HOW TO BREAK EVERYTHING (FIRST TIME)
There’s no point pummelling your victim in the gizzard when a single blow to the side of the head will knock him out straight away. Everything has a devastatingly effective ‘sweet spot’ – and we’ve found it…
BANK ROBBERS!
Hacking away at a safe with a stick of gelignite, an angle grinder and a jemmy is the Hollywood way of going about it, but you’ll more than likely just end up with a severed finger or a demolished building on your head for your troubles. However, most safes do indeed have a sweet spot, claims former payroll snatcher James Crosbie. “They incorporate a sweet spot in the door so that if you lose the keys you’ve got a way of opening the bloody things,” he says. “Beneath the outer skin will be a hole which, if you whack it with a punch and a hammer, will knock out a pin that holds the lock. The lock’ll then just spring open and you can open the door. The spot is different on every door, but there will be a template – you’ve just got to break into the safe manufacturer to find it in their vaults. I’ve often wondered though if scanning the door with echo sounding will locate the sweet spot quicker than by trial and error…”
THUGS!
As anyone who’s ever wrapped a chair leg around someone’s head in a nightclub will know, there’s nothing more frustrating than having them simply turn around and lamp you afterwards. To floor your victim, you’ve got to aim for a spot in between the eye and the ear, just above the temple. “It’s the weakest part of the skull,” says Dr Annabel Bentley, BUPA’s Assistant Medical Director. “Called the pterion, it’s where the four plates of the head interlock and where the skull is at its thinnest. The vital middle meningeal arteries are attached to the underside and if these tear they’ll cause bleeding in the brain.” The result? An instant knockout, followed by a bout of lucidity, which is often followed in turn by a coma and five lost years in a hospital bed with friends and family combing your hair and talking to you as if you can hear them.
DIRTY FOOTBALLERS!
Though Roy Keane’s famous tackle on Alf-Inge Haaland was indeed a career-ending bone crusher, breaking a leg requires a lot of force. “The bones in the leg are extremely tough,” says Dr Bentley “and they’re a lot harder to break than you might think.” If you’re playing against young kiddies, their bones will shatter like a boiled sweet under a toffee hammer if tapped on the growing plates at either end, but to crunch a grown man’s leg in one easy swipe you’ll have to be ruthless. “Where there’s flexibility there’s weakness,” claims Dr Bentley “and the most flexible joint in the leg is the ankle.” This hinge-type, freely moving synovial joint contains seven bones that articulate (connect) with each other, with the metatarsal bones of the foot, and with the bones of the lower leg. “The ankle bone itself, the talus, articulates with lots of bones and is perhaps the most vulnerable of them all.”
SPEEDING MOTORISTS!
In 2003, the North Wales Police Chief Constable got his gash in a fizz after a bunch of desperados called Motorists Against Detection (MAD) were said to have set about his counties’ beloved Gatsos. "We've had things that are effectively terrorist devices, bombs, planted in speed cameras. It's lucky that no-one's been killed yet,” he bewailed. We asked MAD’s head honcho, ‘Captain Gatso’ for some tips. “There are hundreds of ways to take out a speed camera, but the sweet spot is just below the box, where it joins the pole. That’s where the weld is and it’s no match for an angle grinder. Not that I’ve ever done it, of course. Alternatively, what you could do is drill a hole in the side of the box itself and pump it full of the expanding foam that you get from DIY shops. Within minutes the thing’ll explode under the pressure.”
DRUNKARDS!
Perhaps one of the only things in life that’s more frustrating than when your girlfriend gets squiffy and finally announces that she’s up for brown love but you’ve got nothing in the house that you could use for lube apart from toothpaste or ketchup, is when you’re faced with a bottle of beer without an opener. Beery convention dictates that you attack the predicament with your teeth or the edge of a kitchen cabinet, but either will virtually guarantee a trip to casualty and/or Ikea. We consulted Bristol booze hound, Henry John, who advocates a far safer method using a plastic lighter. “Grasp the bottle with your thumb and forefinger flush with the top,” he says, “Loosen yer grip a bit and wedge the bottom of the lighter under one of the peaks on the top. Then, using your forefinger as a fulcrum, pull the other end of the lighter down to prize off the top. Piece of piss.”
PERVS!
Getting into a bra can be a troublesome task. A task that is fraught with the threat of sprained fingers, slapped cheeks or worse. The clasp at the back is shielded by oestrogen-based witchcraft, but there is a sweet spot, as Sue Loder, a spokesperson for Triumph International (www.triumph.com/uk) explains. "Bras can be made up of 40 different components which all work together to add to the strength and look of the garment. The underwires and the straps are vitally
important for support, obviously, but the 'heart' of the bra is between the cups – if it breaks here the whole thing falls apart, as demonstrated by front fastening bras (which some guys might find appealing!)." A covert series of missions (codename: operation puppy freedom) into your girlfriend’s undie drawer armed with a quickunpick should ensure spontaneous spillage within days…
TERRORISTS!
In November 2003 a “mystery projectile” no wider than a biro punched through the skirt of an Abrams M1A1 tank in Iraq. As it drilled through the crew compartment it hit enough critical components to knock the tank out of action, making the tank one of only two Abrams disabled by enemy fire during the war. Infuriatingly, the military bods don’t know (or won’t say) what fired the mini missile, so if you want to take out a tank you’ll have to do it the conventional way. With an RPG-7 – a rocket-propelled grenade. The thinnest part of a tank’s armoury is the underside, but it’s tricky to get to, so the next best places are, according to the folk at Jane’s Defense: “the top side, and rear armour, which remain susceptible to penetration." Handily, the rear armour protects the engine compartment and the external auxiliary power unit. This can be pierced by medium-calibre fire and will stop a 69-ton behemoth dead in its tracks.
HOME BUYERS!
Wouldn’t it be magic if there was a place that was protected from the sea by a sand bank which, if breached, would flood the region for miles around sending house prices into a plummeting freefall? “I know where you mean,” says Steven Riley of Norfolk County Council, “it’s an area called Horsey Mere and the beach at Horsey Gap.” Several breaches have occurred over the years, with one of the most devastating occurring on the night of February 13th 1938, when the combination of northerly gale and a spring tide forced a gap 600 yards wide in the sandhills. Sitting below sea level, 15 square miles of land were deluged with salt water, which drowned cattle and left local villages swamped. Once a breach has been brought about – by a couple of tones of stolen quarry explosives, say – and the flood water has been drained, you’ll be able to buy a quaint cottage at a rock bottom price. But be warned: just 18in (46cm) of water in the average semi-detached home can cost from £15,000 to £30,000 to repair.
ROCK STARS!
We asked veteran hotel-smashers, Status Quo, if they could show us how to lob a TV out of a window for best effect, but they declined saying: “It’s not worth it. We learned long long ago that anything you chuck out of a hotel window simply gets added to your bill.” Undeterred, we went to Tom Lauten, a special effects whizz for Nimba Creations Ltd , who’s demolished pretty much every prop known to man. “TV screens themselves are notoriously tough. However, if it were to land bottom down, the pressure built up inside the telly after a very high fall would cause the whole front face including the screen to blow out catastrophically and all at once. For added spice you could add some pyrotechnic charges to the TV with an impact switch so that the moment it hit the ground a shower of electrical looking sparks also rained out along with the set’s innards.”
MATADORS!
Taking out a 1000 kg bull ain’t easy, as any abattoir worker will testify. The beasts have to be stunned first with a captive bolt (‘humane killer’) to the head before the slaughtering can begin – and even then they’ll lurch about like Bernard Manning on crack. However, a matador can deliver a near instant death thanks to his silver sword and balls of steel. The rampaging taurine juggernaut will first be exhausted by having short barbed sticks jabbed in its withers, and when it pauses for breath and lowers its head, the matador will strike. According to James F. O’Dwyer, author of The Art of the Matador, his “target is a small surface, no larger than a man’s fist, located just between the bull’s shoulder blades... Holding the sword shoulder high, the matador aims and runs forward. The sword is thrust in deep over the horns in between the shoulders – the idea is to hit the major vessels of the heart, killing the bull almost instantly.”
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