Friday, October 31, 2008

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom/

/Gonna shoot you right down ...

Behold the tiny flare pistol, from Berloque.

As you can see from the picture, it is small enough to fit on your keychain.

Itty-bitty as it is, using pin-fire blanks that need nimble fingers or tweezers to load, the single-shot pistol will launch a mini-flare in assorted colors -- red, white, green, yellow, like that. They claim a height of twenty-five meters, and that looked to be about right.

I bought one for my son for his birthday, and we gave it a go last night.

Comes with twenty blanks and ten flares, and while you can buy spares of both, they are pretty spendy -- couple refills of twenty-five rounds each will cost you as much as the gun.

Because the barrel of this gadget has to be drilled through so that the blank can ignite the flare as it launches, this means you can't point it at somebody because the blast will blow out through the muzzle. (It also means that if you happened to be holding a #7-1/2 BB from a shotgun shell and accidentally dropped it and it somehow fell into the muzzle and you accidentally jammed it in deeper with the little ramrod used to eject the spent blanks while trying to remove the BB, you would have a teenie-weenie smoothbore single-shot pistol.)

Not that I would ever tell you to do this. That would be dangerous, for if you then fired the pistol thus accidentally loaded in order to remove the BB, you might find that the blank charge would be sufficiently powerful enough to propel the pellet at a velocity that would punch a hole right through a cardboard box. A true mousegun.

Good luck with a barrel as long as your little fingernail trying to hit something with it, though.

An amusing toy, though, for those of you who find such things interesting.

3 comments:

  1. Damn it - I accidentally saw this post!!! ---- What am I supposed to not do that I might do if I found and didn't read the non directions correctly or accidentally interpreted them incorrectly and accidentaly dropped flamable copies of a post and things in the gun powder - that was left over from me taking apart a shotgun shell -that I did next to the stove - to get a bb (because I don't reload) that could drop in a tiny barrel and all of the above getting knocked over into the open flame on the stove that was left on to make me a calming tea. I know, I know, I should just go watch a Three Stooges movie and not get so excited about a potential new (non) bb shooting firearm that accidentally could be bought? Thanks Steve

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  2. The other comments non series of events accidentally could have happened while making the delicious shrimp too.

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  3. Now, if this thing were just a little bit larger, say large enough to fire .17 caliber darts or something, you could glue it right to the back of your hand, and...

    Oh, I know, shut up.

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