When I got to 10th Group, we played soccer for PT one afternoon. In order to make sure we didn’t accidentally cheat and use our hands, we had to have a bottle in each hand. Mimimal spillage from them if you take a few swigs from each. However, I still have a scar on my face from a vicious head butt. One of the medics swept a bunch of beer bottles and debris from the picnic table and said, “I’ve got this!” as he drunken pulled a suture kit ouf of his bag.
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I agree use heat shrink put it on and warm it up and it will be a nice fit.
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Welcome to the forum, James.
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Now I’m going to have to see if I can find one of the old “Don’t drink and drive. You might spill it.” bumper stickers…
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Since I’ve already gone on one tangent - heat does a very good job on vinyl tubing. Here’s how I know:
Ft McClellan, Alabama, 2004 - I was at Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat School, which I ended up attending six times, twice as an instructor. It’s a four to five week course, depending on the length of the CULEX. All you do is shoot and blow sh!t up for a solid month, with mechanical, ballistic and explosive breaching thrown in along with urban movement and building clearing, and ground and helicopter assaults. Pretty much the ultimate cool guy course.
acular
We were all (about 20 students) or studs in SF vernacular because it takes up less room on a spread sheet, standing around a long row of tables building inititiator charges. They consist of two M 81 initiators, (we dual prime everything)
A length of shock tube, and two NONEL blasting caps.
You can see from the above photo that there is a plug in one end of the initiators, or igniters as they’re sometimes called. You unscrew the end a bit to loosen the clamps on the dust plug, remove it, insert shock tube, and then screw tight again. Blasting caps go on the other end of the shock tube. We built an asslaod of these in the Alabama heat in August.
The trouble was, and here is the point of the story, the vinyl tubing got so hot, when we inserted it into the initiator, sometimes it would melt a little bit or ball up inside - so that the little .22 blank inside the initiator could not ignite the powder in the shock tube. After a few test shots revealed their unreliability, we had to disassemble each one, cut the end off of the shock tube, and reinsert it. This time the tables were underneath a shade structure, but it was still hot as balls.
So we stood the telling war stories whlle we unscrewed the bases and redid them. The guy next to me wasn’t paying attention. He had TWO taped together, with the blasting caps hanging down dangerously close to his nutsack. He began unscrewing an initiator on the pull ring end, which has the same effect as actually pulling the pull ring. The two blasting caps went off. I don’t even remember the sequence exactly - there was a boom, somehow I was suddenly fifty feet away (I must have run like a b!tch) and I saw four medics already gathered around this guy. He was writhing on the ground, begging to know the status of his junk, which miraculously was unscathed. The caps did blow a nearly softball chunk out of his thigh, peppering my BDU pants and sleeves with bits of him and aluminum shards from the caps. I still have the top squirreled away somewhere, full of tiny holes.
Moral of the story - heat works! Sometimes less heat works better.
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Aww, the good old days.
Ken
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Ahh, good old FT. McClellan, I was sent there when I came back from Nam in 72. Have you seen the contamination suits going on because of it being the Chemical school for so long? Wayne
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No, I don’t follow it much. But I do remember us being warned that we might see some two headed frogs.
The Chemical bunkers were part of our CULEX, we acrtually cut throught the doors with a Broco rig.
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When I went to the veterans affairs office to get veteran on my drivers license I had to show them my DD214. He looked at it and ask if I was having any health issues as I was an Agent Orange candidate plus a Ft. McClellan exposure candidate. Amazingly I am fairly healthy for a 73 year old! Wayne
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