As requested by Old No 7 just a few of the tricks we got up to…
Some of the tricks we got up to were to protect our tea & coffee machine from the tool room guys down stairs, when their machine ran out they raided our gun room machine, often leaving us without tea or coffee. So having a key to the machine I put a Alka Seltzer tablet in every other cup, when the tool room guys bought a coffee it foamed like crazy, while they stared at their foaming cup one of us gun workers would buy a cup that of course was OK, the guy with the foaming coffee would then buy another cup which of course foamed again so we would again jump in quick for a normal cup, this went on for some time and they never found out why, eventually they decided to leave our machine alone.
Black powder was readily available so if anyone was away from their bench long enough we would put a small amount of it under their bench, a line of thin cordite made a good fuse and when they started work again the fuse would be lit and moments later PUFF they disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
The manager Roy Hill had lost a hand in an accident with a harpoon gun, his office was directly behind my bench, Roy was a heavy smoker and his ashtray was always full, one day I sprinkled some black powder in his ashtray PUFF cigarette ends all over his desk, Roy turns to me and says " the buggers know I only have one hand and they are trying to blow that one off".
The apprentice gunsmith Ian Jackson was always doing work for his self during the lunch break, mostly hot blueing gunparts on a gas ring, it took a long time before the black powder in the gas ring exploded but the results were quite dramatic for Ian.
We would always try to shoot any unusual guns that came our way, back in the 60s Italian cap n ball revolvers were new to us so finding a 1851 Navy and without lead balls we just loaded it with BP and tissue paper, it worked well but half an hour later we noticed the overalls hanging on a hook that we had used as a target were smoking rather well, there were six big smoldering holes from embedded tissue paper.
One of our jobs was to destroy unwanted powder, good fun but not very interesting" unless "you put the powder in a sealed tin, Ian and I managed to completely make the gun range and carpark disappear in a thick cloud of smoke not realizing the managing director was watching from his office.
In the barrel makers shop we had a framed photo from about 1900 of two directors dressed in tweed on a fishing trip, they were making tea over a camp fire, their car, an old Renault, was behind them, I found, don't ask where, a photo of a naked lady that when I cut her out fitted perfectly leaning on the Renault, the managing director did however think that was very funny.
I guess health and safety would have us hung drawn and quartered nowadays but no one died....
Before I retired from the Army in '92 it had already gotten all FUBAR as far as good old male bonding....
