My best friend and I used Q-Tips-- cut 'em in half, insert a needle, and then use a lighter to melt 'em in. Perfect size & weight. Darts would lodge well into walls, flesh, whatever.
Good times.
Had a lovely chemistry set back in the early forties (I think just before WWII started). Among lots of other fun stuff it contained.
- Potassium nitrate.
- Sulfur.
- Charcoal
Guess what can be made from those three ingredient? Bang!
We lived on a farm back then, and I remember vividly how Dad, in late June, would send $15.00 to an outfit in Ohio and receive in return a BIG box full of fireworks. I and a bunch of cousins would set these thing off from daylite to dusk, and still have a bunch left for the afterdark display. In three or four years of this only one tetanus shot was ever required.
If we had time travel I’d go back there like a shot - if I could take modern dentistry with me.
I remember when a pre-teen could walk into the drug store and buy charcoal, saltpeter, sulfur, and a mortar and pestle–no questions asked. [In Edit–Nod to Daylate who beat me to this.] Fortunately I was older before I realized the stuff had to be confined to actually explode.
Long before that, when I was five or six, I couldn’t figure out why my older brothers could make things explode (weed killer and sugar, nitrated sponges, etc.), but I couldn’t. For example, gasoline in a plastic toy bowling ball looks like a bomb, but it just sits there and burns.
On the other hand, I didn’t carry my “bomb” far enough away from the 5-gallon jerry can, which I’d left open. After the fumes ignited it, the can got knocked over in the excitement. I’m really not sure how I survived. I recall trying to “push” the gurgling stream of gas back into the can with a counter-stream of water from the garden hose.
Anyway, I got the fire out somehow, and my Dad believed me later when I said I didn’t know how the grass by the garage got burnt. (He probably assumed my brothers did it.) It remained a mystery for decades. Then at a family gathering one evening, my brothers finally told Mom that her cake scale hadn’t really been lost in a move–it had been flattened by an exploding homemade rocket engine. Astonished laughter ensued.
Seeing that my brothers survived their revelation, then I told my gasoline can story. When I described drowning the fire with a garden hose, light bulbs went off. For years afterwards, all our small engines had been plagued by water in their fuel tanks…
Oh, also: someone mentioned throwing lawn darts at each other. I can’t help mentioning mumblety peg, in which players alternately throw a pocket knife so it sticks in the ground near their own (or each other’s) feet. One occasionally saw it played with a real throwing knife, which was probably safer.
Hehe,I had a stretch monster,didn’t take me long to figure out that if squeezed it was very soft.Had a lot of my friends squeeze him…then I said punch it.it was like hitting a brick.
Feet bleed forever. I still have a scar from where the knife went in!
Lawn darts - check
Click clacks - check
Cap guns, anvil, ball peen hammer - check
Model glue, gunpowder pulled out of old shot shells, and whatever else would burn - check
Old barn complete with old rotten rope to swing from and jump off - check
2 boat sleds with a inner tube bolted between them and bungee cords to hold yourself in as you slide through the woods on a 45 degree slope - check
It’s a wonder I still have all of my appendages!
Some of you may recall that years ago, “Mr. Potato Head” did not come with his own plastic potato with the slits in it. You bought a bag of face parts and stuck them into your own (real) potato. Of course, a raw spud’s natural hardness required a rather stiff pointy plastic appendage to get the job done.
I know from personal experience that when left lying on a bedroom floor, said pieces were able to pierce a child’s bare heel just as easily as a tater – maybe more so, in fact.
I chopped mine in half with a hatchet. That was some seriously sticky goo in there. Ruined the hatchet.
Yeah, that model (mostly cars for me) glue tore really tore up my fingers! So did rubber cement. I’ve had fingerprint wokers wonder what the hell happened to my thumb, index, and middle fingers.
I used to have a toy pedal tractor sort of like this that we’d race down my downhill gravel driveway against a bicycle or whatever. It wasn’t really built for speed, but if you pedaled fast you could get those rear plastic wheels spinning. It had two really little wheels in front, and vague steering at best. You’d get up some good speed and all of the sudden CHUNK those front wheels would turn perpendicular to the tractor, it would stop very suddenly, and you’d hit your chest on the steering wheel and fall over, or at worst go sailing over the front of the tractor. 
I drove the old Henry by my self at about age four. Grandpas teach you things in private that piss mom off. They thought I was kidding when I asked if I could drive the tractor. They were all outside on about my 3rd pass around the shed.
Caps were nothing. When I was about 10 a buddy and I visited a neighborhood garage sale. The old guy gave us a box of .22 bullets so we would leave. We when back to his house and got a pair of pliers. One person would hold the bullet with the pliers, the other would whack the bullet with a hammer. It’s a wonder we didn’t hit anything with the bullets.
It sounds like the man chose well. You just didn’t manage what he intended.
Fun thread. The latest issue of Make Magazine has a short article on some chemistry sets that came out in the early 20th century. One set from the 20’s included cyanide (yes, the secret-agent-slip-under-the-tongue cyanide.) Another set (same company) included chemicals for melting glass at 1600 degrees. To quote the magazine, “mind your fingers, kids!” (The article also mentions a chemistry set for girls that had no chemicals.)
As for my own childhood, a few of my friends where sons of chemistry professors at a local college. We snuck into the labs and pinched more than a few dangerous chemicals. Sodium is fun when mixed with water.
I had a pair of Click Clacks that actually broke their string a went sailing off. Luckily, that did not cause too much damage, but it could have.
It was a roll of slick plastic with a cool stripy pattern. Impossible to stop. Impossible to steer. And it would hold five kids if they squished together! You always wanted to be in back – unless you were trying to prove Manliness. That thing went FAST!
And far – beyond the range of our sledding hill, through the trees (if it didn’t hit any) into the parking lot, onto the highway, into the pond. . . .
How do kids these days learn to handle themselves in emergencies without the help of dangerous playthings? We learned all about broken bones and head injuries, burns and bleeding.
Lawn Darts. Woodburning kits. Electrical toys that shorted out – spectacularly! (OK, with a little help. . . )
Did you ever make a parachute for your G.I. Joe out of one of your mom’s silk scarves? And do you remember trying to catch it when the parachute didn’t open? Taught you something about terminal velocity, didn’t it?
Then there was dad’s hand-me-down chemistry set! Of course, he’d used all the potassium nitrate. We looked into making more of our own, but it involved raiding grandpa’s outhouse and that was just too disgusting!
We used to tie large firecrackers to GI Joe and threaten to blow him up unless he talked. To his credit, he never talked, but we were forced to make good on our threat.
I am reminded of a thread I started years ago, Things Klingons tell their children.
“Quickly! Run and bring me the scissors!”
Yep we used to sled down a country road into a “T” shaped intersection and jump the bank on the other side, into a field. Another hill had a barbed wire fence and a creek at the bottom.
Cracker Jacks. “Candy-coated peanuts, popcorn and a prize.”
They don’t even mention the “prize” on the package anymore. Which is just as well, since it’s always a temporary tattoo of the Baltimore Orioles mascot.
Gather round, children: in Ye Olden Days, it was perfectly acceptable to mix easily swallowable chunks of plastic and metal inside boxes of candy. Back then, everyone understood that there was no risk involved, because the first thing any kid did was dig out the prize.
These were toys that were cool in uniquely kid ways: miniature pinball machines; toy soldiers; 3-D pictures; magnifying glasses; working compasses; tiny circus animal figurines.
Somewhere I have a blue elephant automaton that really walks; it’s powered by a little bead on a string tied around its trunk. You hang the bead off the edge of the kitchen table, and gravity does the rest. Stampede!
Are you my brother? He & his friends did this in our back yard, and it was my (teenage at the time?) older brother who ended up with a dart in the middle of his back.
They took turns on the tree swing, while the others threw the darts. Mike got a tetanus shot that day!