Rock skipping

[skid542]

I go out to the woods and do a fair bit of hiking and backpacking and all that camping stuff. A lot of times I don't have the time to go for a good hike so I like to go the creek and skip rocks. Nothing spectacular about skipping rocks I know but I personally really enjoy it and it's a good way for me to relax and unwind. It's actually become a hobby of mine over the years. Photography is another hobby of mine and I finally took the time to see what I could about combining them. So with the camera on a little tripod with a 40 inch cable trigger in my left hand and the rock and my right I gave it a whirl. I took a total of 12 shots and had 5 out of the set that aren't worth much.
I scanned the best skips and one of the 'failures' and here's the link to the directory with them - http://filebox.vt.edu/users/lskidmor/personal/Photos . (I couldn't get the size to show right on the board, hence the link, each is about 4-6kb)
Completely non-Subaru related (though the drive to the creek is a fun one) but I felt like sharing.

[vrg3]

Cool pictures. It's weird that something so simple and unspectacular, as you say, can be so much fun. I love skipping rocks. It's one of those neat things about the world that running water tends to create stones that skip well on water.

[legacy92ej22t]

I thouroughly enjoy skipping rocks too. I always have ever since I was very young.

[legacycontinues]

I like to skip those really smooooth ones. Those suckers go and go and go and go.........They should make a rock skipping gun. If you angle it just right you can skip a rock across a lake.......

"News at eleven.... Man kills Nessy with homemade rock-skipping gun."

[skid542]

Thanks. One curious thing I found in the all the pictures, the water splash curls back on itself every time, even if just slightly.

Hehe yeah. I've thought about it. If you took a 2 foot piece of alum. angle and put a tread, like a convevor belt material or something on the verticle edge. And then connected it to a torsion spring of some sort....

[legacycontinues]

That sounds dangerous. I mean something like a potato gun.....just smaller.

When I was younger I built a potato gun and it was wicked. I let my friend Billy borrow it and he shot a potato into (penetrated metal) a car door. What really sucked was the car was waiting to get the tranny fixed at his fathers AAMCO shop. It was kinda hard to tell the insurance guy what happened without laughing.

[skid542]

Lol, potato cannons are great. I've gotten approx. 150 yards (confirmed, not estimated) out of a piece of ice frozen in a scrap piece of the barrel PVC. Also my brother and I once made an arrow out of a 3/8" dowel and found it in the next field over buried in the ground. Worried that we'd have to explain an arrow through a cow we stopped . But I've never shot it at a car despite many temptations.

[scottzg]

Sweet pics!

Had a calcium carbide potato cannon. We'd launch cement filled beer cans across the river about 3/4 of a mile. You couldn't see them unless you had a light source stuck to them and it was night. The cannon evenually blew up.

[legacycontinues]

We used propane and propane accesories....

[skid542]

Holy geeze Scott, what was this thing made of and where were you getting the calcium carbide?

Nice, we never fooled with the propane enough by itself, just hair spray.

[scottzg]

The calcium carbide was from my ex-miner neighbor. He had a 55 gallon drum of the stuff and was trying to get it out of his leaky garage, heh. My dad's buddy got most of it, but i got about 5lbs. The CC was a 8" black pvc pipe with about an inch of duct tape around it. I used a rocket launcher ignition box and extended the wires a good bit. When it blew up, the front half blew off with the can.

Oh yea, if one used a potato, there was nothing left but a moist spot when fired 30'.

[skid542]

lol, that's absolutetly great Scott, I love it.