re: Old Sled With Runners

I didn't want to hijack the thread below, but it reminded me of my son and his buddy. One nice warm summer day I saw them leaving with an old runner sled that we kept hanging in the shed. I asked them what they were up to, and they said they were gonna clean it up and paint it over at his buddy's house. About a week later I happened to see them bringing it home, and I'd never seen a sled in worse condition. It looked like it had been run over by a tractor. I asked them what happened to it, and after while they broke down and told me they were using it to slide down his buddy's barn roof. I couldn't believe they'd come off of a big barn roof like that, and said so, but they said his dad had a big pile of manure positioned perfectly to land on. A few days later I ran into his dad at the mill and asked him what he thought of them using his barn roof for a sled run. He got a funny look on his face and said, "So THAT'S what made those stripes on my barn roof". The kids said the runners lined up perfectly with the corrigations in the tin. So - all you guys with real young boys - this is what you can look forward to as they get older, HA!

Paul

About 50 years ago I was about 3/4 of a mile from home with the neighbor kids and I tried to jump a creek off the high bank to the lower one on one of those sleds. My butt went through the boards and got cut along the back of both legs, thought I was going to bleed to death before I got home.

Guess its fess up time for me too. About 60 years ago I tried to jump a creek on an old bicycle. Things were going fairly well until the front wheel dropped out of the fork. My nose still leans to one side today because of that misadventure. Joe

Back in 65 there was a snow storm that swirled through our yard and created a drift right up tight to the hen house roof. We took the sleds and started at the peek and down on to the drift and right on down the driveway out to the road. Weather was super cold so the runners never did break through the hard drift. Fun times.

we cringed everytime my older brother would leave with a sled. Always came home busted up. Fortunately my dad was good at fixing things. The sled I have today must be better than 40 years old.

My older sister and I used a large wash pan on our barn. We took a lot of lead heads off when we went down. The lower part of that side of the barn roof was flat, so we could slow down and stop before going off the edge. The last time I started to slide down, the wash pan tip the other way and on that side of the barn, there were no flat roof to slow down on. I went off a 7 foot drop on to a briar patch. Lesson learned. The funny thing is that the roof never leaked. We were 5 and 6 years old.

This wasn't a sled but a borrowed toboggan for a date. We had about eight inches of new snow, must have been in January. I had never been on a toboggan before, but being a gentleman, I put her in the front. When we got to the bottom of the hill I could hardly find her. I don't think we went out again.

Larry

When I was young (9 or 10) we had a neighborhood kid that was a know it all snob. We loosened the nuts on the front axel on his bike. We about split in two laughing when he jumped the front end up to jump a curb. Nope, still not sorry.

When I was in elementary school, we used to use the waxed cardboard milk cartons fom the lunchroom to slick up the surface of the playground slide. Sit on a couple and slide down - a few trips and the surface was really slick. Wonder how they waxed those cartons at the factory - some had quite a bit of wax on "em.

That reminds me - did you ever take the front wheel off of one bike and slip the front fork over the rear axle of another bike? Makes a three wheeled, in line bicycle built for two. Buddy and I were racing with some other kids when the back bike came unhooked. You stop quick when that front fork digs in the road!

I built a bonified two seater for my two boys, using two bike frames. It looked and worked good. I have a pic of it - - - somewhere.

On the back side of the Western Michigans cafeteria there was a really nice sledding hill. We would sprint out of the cafeteria with lunch trays and take off down the hill. That thin plastic tends to shatter in the cold, especially when you hit a snow jump that someone built the night before.

We did that for quite a while until WMU's finest, aka public safety put a stop to it.

Rick