What is the weirdest thing you all have ever done to a fire, in a fire, or around a fire? I know that it seems to trigger certain creative thoughts, so people do some strange stuff.

I once made a 12 foot fire out of pure hickory. Smelled like a barbeque! mmm, barbeque...

 

One night (back in my younger drinking daze) we took 2 bags of fireworks, poured a puddle of gas and made a gas trail about 20 foot long lite the trail and ran behind a big tree... I'm sure you can imagine the end results

 

I tried that once, with ill results... my dad gave me a whole can of pyrodex (black powder) that had drawn some moisture and wouldn't fire in his gun. Anyway, he told me to go dump it out he didn't say where to dump it.. or that I couldn't set it on fire afterward... I poured most of it into a pile, and then made a "trail" about 8' long. It took forever to get it lit, and the "trail" kept going out, so I ended up about 2 feet from the mound of powder trying to re-light the "trail" when suddenly "POOF"... I had no hair on my arm or on the right side of my head... (this was early 90's so I had a mullet and hair down to my shoulders...lol) Anyway, so now I'm half bald and half baked and I wreaked of burned hair and black powder... I went back inside and straight to bed. I ended up getting up in the middle of the night because the burn on my hand had really started to smart. I got this bright idea that since it felt better when I ran cool water on it, I would just fill a bucket with cold water and leave it by the bed. I ended up falling asleep with my hand in the bucket and well... yeah, you know how that goes.

 

Hi guys,

I read the question, and had to laugh. About 3-4 years ago, I had just rebuilt a 78' Scorpion Whip snowmobile. After several days of screwing around after school, I finally got it running fairly well. I was all proud of myelf, so I filled the gas tank with a fresh mix, poured the coals to it, and took off.

Somewhere down the trail, and unknown crack in the tank allowed my fresh fuel to start running down the front of the tank and all over the wiring harness. You can figure out the rest. POOF! I was running about 40 when I heard the sound. A few seconds later, I smelled the fire, and noticed heat around my leg. Thinking back, it was a damn funny thing to see flames licking out of the air vents on the front panel. Luckly, my Carhart coveralls held out, because by the time I made it back to the house (about 30 sec.) my sled was pretty well tosted.

Incendently, the sled was rebuilt again, and still burning the trails. Hope you enjoyed the story.

 

Well, most of my "fire stories" happened when a bunch of us were drunk. And a couple of them I am glad that I had no part in. So, on to the funny stuff.

One Halloween, we were sitting around feeling a good buzz, when someone decides to go get some fire crackers and roman candles. Fast forward to the good part. Some of the fire crackers would provide a "bigger bang" if you hit them with a hammer a few times first. So we throw everything we got into an empty beer box, and light the box on fire. Vans are getting pelted with bottle rockets, dogs are peeing on carpets, and 8 or 9 of us are getting a good laugh to go with our beer coming up our noses. That box only burned for a few minutes, but we probably blew up a couple hundred bucks worth of fire crackers.

During camping, a friend who is sort of a closet pyro, liked to build "stokers" as we called them. 40' flames off of a 12' round fire pit. Burned everything that would burn, which we didn't need later. That meant chain saw mix was out. Thank God. The reason we built a 40' fire was because it was pouring rain. More like raining cats and dogs. The rain was so fierce it was like Noah building a second ark. We just couldn't keep dry no matter what, and having that big a fire was the only way.

Another time camping, while I was asleep, with my keys safely in my pocket, I awoke to find the outhouse missing, with burned fiberglass all over our fire pit. I wonder what they were up to the night before.

 

i was trying to start the BBQ with that little button on the front... anyway it's an old one so it always takes a few tries... but my dog was sniffing around at the back of the darn thing just as it caught.. the lid was full of propane so it made a little explosion and the flame shot out the back and burnt off his whiskers

i was worried about his eyes more than anything... then my girlfriend comes out and sees me holding down the dog pouring my beer all over his face... he was ok though

 

This one wasn't me, but pretty good nonetheless. I was told this story this summer, I wasn't actually there. A guy I work with at the parks dept. had x-mas tree removal duty. This is where the city guys go around and collect all the old christmas trees and we take em to the city brush dump. well this guy came up with the idea to burn them. He had the fire goin real nice with a tooon of trees. The next one they threw on was one of those flame retardant ones...full of chemicals. He threw it on w/o knowing thats what it was. There was a cloud of black smoke you could see from out of town, raising 100's of ft in the air. Our boss at the shop, about 2 mi away looked out and saw it. As you may figure, he was not too happy about it.

 

well this was when i was about 12
my dads side of the family was up at my grandfathers house. he use to have horses so when the hay went stale he piled it up int 4ft domes. well my dad and uncle went and got some gas. this gas has been siting for a couple of months. well they tryed lighting a stick doused in gas. it lit on the third try. its hunting season so its snowing and the hay piles are wet. they wouldn't light so they poured the can of gas on them. my uncles lighter was out so i went to get matches. well dad had his lighter on him and as i was running back to them. The hay pile rose about 10ft in the air and mice and some rabbits went running in all directions when that thing blew up. we all had to change after that.

 

Called to a fire, arrived, pretty young lady answered the front door in her birthday suit.
I believe the PD handled it from there. She did get a thank you.

 

One night we set a pile of hay on fire, well after going in the house for about a half hour...we walked out to find half the pasture on fire.... (well maybe not quite that much but thats what it seemed at the time) anyway as we were trying to put out this fire, the bottle calf we had at the time kept running through the middle of the fire and spreading it EVERYWHERE! YIKES!!!! Luckily we were able to get ahead of it, and got it out without too many extra gray hairs....although most of our lungs were fried I think.

 

February 14th, 1994. I arrived home, after being out for 5 hours, to find yellow tape across my doorway. I opened the door, to discover that somebody had set fire to my home, trying to thaw the pipes, in my absence. I lost every thing I owned, that I was not wearing or carrying at the time. The ceiling was gone, the back wall, most of the floor, and all of the contents were toasted. That was the weirdest fire story I have got.

 

Theo, that blows. One Valentines Day present gone wrong.

 

Yep, kind of put a damper on things for a minute or two.

 

Back in the 80's (i was about 15) we were hired to clean of a vacant lot. The lot had an old water well so we threw all the debris into the well. Once the lot was clean we poured 5 gallons of gas into the well and tossed in a match.

It was like a giant cannon going off. All kinda stuff shot out of the well and the windows next door in a vacant building were blown out. The town only has about 500 people and Barney Fife rolled up with the lights flashing.

He asked if we heard an explosion. We told him didn't hear a thing with burning debris laying all over the place.

Apparently the well had been filled with some junk previously and some kind of gas like methane was already present when we fired it up.

Nobody was hurt and at the time it was cool. Old boards and stuff flying about 50-100 ft in the air.

Looking back on it were lucky we didn't get hurt or killed.

 

about 3 years ago, me and 3 other guys got into an arguement about fire traveling up a stream of lighter fluid. So, us being in the tank already, and of course in the fraternity house (the bastion of all stupid ideas), we went out and got a candle and a bottle of lighter fluid (the kind for a charcoal grill). We put the candle in the alleyway, and lit it. We then went up to the third floor fire escape, leaving the second floor for spectators, and proceeded to squirt the fluid down towards the candle. Well, we missed for almost an entire bottle, when a drop finally caught the flame. WHOOOSH...the whole back part of the alley way flamed up at least 30 feet. While we were missing the flame, we didn't think too far ahead about all of the excess lighter fluid on the ground.



Then we blew up the telephone.