I am one of the lucky ones! I had the hand me down erector sets- WE made race cars with Rat traps as the motive force. I had several Gilbert Chemistry sets. I asked my favorite aunt to get me sulfer and Saltpeter - I made some rather good black powder- Solder the bulb from a "flash cube" to about 100 feet of found telephone wire, put powder and bulb in a rigid tube, stand behind large diameter tree and touch wires to D Cell. While I do not work in the field, I still love chemistry and will occasionally do silly chem experiments like Instant fire from antifreeze and a strong oxidizer. Make my own lime by calcining shells, and then disolve in water, filter and show how blowing through a straw generated CaCo3 again. Being child like means you can always be entertained easily.
Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
181–190 of 190 posts
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#182I am one of the lucky ones! I had the hand me down erector sets- WE made race cars with Rat traps as the motive force. I had several Gilbert Chemistry sets. I asked my favorite aunt to get me sulfer and Saltpeter - I made some rather good black powder- Solder the bulb from a "flash cube" to about 100 feet of found telephone wire, put powder and bulb in a rigid tube, stand behind large diameter tree and touch wires to…
Oh yea, my favorite aunt also bought me a lead casting set along wiht 1 mold for toy soldiers. sigh, I wish I had not lost that mold.
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in the 1980s. It must've been Christmas gifts, and my brother got a P-51, and I got a Spitfire. They were made of plastic, and looked more like realistic scale models, rather than what in the photo looks like a hand-painted balsa wood kit. (I don't recall we ever ran the engines. Probably told to wait until we went to a place with room to fly them, and then probably parts were lost before that could happen.) Spe…
I still have some lawn darts at my parents house that were illegal even when we got them. Javelins were banned in my state for track and field too.
Really ? One would assume schools or athletic clubs would make sure to observe the necessary safety for javelin practice.
It really seems like there would be bigger problems if one can't assume even that.
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#184I 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.…
I have a very similar experience about a decade later in a follow-up organization to the SVAZARM/pioneer ones.
By that point the control line planes were just hanging from the ceiling and detonation engines were on the way out with glow spark replacing them mostly. People also had general acces to multi channel RC and we had one vintage "communist era" single channel on/off RC set as a curiosity. :-)
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still have some lawn darts at my parents house that were illegal even when we got them. Javelins were banned in my state for track and field too.
Really ? One would assume schools or athletic clubs would make sure to observe the necessary safety for javelin practice. It really seems like there would be bigger problems if one can't assume even that.
Track meets are a little chaotic sometimes with all the events going on both the field and the track around the field. I guess someone actually was hit by a javelin at one point. From my searching it seems like these days its only just starting to come back to some highschool programs.
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#186The 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…
Really? I remember us having problems buying magnesium ribbon back then. A friend got some from our chemistry teacher with a bogus reason. Unfortunately, the thermite mixture wasn't done right--pebbles rather than powder--and it didn't get going.
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#187Hey, I still have my Cox 049 engine somewhere. The airplane is gone, smashed up of course. I suppose it was dangerous by modern standards, but not at the time. About the worst it would do would cut your finger if it backfired when starting. Or you could use a cheater stick, or even an electric motor to start it. I once made a car for it out of piano wire. It would take off at high speed down the road, but because I n…
> but because I never could get the wheels aligned perfectly straight it would inevitably try to turn Hm. I don't think "wheels aligned perfectly straight" is the actual solution. I wonder if there's some simple mechanism by which it could be made directionally stable, in the sense of continuously adjusting itself to go forward instead of turn.
Angling the wheels slightly outward would at least work to course-correct if the weight of the contraption gets slung out. If the car leans left it'll have the most weight on the left-angled wheels, putting it back on all four wheels. The mirrored situation happens if the car leans right.
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#188The fun thing to do with the engines was to start them standalone, point them straight up and let go. They'd go shooting up into the sky until torque reaction made them spin fast enough to stop fuel getting to the engine - at which point they'd pop and misfire, and tumble back to earth (sometimes restarting on the way back down. To this day I have scarred fingers from playing with these model engines.
I had a similar experience building model rockets with those Estes brand engines.
After many hours putting together the rocket, I launched it successfully but the parachute got stuck in a tall tree and I couldn't retrieve it.
My Dad an I had the bright idea of simply lashing a bare Estes engine to a balsa rod, and launching it like a classic Chinese rocket. The performance was amazing, so we promptly drove to the hobby store and bought the biggest engine they had in stock. The "D" size, if I remember correctly.
That was a tad too much power -- our contraption bent and started going in spirals and nearly set someone's garden on fire.
Fun times.
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#189I 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.…
I have a very similar experience about a decade later in a follow-up organization to the SVAZARM/pioneer ones. By that point the control line planes were just hanging from the ceiling and detonation engines were on the way out with glow spark replacing them mostly. People also had general acces to multi channel RC and we had one vintage "communist era" single channel on/off RC set as a curiosity. :-)
I've fall into hole between rich state (when such clubs were comparably-well-funded) and rich parents and full shops (when it become possible to buy materials, engines, etc., for money of participants themselves), so our small local club has only 2 working carbureted compression ignition engines (it is named so in English according to Wikipedia) and one glow-plug engine, all other were cannibalized for parts...
Re: Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
#190I got a Cox Red Baron in 1972, as I recall. Sad because I lived right next to a huge school yard but was never able to get it started. I had no one to ask how and why these things worked. It sat in the box on a shelf for the longest time.