When I was young and my parents could not afford to buy us toys, we had to contend with making our own wooden toys. One of the “usual” toys that we often make is the wooden gun. I know paint-brush skills suck! A very rough blueprint of the wooden gun looks like the above.
The “ingredients” are rather simple:-
An arm length wooden plank (cut in the shape of a gun)
A nail or thumbtack (whichever is available)
A couple of rubber bands
Continuing the weekly series – read Part 3 here
The above is for the “gun” – hit the nail or thumbtacks at the end of the gun (the part where muzzle would be).
Tie the rubber bands at the nail. Take a small square wood chip and put it on the other end and tie more rubber bands to hold this wood chip. For the bullets, we use wild plant seeds which were found all over the neighbourhood (I don’t know the name of this plant – we just called “cherry”). One thing about this “bullet” is that when we are hit with this, it is painful.
We are normally divided into 2 teams – it is either me against my brother or me and my brother against the kids in the neighbourhood. There was once we organised a game between this neighbourhood and the other neighbourhood and it was played the whole day. We even managed to capture a POW and later that day, we had a change of POWs.
Captured weapons were collected and placed inside my neighbour’s dog kennel (that was a mean dog!).
hhmm..when i was growing up in penang we play with something similar but it was either buluh or the branch with a hole in the middle of it. you’d take another stick to shove the “buah gatal” from the back of the “barrel” 😛
Cheers!!! 😀
We had buluh in the neighbourhood but no one dared to go near because often we find snakes near it