Destruction, Demolition and DeconstructionThe Lone Groover says "I've just taken down a pergola with a metre-deep Russian vine over the top. It had nine birds' nests in it, and had rotted all of the cross timbers. It covered the entire lawn and needs a skip of its own." What's the biggest/worst thing you've ever taken down? Tell us your tales of demolition and wanton destruction.
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:17)
This question is now closed.
Total Cunt with no regretsI once flew a plane into the world trade center and by a miracle of God I walked away.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 22:57, 4 replies)
Death of a shed. SHED! My ex Brother-in-law bought a house on a steep slope
It had previously belonged to some old dear who had obviously run out of the energy, time, or money to maintain the garden, which was south facing and potentially gorgeous but was badly overgrown and untended.
We had a working party one weekend to clear a lot of shite but on one side was a SHED. Quite a nice one at one point, I expect. It had a little sun patio on the front but it was badly rotten. SHED had to go.
We all praise SHEDS - they've become a significant part of QOTW legend even if most of the regular contributors or iconoclasts can only aspire to one, but let me tell you about the death of a SHED.
It had to go. If it was a pet we'd have taken it to the vet. If it was our granny we'd have got a one way Easy-Jet ticket to Zurich and checked the will, or booked her into a care home in Bristol.
How do you put a SHED out of it's misery? But quickly,like? Demolishing it bit by bit would have been good but time consuming and, for the shed, undignified. The old way might have been a gallon of petrol but that wasn't really a practical option but petrol and fuel and chin scratching and...DIESEL!
I had a Diesel Citroen ZX at the time. Say what you wish about Citroens but it'd pull a thick elephant backwards out of a swamp. So we attached a rope to the shed, and attached the other end to my car.
Sorry if you've read this far and expected a link. Just go back as far as you can and imagine the spectacle of a car at high revs, wheels spinning, and a huge lurch as the car took up off the drive with bits of shed collapsing onto it.
The moral of this story is - car pulls shed down. But we enjoyed it.
EDIT - for the AB archive - man tells dull anecdote about tying car to shed but man enjoyed relating the memory.
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The Disappointed Caravanner of the year, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 20:42,
4 replies)
An old stable20 years ago, the old man and old lady bought a disused chicken farm which had huge poultry barns and a large stable. They paid someone £9,000 to demolish the poultry barns. They paid me nothing to demolish the stable.
I have a degree in a totally unrelated branch of engineering, but I worked out where to cut the various beams and posts so that the whole thing wobbled on the brink, ready to fall as soon as I knocked out the last central post with a sledgehammer. I did this and ran for my life as it collapsed in on itself with a satisfying "crump".
Then they told me about the asbestos roof I'd just managed to crack into 101 pieces. Hang on...asbestosis takes 35 years to show up, you're 55 and I'm 23. Why am I doing this?
Exploited, that's me.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 20:13, Reply)
DansetteUsed to get old Dansette record players from jumble sales/church fetes etc as a kid for 20 - 50p. Great laugh smashing them to pieces, the valves make a fairly mini explosion when lobbed at a wall.
Fast forward to now, have you seen how much they go for these days?
D'oh :(
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 19:35, 3 replies)
when my parents bought our house, the builder was a total workshy cunthe did many things Wrong, but perhaps the most heinous was that the house, which was a newbuild, was sold with a big patch of land at the front. my mother planned a rockery and my father planned extra parking.
until the day we arrived home from various works/schools to find a mahoosive fence running right down the side of the house. with the plot of land on the Wrong side of it. a quick word with one of the neighbours who had been speaking to the purchaser of the new house on the Wrong side earlier in the day, and yes, the builder had also sold it to him, wasn't it awful, typical builder, we had all his support etc etc.
i think the fence lasted about 10 minutes after my father got home and set about it with a hammer. the builder was deeply unimpressed, but he had to accept that he had been a dodgepot, and his threats of suing went away.
the most memorable thing, apart from the sight of my dad swinging a hammer like peter sutcliffe on speed, was that the supportive neighbour was at a dinner party a few weeks later, with people who were unbeknown to him mutual friends. he spent about an hour slagging my dad off as this awful beast who had flattened a perfectly good fence. my parents never let on that they knew about his two-facedness; not sure i could have swallowed that.
look, i didn't say it was interesting, blame yourself for reading it. and blame the question. you can't polish a turd!
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rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 18:48,
4 replies)
common sense fail.Sheffield forge masters c2004..
This place had a 30 tonne crane inside the forge building for shifting large buckets of molten metal around.
The crane and control gear was built in the late 70s or early eighties by some cutting edge Chinese or Japanese company at the time. Needless to say, they ceased trading at around 1990. It worked with minimal maintenance and breakdowns until 2004, when a fresh from college whizz kid was sent there to do the yearly service. Numpty bollocks as he shall forever be known, did the tasks expected of him, and then decided to act on his curiosity.. He looked at the ancient PCB's and logic circuits, un plugging them and reconnecting them into their sockets WITHOUT TURNING OFF THE POWER. He plugs the last one in, and is granted with a small puff of smoke.
Tl;Dr - the replacement crane cost quarter of a million pounds.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 17:40, 1 reply)
ArsonIt was a Pontiac Tempest. They had bought it just to destroy it. We threw dimes and ball bearings into the carburetor, and listened to them flying around in the cylinders. Forward, reverse, over and over at high throttle. Finally, after a day of fun, and not being satisfied my friends were really into total destruction, Mark and I brought a can of gas out to the school parking lot where the Tempest was parked. I poured in a couple of gallons, and struck a lighter. I had no previous experience with large quantities of gasoline. There was a pretty good wall of fire that blasted at my face. That's about the time when we began running. I had no idea cars were so flammable. It wasn't long before a series of sirens were heard racing down the street. The next morning the cops showed up at the house. I guess someone pointed in our direction when asked who might have done it. Well, when asked if we did it, I, knowing that my eyebrows were well singed, said we had not. I also added that we had been barbequing. I think the only thing that saved me was the fact that the cop was one of the trumpet players in the high school band. He played third, and I was first chair. So he must have had some respect for me. Another narrow escape from the state penitentiary.
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cowcat Bituminous squeegee, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 17:34,
Reply)
Have a marrowfat pearoastOne morning our headmaster interrupts his normal assembly address to ask for volunteers. Myself and a couple of chums slung up our arms, and were duly chosen for a special task - smashing up the sixth-form pool table, which was being replaced.
Given a selection of hammers and axes, we were told that we could do as we pleased, provided that the valuable slate came off in one piece. We merrily chopped, hacked, stomped, splintered, crunched and smashed our way through the next two school periods until we were left with a pile of woody bits, the coin mechanism (which I took home as a trophy) and the pool balls. The school groundsman came and set light to our pile of achievement, congratulated us (swore), and sauntered off.
Now, given that this great big blaze was on the same day as PE, half-empty deoderant cans were lobbed on the fire as soon as the groundsman turned his back. We were treated to a rippling CRACKcrackCRACKCRACKcrack as they went off in quick succession - broad grins were exchanged. We eyed the faux-ivory pool balls.
On the fire they went.
As we legged it to the safety of a hedge, we spotted the school badboi (innit) saunter up and add his deoderant can to the pile. He must have got the shock of his life – instead of one measly 'crack', he was treated to a juddering calamity of explosions as several of the plastic balls went at once. The other balls went off shortly after - neatly drowning out the headmaster's vitriolic ravings as he raced up to Mr Badboi and accused him of trying to level the school.
This was fun for, ooh, all of thirty seconds, before I discovered that my warm glow of satisfaction was, in fact, a slightly on-fire jumper.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 17:25, 1 reply)
*innocuous subject line**rambling paragraph about nothing very much*
*eventual conclusion which says very little*
*shortening of 'enough said'*
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Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 16:29,
28 replies)
Unconvincing set upTedious middle, line break, line break.
Apparently I was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
Penis length apology, reference to desirability of 7 days elapsing.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 16:17, Reply)
Video Killed the Video StarI chucked a video recorder out of a first floor window because it chewed up my tape of Evil Dead.
Seemed a fair trade.
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Joe Scaramanga with a G-double-O-D vibration, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 15:45,
1 reply)
I once used a hammer to smash some small dumplings containing pork, salt, spices, and often garlic or finely chopped green onion.That was my tale of wonton destruction.
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Dr Preference AjcuiVd289, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 15:19,
2 replies)
"Brute force and ignorance solves every problem eventually."(
Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 15:06,
5 replies)
In the 70s, when I were a ladof about 9 - 10 years old, we lived in a village that was quite a famous airfield during World War II (Biggin Hill). There were quite a few derilict houses dotted around, which most of the kids in the village used to spend their weekends smashing up.
Several of them were eventually razed completely, in proper Graham Green destructors style.
How we survived, I have no idea. Once, my brother and I were merrily smashing through the downstairs stud walls with a hammer, as another bunch of kids were busy doing something upstairs.
We decided to take a breather, and wandered outside. Probably to have a fag. Anyway, as we left, it became apparent what the kids upstairs had been doing, as the whole chimneystack came crashing through the roof and landed in a 5 ton pile of bricks right where we had been standing about a minute before.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 14:47, 2 replies)
As I write, I'm girding my loinsTo finish off removing the last wall - made from logs and lime plaster - from a shed, prior to re-cladding in less pretty, but actually waterproof insulation, which will make it a useful space, and avoid the structure rotting and collapsing in a couple of years time.
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 14:37, Reply)
My old school had a piano they wanted rid ofBut they were too tight to pay for someone to take it away. One afternoon they rounded up some of the bigger students and herded them into the room with the piano.
"Now then lads, for legal reasons we can't actually ask you to destroy this piano. Back in five minutes."
Matchwood.
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MatJ LOOK, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 14:31,
Reply)
I agreed to deconstruct six pianos in a church.They were located on the third floor of the building. As near as the caretaker and I could figure, they had been muscled up the stairs sometime in the 1920s, then the staircases had been reconstructed so there was no way of removing them whole. Then the roof leaked and they got damaged- so the church wanted them out of there.
A friend of mine volunteered to help in exchange for the ivory from the keys. I could think of no use for it- I was mainly after the bigger pieces of wood, which appeared to be mahogany (it was a veneer, dammit), so I agreed. We quickly figured out the most efficient way of dismantling it to pieces that could be carried down, and I laid claim to the hammer boards as well as they were wooden linkages and therefore pretty cool.
We completed the job and Charlie carried home the keys. "Only a couple of pianos had ivory, though," he told me. "The rest were acetate."
"Oh. So why do you want them?"
He gave me an odd grin. "There are things you can do with acetate if you know how."*
Some time later there were reports of explosions around the city. I guess he was deconstructing other things himself...
*No, I had no idea what he meant by that. I should have known.
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 8 Nov 2012, 14:03,
3 replies)
Sledgehammer: Man versus MEGASHEDI bought a house a few years ago, where the previous owner had an obsession with two things: Leylandia trees and garden buildings. The back yard was a forest of Leylandia, which were pulled out of the ground and chopped up over a period of several months, and there were no fewer than four sheds.
Thanks to a slash-and-burn policy, we soon ended up with a pretty acceptable garden, and I was set to work on demolishing the fourth shed at the top of the garden, which we had christened MEGASHED. It was huge. Previous Irish Owner had built it himself out of huge sheets of plywood and it stood well over ten feet tall and might have doubled up as a squash court if it were not such a bloody craphole.
After getting the doors and a few of the side panels off through brute force and a crowbar, I wondered if there might be a quicker way to finish the job, all the time eyeing up one of the huge lengths of four-by-four holding the thing up.
I selected my biggest sledgehammer, and with main strength, knocked out one of the corner supports with a single blow. Then, a couple of hefty swings took out another, as nails and other low-quality fixings pinged about me.
In retrospect, I should have stopped there, taken the roof off and perhaps a couple of now unsupported walls. But I did not. Instead, I lined up with a third corner support, felt rather satisfied with the thunk as it fell ago, almost immediately taken over by fear, darkness and agony as the entire structure folded in on itself like the final scene from Poltergeist.
I lay there for some time on the concrete floor, considering my folly. Then, shouted for help, and it came. Eventually.
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:54,
11 replies)
I destroyed the World Trade Centre.I think I should win the compo
(, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:46, 1 reply)
Jimmy Saville's legacy. (
Maffers I flow kinda strange like Spina Bifida footprints, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:29,
Reply)
5thAlso, I've never sexed a child.
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drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:28,
Reply)
i once took down my pants to reveal the biggest/worst thing.(
The Doveston haunted by the memory of his own amnesia, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 13:25,
3 replies)
This question is now closed.