Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys • Hacker News Board

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#171

Post by User23 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

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.

Making good black powder is quite dependent on the quality of the charcoal[1].

[1] https://schuetzenpowder.com/swiss-black-powder/

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#172

Post by blacklion » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

I find this division on "hobby" and "toys" very strange.

I participated at local "airplane modelling club" at my 9-11 years and we had these control-line planes with ICEs (hand-built from scratch). Only "glowing plug" ICEs were very high-end and rare in my country and we used compression (effectively 2 stroke diesel!) engines which required very specific fuel: 1/3 of kerosene, 1/3 of castor oil and 1/3 diethyl ether. Ether were hard to get by, but my grandmother was surgeon nurse ;-) And, yes, 9-year old flight these planes under supervision of club's instructor.

R/C planes were known, but electronics for them were available only in very big clubs ("Pioneers Palace", one per city in best case, if you live in big city).

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#173

Post by zenon » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

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…

My friend had a chemistry set that included a lead bar. We liked to chew on it -- imagine, a metal soft enough that you could easily dent it with your teeth!

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#174

Post by foobarian » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #138

greenbit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For all the broke young thrill seekers still out there and reading hn, KNO3 is readily available as "stump remover / killer" (for which it's ... better than placebo) and dirt cheap since it's technical grade

Stump remover is cheap and plentiful. I tried to make gunpowder with it but it was not what I hoped. (It fizzled and went out).

What I did have more success with is smoke bombs. Mix sugar and KNO3, heat up slowly in a non-stick pot until molten, pour into appropriate molds, let cool and ignite as desired.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#175

Post by JasonFruit » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 2:11 PM UTC

speakspokespok wrote: post #155

implements wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow. Way to bring me back. Looking at the link above I immediately recognized a similar toy that I had in the early 90's. it was of a similar design but with a small electric motor, and a stiff wire about 3ft long running to a control box that also had batteries. The UFO would hover. As I recall it was red and looked like a UFO. If we're talking toys that don't exist anymore, anybody here ever have a water pressure r…

I loved my water rocket! That thing was amazing. You can still get them, and it sounds like they're as impressive as they were.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#176

Post by pclmulqdq » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

chihuahua wrote: post #67

denton-scratch wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sulphur? My local hardware store sells flours of sulphur for gardeners. It's used for acidulating soil, and for combatting some kinds of fungus. I don't know why anyone would want to regulate the sale of elemental sulphur; it's not toxic, caustic or explosive. It's less flammable than a piece of wood.

GP mentions S and HNO3 in the same sentence. Those 2 combined with charcoal results in black powder.

You can use household fertilizer to make ETN, which is much more dangerous. There should be no problem with black powder.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#177

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

The thing I get a kick out of is that the picture is clearly from the 1990s: I forget what we called those pants, but I remember the giant high-tops were all the rage when I was in 4th and 5th grade.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#178

Post by aconbere » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #177

The thing I get a kick out of is that the picture is clearly from the 1990s: I forget what we called those pants, but I remember the giant high-tops were all the rage when I was in 4th and 5th grade.

Parachute pants or just as often “Hammer pants”.

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#179

Post by terran57 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

This post, and all the comments here, brought back lots of memories for me. I too have the faint scars from hand-propping these things ... or was it from the roman candle exploding in my hands in the midst of a roman candle war with other kids in the neighborhood? Estes rockets, chemical sets, control line planes, all part of my lived experiences as a kid in the 70s. It was certainly a unique time to be a kid - very little direct supervision during play time - few rules - basically be home when the automatic porch light came on. You could do stupid things like take your parents car out for a spin after midnight at age of 13. Then having the only consequence of getting pulled over by the police being a stern lecture and having the cop follow you home with a warning to never do it again...

Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

#180

Post by m4rtink » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #73

lproven wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to Google it, so just FWIW, that is usually called "castor oil" in English. :-)

Oh. Thank you, I did only check the direct translation indeed. Learned something today. :) That oil is for lubrication, the petroleum is the real, main fuel and the highly flammable aether is needed to be able to ignite at all at the comparably low temperatures you can produce with cranking. Too high compression and the first firing will see a too high counter force to continue, too little compression (that screw on…

We still had those at our aircraft model building club in the 90s as "that old thing" with the then new (at least for us) glow spark engines being all the rage. ;-)