Sure, you could buy one of those fancy-pants airsoft pellet guns and assail your friends with tiny plastic balls. But wouldn’t you rather just make loud noises in their general direction? Whether you prefer ring caps, strip caps, or an endless roll, there are guns out there for you–at least there used to be. Now it seems like even the discounted dollar store plastic pistolas have disappeared.
I found the ring caps to be slightly more reliable than the rolls, although somewhat quicker to deplete. But either was better than the tiny guns that took one small plastic cap, carefully removed from a ring or strip. Bang! and time to reload. Bang! and time to reload again. Nothing beat the real puff of smoke that accompanied that Bang!, which makes you wonder–what ever happened to cap guns?
Images from arestlesstransplant.co, wildwesttoys.com, blog.emerson.edu, nicholscapguns.com, and webdebris.com (x2).
I always preferred ring caps, because you had to reload after 6 to 8 shots (accounting for "duds"), kinda like a real gun. My favourite, however, was this:
<img src="http://www.bullybeef.co.uk/images/capg8.jpg" width="600">
if you threw it high enough, not only could it actually injure someone (never my intent), but that little hole in the tail fin would make a cool whistle sound as it came back down!
That's what I remember having. Being a Gen X-er I didn't get the fancy "Giant Atomic Bomb" version Baby Boomers got. I think this was the guts of the thing, though.
http://atomictoasters.com/2012/06/you-dropped-a-b…
Cap guns are alive and well here in Tombstone. Any day you can see kids decked out in new cowboy hats, with plastic holsters shooting at each other and anything that moves with capguns. You never see the roll type caps anymore, I think they're obsolete. Which is too bad, I used to like taking a big rock and trying to set the whole roll off at once.
I usually just took a rock and ran it down a strip of a dozen or so of the roll cars for a nice machine gun affect.
I think The Professor also enjoyed the Big Bang approach. Though being a technophile he used something called a 'hammer'.
My pal just introduced me to a dangerous idea he learned from his father. Take two bolts and a nut, thread one bolt partially in, tuck some strike anywhere match heads in there, screw the other bolt in from the other end and with a bit of compression. Chuck it at something solid and hope it lands bolt head down. BOOM!
Strike anywhere match heads can also be used to re-fill a hacky-sack that has mysteriously lost all its beads. Though it's advised that this repaired hacky-sack be donated (anonymously) to some Hippies on Telegraph.
All kinds of fun to be had with match tips. Cut the tips of a half dozen books of matches and put them in an empty 2 liter soda bottle. Light with fuze and lookout!
AH those were the days ……………….. of course if you crammed enough match heads in a large enough 1/2" and above combo the threads would strip and bits would fly………………………dont stand to close
When I was a youngster I heard tell that if you filled a tennis ball with strike anywhere match heads and chucked it there would be a resulting grenade-like explosion. Never did try it though.
The Alamo Drafthouse does "tough guy cinema" where they hand out cap guns and have actual explosions in the theater for screenings of Die Hard and Blazing Saddles.