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Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

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Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#111

Post by deepspace »

denton-scratch wrote: post #66
euroderf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who among us lit up the chunk of sulphur and (out of innocent curiosity) took a good snork off it, realizing too late that it was a stupid thing to do ? I sure did. Tinkering with chemistry also motivated me to look for sources of hydrochloric and sulphuric acids, but in New York state the guy at the pharmacy said I needed parental permission. Wasn't gonna happen.

Hydrochloric acid: My hardware store sells 30% HCl as Spirits Of Salts, for removing limescale from toilet bowls. It's effective, unlike toilet bleach. It's nasty stuff, and if your seat-hinges are metallic, you risk corrosion. And remember to flush before you crap. Sulphuric acid: No, hardware stores don't sell that here. You can get it from car batteries, and builders use the strong stuff for clearing drains. I hav…

I had the same idea when I was in school, and wrote a chemical company I found in the yellow pages for a price list and order form for Sulphuric and Nitric Acid.

The happily provided both... with a minimum order quantity of around 250 gallons.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#112

Post by thesaintlives »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #85
denton-scratch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So regulate charcoal. And black powder requires saltpetre, and doesn't require nitric acid. You can make saltpetre from piss, but I don't know how. And is black powder so scary? You can get it out of firecrackers, which are sold (here) without ID, although I guess you might have to prove your age to buy fireworks. It doesn't detonate, so it can't be used to prime a high-explosive like ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

Saltpetre was available from chemists (ie pharmacies) in the UK, but me and my pals had limited success making decent gunpowder with it - I strongly suspect it was heavily laced with some form of fire retardant precisely to thwart pyromaniacal little herberts like us.

Dry all parts. Mix in food blender, bingo!

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#113

Post by implements »

JasonFruit wrote: post #97

We removed the engine from my control line model and made a much more dangerous device! We mounted three wheels on the edge of a Frisbee and mounted the engine vertically in the cut out center. Then we started it and let it uncontrollably bounce, fly, and spin around the driveway, scattering gravel, until it ran out of gas or quit running from sheer abuse.

Wasn’t there a flying toy where an engine was mounted between two counter-rotating disks? (80s or before, possibly)

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#114

Post by ajsnigrutin »

greenbit wrote: post #49
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #19

The 70s really were another country - see also: chemistry sets. These are pale and anodyne things now with a mere handful of bland household-level chemicals - assuming you can even find one in a toy shop at all. But as a lad these were both readily available and full of dozens of intriguing substances that would send a modern health and safety wonk into apoplexy. Who among us did not incinerate all of the supplied ma…

Those sure were different times. I recall in the mid 1970s, as a kid no less, being able to go into a pharmacy and buy sulfur or KNO3 w/o any trouble at all. However it wasn't more than a couple years later, when a request for phosphorus was met with an icy "do I need to call your mother" stare, that my budding career as a chemist came to an end. Besides, the Radio Shack across the street had this computer set up for…

Can't even buy 30% peroxide anymore over here :/ Some regulation, some scare mongering and it only got sold to business customers... I can do that, but the quantities are also business-sized, and I don't need 20 liters of peroxide, but can't buy it in 1L bottles anymore

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#115

Post by DavidPeiffer »

jacquesm wrote: post #92
WalterBright wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bone to pick with LEGO. LEGO destroyed Erector sets. Erector sets were great because they were metal parts that you screwed together, and the machines you built look like machines. (My mom was reluctant to get me an Erector set, assuming I could not handle the tiny nuts and bolts. But I had no difficulty with them.) https://www.ebay.com/itm/133855778156 Lego machines look like cheap plastic crap with all tho…

There is two kinds of Lego (actually, a couple more but for this two will do). Lego bricks and Lego Technic. Lego Technic was conceived from day #1 to make proper machinery possible, the colors you are free to ignore. The old Technic sets such as https://thelegocarblog.com/2011/11/20/lego-technic-8860-car-... this one were really quite nice from a mechanical point of view. Lego created the technic line because in Eur…

I haven't thought about Fischer Technik for about a decade. Back in high school, there was a Principles of Engineering class (part of the Project Lead the Way curriculum). One of the projects was to make a marble sorter.

My group wanted to make a continuous belt marble sorter, rather than fully processing one marble then working on the next. Our chute to sort to buckets at the end didn't move very fast though. On the demonstration to the teacher, one of the marbles rolled along the seam between two buckets, only to fall into the correct bucket giving us 100% accuracy. He wasn't impressed with that part, but gave us the grade regardless.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#116

Post by AnimalMuppet »

JasonFruit wrote: post #97

We removed the engine from my control line model and made a much more dangerous device! We mounted three wheels on the edge of a Frisbee and mounted the engine vertically in the cut out center. Then we started it and let it uncontrollably bounce, fly, and spin around the driveway, scattering gravel, until it ran out of gas or quit running from sheer abuse.

My dad made something like that, except not with a Frisbee. It had two helicopter blades, and a dowel sticking out opposite the engine for balance. It had a little ring at the center of it holding the other parts together. He'd launch it from a screwdriver through the ring.

And once he did, it was pretty random where it went. Once it just went horizontally at about ten-year-old-me's head height. I ducked under it and it kept going. Sometimes it didn't do that much. And once it flew up... hard telling now, maybe 50 or 100 feet, and traveled maybe 1/8 of a mile before it ran out of gas.

You could sort of steer its initial direction by slanting the screwdriver. After that, you had no control, not even a kill switch.

Fun. And danger.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#117

Post by DavidPeiffer »

ramesh31 wrote: post #57
fxtentacle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble 12+ LEGO sets. Back in the day, when I was playing with LEGO Mindstorms, I thought the fact that you compile binaries and flash them with a USB cable was a feature, because it gave you full control. There was even alternative OS choices li…

>My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble 12+ LEGO sets. I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box? Why wouldn't I just a…

I also loved K'NEX. I built so many things, expanded the Big Ball Factory with additional logic gates at the top, got hands on experience playing with gear ratios, tower cranes, and built vehicles to race against my brothers down the stairs (of course the K'NEX man had to stay intact!).

It was fun building chunks of a big structure and assembling them together, and inevitably having to rebuild a chunk because of some missing pieces.

I do wish they built a control system akin to Lego Mindstorms though. Turning motors on and off manually was fine, but I really would have love to to be able to, for example, build my tower crane such that it could rotate via motor, and have separate controls for lowering the bucket and moving the load closer/further from the tower.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#118

Post by AnimalMuppet »

How about 1950s airplane non-toys? When we went through my dad's stuff, we found some wings that were about three feet across. On the top they said something like "This does not contain anything useful even to an enthusiastic amateur. The owner is a struggling scientist engaged in upper atmospheric and cosmic-ray research. If found, please return to ".

The skin on those wings was insanely thin. You could break it with a fairly gentle touch.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#119

Post by JasonFruit »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #116
JasonFruit wrote: post #97

We removed the engine from my control line model and made a much more dangerous device! We mounted three wheels on the edge of a Frisbee and mounted the engine vertically in the cut out center. Then we started it and let it uncontrollably bounce, fly, and spin around the driveway, scattering gravel, until it ran out of gas or quit running from sheer abuse.

My dad made something like that, except not with a Frisbee. It had two helicopter blades, and a dowel sticking out opposite the engine for balance. It had a little ring at the center of it holding the other parts together. He'd launch it from a screwdriver through the ring. And once he did, it was pretty random where it went. Once it just went horizontally at about ten-year-old-me's head height. I ducked under it and…

I'm not sure that device qualifies, but I've often told my wife that I hate the farewell phrase, "Stay safe!" that's become so common lately. Sometimes you have to balance whether something is enough fun to justify the risk of death.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#120

Post by mgressek »

We used to have the cox sky copter with the same engine. It had no control wires, you just let it go and it would ascend until it ran out of fuel and then it descended by auto rotation. It wasn’t that fun though, as it usually got stuck in a tree or on a roof on the way down. One day it just took off and disappeared, never to be seen again. We also had a dune buggy with that engine.
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