Definitely the most fun was to be had making one's own stuff. Damn, you are taking me back. A nail inserted into a bamboo stick made an adequate spear.
Between the main posts of wire fences, we used metal rods, about the thickness of your little finger, and known as droppers, to reinforce the fence. I took one of these, spent a whole afternoon hammering one end to a sharp point, and made a hand grip at the balancing point using a strip of old inner tube. It made a pretty deadly spear. I remember stalking flocks of guinea fowl with it, determined to get something for the pot, but I never got remotely close enough.
Another piece of boyhood weaponry: the kleilat ("clay switch'). You cut a long, flexible switch from a tree. Then you stick a lump of clay from the bank of the local creek to one end, and use it to throw the lump. We had mini-wars with these things and would end up muddy and full of black and blue bruises. Miraculously, no one ever lost an eye or something. There is apparently a whole army of angels up there with the full time occupation of protecting boys from themselves.
And then there was the homemade blowdart gun: take an old ballpoint and remove the inside bit so you have a hollow tube. Push a pin through small piece of sponge so the sponge ends up against the head of the pin. You now have a dart that will fit snugly into your tube, ready to be shot by a puff of air. It really stings when you get one of these darts shot into your arm or leg.
Or, more adventurously, pram wheels from the local rubbish dump nailed onto wood made for an exciting afternoon! A go-cart was called a bogie (no doubt after the rail cart) in Scotland and Northern England, whereas, I would discover, a
bogey was something entirely different down South, namely London.
I always wanted one of those (known here in Afrikaans as a "kaskar" - translates more or less as "crate car"). Never had one though, but we had something virtually as cool: a draadkar ("wire car"), a toy car constructed of pieces of wire, with shoe polish cans for wheels, and a long steering column sticking out the back:
I do not think there is a video game on this earth that can compete with these kinds of things. I have seen this richly demonstrated on such occasions as when I took kids to the place where I grew up: their cell phones are promptly forgotten, and they start building forts out of wood they chopped down themselves, or build things from clay, or, er, heaven help us, build one fire after the other. By the end if the day they are covered in mud and dust from head to toe.
I pity kids who grow up in the city.
but my cousin's did. 
