewhere in the woods, the researchers were waiting for a flight of bats that never came through. Finally, some activity on the trap. Scale says 10 bats...75...16384! Wait, 16384 bats? That can't be right! What could have knocked the trap down? Oh well, might as well check it out, even though it probably just fell on its own...

After another minute of struggling, we saw headlamps approaching: who would have pulled such a nasty prank? After all, we were the only ones who were ever out here, especially at night...

Approaching the trap, the scientists observed that they did indeed make a catch, and between the headlamps and the generally English vocalizations of the trapped animals, it certainly appeared to be humans...the exact catch they had been promised they wouldn't make all the way out here

As the lights approached, we could see they weren't any of our staff. They introduced themselves, rather awkwardly given the circumstances, as bat researchers who had set these traps to try to catch bats by the thousand to survey for white-nose disease. Trapped in Camp Forester on 7/2/07: ZERO bats, 2 humans. At least it was easy enough for them to free us...

As it turns out, the management, not knowing of our explorations, had told some environmental studies majors from Potsdam that there wouldn't be anyone in the outer districts of camp at night, and they could do their brown bat research. Which is not a compatible interest with exploring.

*Therrin laughs hilariously at Pkrearden's story!!!!!*

I was thinking it'd end up being you hanging from your foot 6 feet in the air, on accident; but it turned out FAR better than that!

Now 100% more poll-rific

that was only one MacGruber worthy moment. I have many. I either pull shit off in grand fashion or fail miserably. another MacGruber moment occured once again at SR2. Yes, boy scouts gives you plenty of opportunity to do stupid things. SR2 is a big place, over 3000 acres. The summer camp only covers a small area. When I worked there we staffers would spend our free time engaged in un-boy scout-like activities on occasion. The "flaming bowling ball of death incident" as it came to be known was one of those incidents.

WARNING: wild animals were instantly vaporised in the making of this moment.

The flaming bowling ball of death incident, began, as all good incidents of this nature do, with explosives and wild animals. SR2 is over run with armadillos in the pre-flattened, or larval stage of their life span. SR2 lacks heavy traffic, so the dillos are extremely safe from their natural predator: the chevy. The suckers are everywhere. It is so bad that one of the camp ranger's duties is culling the armadillo population. Myself and my cohorts who shall remain nameless took it upon ourselves to help with the armadillo eradication efforts in our own, unique way. As an fan of things which go boom, I have been known to occasionally produce substances with, shall we say, dramatic exothermic reactions.
On the menu for the flaming bowling ball of death was gelignite. home made blasting gel. as we sat around, bored, trying to find something more entertaining than soup cans to destroy, we noticed a opossum on the half shell moseying by. after a brief chase and a prolonged excavation the dillo was extracted from his shallow burrow and clasped securely by work glove shielded hands. Out came the duct tape and fuse, and quick as you like, we had our own armoured suicide bomber equipped with a generous (1/2 pound) chunk of gelignite and what we estimated to be a 90 second fuse. We lit that puppy up and stood back expecting the poor doomed soul to run for his burrow, and provide us with a satisfying spray of dirt and smoke. True to form the little guy took off running the minute he was let go.
This is where things went wrong.
Our 9 banded little buddy chose to run the opposite direction of his burrow. Dillos might not be smart, but I suppose he figured that four teenagers with various digging implements made returning to a shallow burrow a poor choice. As we watched the thin smoke trail from the fuse bounding through the tall grass we expected to see it stop at any moment and give us the entertainment we so badly wanted. to our amazement, the smoke didnt stop in the grass, and 45 seconds after release, our victim had found his hiding spot. It was not a burrow. It was a latrine.
My accomplices and I spent a good 3 seconds deciding that we should probably back up a little. yeah, the latrine was 75 meters away, but shit...we'd used a 1/2 pound. we figured that we could probably get away with using significantly more than the one and two ounce chunks we had been using since we had made the technological leap to having a delivery system. As everyone has probably guessed by this point, the charge didnt fizzle. 45 seconds after the dillo had made entry into the latrine...there wasn't a latrine. all that was left was a a concrete box filled with long dessicated human feces, a few small flames, and a considerable amount of wooden debris scattered liberally in a 20 meter radius around the site of the erstwhile latrine. The only thing that kept us from getting in trouble is the fact that we were a considerable distance from the active areas of the camp. to the best of my knowledge, to this day, that latrine has not been replaced or repaired.

Posted by send4hlp Freemont, Played, Porcelain Doll, & I spent around 20min taking apart a pressure gauge to get to the pool of mercury inside. After taking apart the whole thing by hand, I see there is a button on top that gives you direct access to drain the mercury out...

Haha yea we did. We turned whatever we could find around us into something to hold the mercury. Then i went up to the roof to mock those kids that couldnt get in if their lives counted on it. Was glad to see you almost had it figured out while i was done being an ass.

since this one never got a lot of attention or applicants I'm going to close it early and give the win to send4hlp

what, no split reward? send4hlp and I both had 29.something %

Posted by Send4Help Freemont, Played, Porcelain Doll, & I spent around 20min taking apart a pressure gauge to get to the pool of mercury inside. After taking apart the whole thing by hand, I see there is a button on top that gives you direct access to drain the mercury out...

bahahahaha that was hilarious....

A little late in the game, but thanks for the award! I will keep it close to my heart ;)