I was watching the PBS Program Nova tonight. It showed a guy cutting a metal baking pan using bacon for the fuel. He had fashioned a tube out of bacon and by sending oxygen though the tube it made a dandy, yet crude cutting instrument.

It made me think back to other wild things I’ve seen using fire. Of course growing up, I was like many kids that got out and built fires, like camp fires but we weren’t camping. We just built fires to entertain ourselves.

The following is a story about those campfires

https://www.facebook.com/groups/729839877052650/permalink/2260462960656993/

Below is a story I wrote one time about a cutting torch made for cutting metal.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/729839877052650/permalink/2208879062482050/

One of the craziest practices of starting fires I’d ever seen was down in Mexico.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/729839877052650/permalink/2207921609244462/

I’ll always say one of the absolutely craziest things I’ve ever seen, I witnessed when I was a small child. I was with my dad and we stopped by the apartment of Nelson Lewis in Austin. He was in his 20’s and living alone, prior to marrying.

When we got there we opened door and went in. We could hear the water running so we knew he was showering. We could see a yellow glow coming for an adjacent room, a bedroom. It was really cold that day. He didn’t have a heater so he had a lit the gas cock down at the baseboard. The flame was shooting out several feet in toward the center of the room.

When my dad asked him about it he said he just made sure there wasn’t anything that the flame could touch. Cecil recommended that he get a heater hooked up to it as soon as possible, which I guess he did. I never heard of his apartment burning down. Even at a young age that made an impression on me.

This story is about a machine fire on one of my jobs.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/729839877052650/permalink/2982175748485707/

How many of you remember being told that if you playing in fire that you’d wet the bed? I heard that all the time growing up.