I remember those! My brother got to have surgery and a soft cast on his arm for over a month because of this toy, and then my mother took mine away before I could follow suit. Second children never get to have any fun.
Aha! So YOU GUYS are the proximate cause for everyone’s fun being taken away. Mom always said “you could lose an eye” but nobody knew anyone who had.
Considering that just about everything was originally invented in somebody’s garage, clearly the communists are responsible for the emasculation of young boys in this country. It’s all a nefarious plot, I tell you 
It’s actually illegal to sell Lawn Darts, per the federal government. We had them growing up, and managed not to kill anyone. I vaguely remember “clackers” and vaguely remember the idiot who had them hurting himself on a regular basis. As I remember it, he rather deserved it. Chemistry sets were de rigeur, and they are undoubtedly highly illegal or completely weenified, if they are at all available today. I enjoyed Jensen Steam Engines, which thankfully are still available (just in time for the holidays if you order!) at
Bah. Wimp toys, all of these! I want my Bag O’Glass!
Heh.
In the museum in which I work, we have a toy which is a working model steam engine, used to power another toy. Doing research on it, I found one small article in a newspaper which talked about the tragic death of a child whose steam engine had exploded.
We also have a miniature cast-iron stove. The elderly woman who had donated it in the 1930s was kind enough to write a little note telling us how she played with it. She would fill it would wood chips, take it out into the yard, light it, and bake mud pies. The inside of the stove is still coated with ash.
We also have a miniature cannon, which requires gunpowder to work, a doll house which has real oil lamps (which were used until the chimneys were black) and myriad other toys which probably should have killed their owners.
Back then, EVERY toy was a choking hazard.
Besides cutting open a model rocket engine, there’s the fun of the unstable rocket. A stable rocket will go up several hundred, maybe a couple thousand feet. But if you build a rocket with fins that are too small, or with too much weight in the tail, the rocket will just go up about 30 feet, tumbling and zipping around like a crackhead hummingbird.
Sometimes the rocket can become stable after enough of the fuel has burned off. Then, instead of random tumbling, it takes off in a straight line like, well, a rocket. If it happens to be aimed at your head…
Good God, man, what were you thinking? The proper use for black powder from Estes rocket engines is packed inside something!* The neighborhood hobby store used to sell “Hobby Wick”, a controlled rate of burn fuse. We used it to make bombs out of pens, model cars, our mothers’ makeup containers and who knows what else. I remember a slumber party at a friend’s house where we woke up half the block by throwing bombs into the drainage ditch that ran down the middle of the street. It’s a wonder that all of us survived to adulthood with our all our fingers and eyes.*
I still remember the sad day when Mom took away my Hobby Wick, just because I was lighting chunks of it in my room.
*DON’T BE AN IDIOT: the activities described above are meant to illustrate just how dumb some of us were as kids. Do not try these things at home. If you won’t listen to your mother then listen to me.
Remember Ka-Boom? Take turns pumping up a balloon until it exploded. I’m sure I have hearing loss to this day from over 500 friendly competitions.
Lissa, the stove I have isn’t cast-iron, so it’s probably a little more recent than that one. It was my mother’s and I played with it a lot when we visited my grandma. It was steel and ran on electricity, with one working burner and an oven that really heated. I actually cooked food on it. Well, that is, if food doesn’t actually have to be edible. It started out as actual foodstuffs, though. And, yes, I burned myself on it a few times, and my grandma very carefully put butter on the burns.
One of the best toys we had was one my dad made for us. (You have to wonder what was going on in his head.) He would take the springs out of window shades. Now, these generally had a tightly coiled spring with a wooden piece on each end. If the wooden piece wasn’t there he put electrician’s tape on the end of it, so there was a place to hold onto it. Then we used them to shoot short pieces of dowel stick. Fortunately, they didn’t have very much range and we didn’t have very good aim.
Of course, there was also the set of lead soldier molds that we had. Nothing like getting molten lead all over yourself to teach you what fun is.
It’s a tragedy that entire generations will grow up without lawn darts.
As a tyke, I had a small rocket formed of hollow (and surprisingly strong) plastic; its launcher was an air pump with a locking trigger. You partially filled the rocket with water, locked it into the pump, pumped it till the plastic housing creaked, yanked the trigger lock open, and the thing launched with a truly amazing amount of force.
I also had a toy crossbow that was meant to fire suction-tipped bolts. However, pencils were the right size to be dropped right down the bore; when fired into a nearby wall, the pencils would literally explode.
My sister and I inherited a Barbie Town House from some older girls in our neighborhood. The thing was a pain in the rump to put together, so one fine Sunday morning before Sunday school we were playing with its disassembled pieces. We piled the fat tubes that supported the floors in a sort of pyramid shape on the table, and my sister started shooting the narrow square plastic bits that were meant to be the corners of the elevator shaft through the tubes. My part of the game was to guess where the square bits were going to come through and catch them before they fell to the floor.
I leaned in really close just as one bit came sailing through the very tube in front of my left eye. My eye kept watering and watering all the way through Sunday school and all the way through church, and after church my parents took me to the emergency room. Scratched cornea.
The moral of the story is: with enough skill and determination, any toy can be a Dangerous Toy! Plus, your mom was right. It’s all real funny until somebody loses an eye.
My parents bought me a working microscope set complete with dissecting tools when I was 8 or 9. I never so much as cut a finger.
However, the battery-powered die cast tractor my grandparents gave me ended up having to be cut out of my hair after wheels got tangled in it.
So much for those “safe” toys. Bring on the sharp objects!
Aww yeah! home made toys…err, weapons…were the best!! And the most deadly!!
Slingshots, glove guns (bit of poly pipe about 4cms in diameter with the finger of a rubber glove stretched over the end and taped on…drop stone down the barrel, hold stone inside glove finger, pull glove finger back, aim at brother, let go, laugh and run like hell.
Cross bows. Our crossbow creating days culminated in the mother of all home made cross bows!! We took a railway sleeper made of wood, bolted a leafspring off a tralier onto the end of it, put a bit of steel cable between the holes where the bushes bolt onto the tralier, bolted a hand winch onto the other end to pull the cable back and bit of steel pipe to put the dart in and help make it go straight. We knew me were on a winner when the first dart, which was a wooden broomhandle, was split in two when we triggered it. Dad turned up to investigate and suggested we use inch steel pipe…the results where fantastic! the bit of pipe disapeared from view (we lived on a farm, no nieghbours). Next test was to see if it would go through a sheet of tin…yep! 9 sheets together was the best record.
Unfortunately after a days creation we were forced to disassemble because it really was capable of killing us…possibly whales to
I miss lawn darts.
My friends and I invented a drunken gambling game with those things. Everyone puts a dollar bill on the other side of the lawn. Then, each person gets a lawn dart and keeps any bill they can stick a dart into.
Great fun.
YES! The trick to this one was to get as much water in it as possible. For best results, fill it completely with water and then hold the pump underwater while you work it*. My friends and I launched this sucker from the 8-foot-deep bottom of his pool; it disappeared into the heavens. About 45 seconds later it came back and landed in his neighbor’s yard. We found it embedded in the ground. I shudder to think what may have happend if we had launched it from the surface.
*Do not confuse with actual directions, or an attempt to persuade you to do the same. For information purposes only.
I fondly remember the Easy-Bake Ovens and Creepy Crawler makers of my youth. I don’t remember any of us ever getting burned and we often played with them without parental supervision.
Also, my brother had a BB gun our parents would let him shoot off in the basement. I didn’t have the muscle power at the time to cock it so didn’t get to shoot it often, much to my enduring regret. We all managed to survive with our eyes intact.
The best thing I remember from back then was when my younger sister had a farm set with a barn and animals and little plastic people. We used to take the shade off our lamp and melt the people on the light bulb. One we called Charley Bucket (because he carried a bucket) and we were always getting him into trouble with the other people. I think we were melting him for punishment.
Oh, those were the days.
I recall nearly being strangled to death by a Water Wiggle. Does anybody else remember that godawful thing? You attached it to a garden hose. It was a length of flexible tubing with a nozzle at the end and a plastic head on top. Turn on the hose and the water shooting out the nozzle would propel the head all over the place. Haven’t seen these things in years.
I was saddened recently when I (for some reason I can’t remember) mentioned Jarts and my high school students had never even heard of them.
Hmmm. Maybe I should bring one of my Jarts sets to school for play at lunchtime. Probably a bad idea.
Microscope with live-steel dissecting blades? Check
Hot-Wheels track with the spinning-catapult garage? Check
That cool, AWESOME, water-pump-rocket? Check. Remarkable range! A true classic.
My sister’s Easy-Bake? Check. I was an enlightened male.
All that and people were riding big honkin’ rockets to the frickin’ MOON right on live TV.
It figures it was too much fun to be all legal … 
The Jeopardy home game in the 1970s used to have little metal clickers that were in actuality a square of VERY SHARP metal under a thumb-shaped shield. Although this was technically an “adult” game, it was near impossible for them to keep my hands off those clickers and I was able to produce a gash on my thumb that put out about a gallon of blood before it was moved to a high, high shelf in the closet. (The game, not my thumb.)
Some older kids in my neighborhood made a similar device. They soldered together several tennis ball cans (they were metal in those days), making a tube about 4 feet long. The tube was left closed on one end, but a tiny hole was punched in the side just above the closed end. They then poured lighter fluid into the bottom of the tube, dropped in a tennis ball, and lit the fluid with a match through the hole. Voila - tennis ball cannon. It made a tremendous boom but didn’t shoot the tennis ball nearly as far as you’d expect.
I learned this trick from my high school chemistry teacher: Connect a small funnel to a natural gas jet using a length of rubber hose. Make a mixture of half glycerin, half dish soap, and line the funnel with it, so that when you open the gas jet, the funnel blows a big bubble full of gas. You can guess the next step; let’s just say it involves a match. Foooom! I was actually permitted to try this before the admiring eyes of my physics classmates.
Some other guys I knew were permitted to build crossbows in wood shop. They ordered a kit containing the spring steel piece that bends and the other hardware. One kid was quite a woodworker and built a beautiful black walnut stock for his crossbow, and I hear it worked splendidly. Our shop teacher must have had nightmares for months: “Student Builds Crossbow In Shop Class; Nine Dead in Rampage”