You know all those recalls of toys with paint with XX ppb of lead?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When I was growing up we had a “make your own lead soldiers” kit. This was a commercially produced item, sold by some place like Edmunds Scientific, for you to give to your children.

Really.

Not toys with some lead paint on them. Oh, no. Each soldier was a solid chunk of lead, through and through.

There was a little ‘furnace’ thing you plugged in that got to whatever temperature needed to melt lead.

On top of that was balanced a little pot with a really badly insulated handle.

The third part were some metal molds, in two pieces that clamped together, so you could extract your new minted GIs.
First you dropped your no-longer-wanted lead guys into it and watched them do a Wicked Witch of the West impression, all the while hanging over the pot, undoubtedly breathing in beaucoup de fumes.

Then you tried to pick up the pot without sloshing the molten lead about too badly, despite the fact your fingers were roasting on the handle, while you attempt to pour the lead into the little funnel openings that lead to each compartment.

Then you open the mold and knocked out your new soldiers, further scorching your fingers, because what child can wait for the thing to cool all the way?

If there were uneven blobs of lead on the bottoms the feet/base combos we stropped then back and forth on the concrete of the garage floor so they’d stand up more steadily…no doubt generating lots of lead dust just the right size for inhaling…
So me and my sibs got to play – unsupervised, mind you – with a furnace thingie hot enough to melt lead while we inhaled all that nice, wholesome lead fumes. Over and over again, because making the soldiers was fun, but playing with them was boring.

Oh, and as if that weren’t enough, our father brought home a jar with about four fluid ounces of mercury. It’s absolutely neat stuff to play with, too. Pour it into your hand, let it seep between your fingers, have ‘races’ blowing blobs of it across tables…
Heck, the only reason we didn’t have the Bag ‘o’ Broken Glass was that SNL was not yet on the air.
Goes a long way to explain why we didn’t grow up into rocket scientists, doesn’t it? :smack:

2

If you go here (www.wishbookweb.com) and look at the Spiegel 1955 Christmas catalog page 233 item number 7 you can see an ad for it.

It only cost your parents $3.98 to stunt your development! :stuck_out_tongue:

3

We had one of those. It was a lot older than 1955, since it belonged to my older brothers first. You had to put the mold into the vice to keep it closed tightly enough so the molten lead didn’t leak out the sides. I spattered some on my feet once. At least I was wearing socks. I still have some of the soldiers, including a laying-down-shooter.

Cool toy. We’re all lucky we grew up whole.

4

Just wanted to say “thanks” - that is an incredibly cool website!

5

Metallic lead is not that dangerous, unless you apply a little 0.5mv[sup]2[/sup] to it. The danger comes when it’s used in a compound that can be readily absorbed through mucous membranes.

6

My grandfather used to recount how he would suck on his lead soldiers. They were sweet, he said. Probably explains a lot. I never had the lead soldier kit, but I remember melting lead recreationally on the kitchen stove. You’d collect a bunch of tire weights, put 'em in a tin can, and put it over the burner. Result? A tin-can-shaped lead ingot. Another thing we’d do, back in that more innocent age, was use our teeth to clamp down lead sinkers on our fishing lines.

These days, of course, I’m as lead-phobic as anyone. But I still have to wonder about the contention that even the tiniest amount of lead in the bloodstream will shave whole points off your IQ. Past generations, even in the educated classes, had vastly more lead exposure than we do – through lead-glazed china, lead pipes, lead solder, lead paint, lead alloys, the aforementioned lead toys – and they didn’t all turn out cretinous.

7

Actually, you have probably been dead since the late sixties, but the heavy metals have preserved your body. I know, it happened to me, too.

Tris

8

People have stopped doing this?

9

Lead Acetate is called Sugar of Lead, because it’s a seductively sweet substance. Great way to get lead into the body, where it can do harm. I always wondered how they knew, and how common something like that could be. But, from your grandfather’s experience, it seems that sweet lead compounds (whether acetate, or something else, or the lead itself) isn’t really all that unusual.
I remember magazine articles from the 1960s on casting your own lead hammer head. And I’ve seen lead musket balls being cast. And Lead blocks (for weighting things down, and for radiation shielding) used to be common in physics laboratories.
Nowadays lead’s a lot less common. You can get lead completely jacketed in plastic for your lab from places like I2R. And nobody has lead hammers any more.

10

Hey, look! A Humvee in '79!

11

I had one of those lead soldier kits when I was a kid! You didn’t need a catelogue from the mid '50s and a time machine to get them, either. My folks bought me mine in the mid-to-late eighties.

12

I don’t know about “people,” but I have. Of course, I haven’t really fished in about 30 years. But aren’t sinkers made from something else these days, out of concern for the loons and whatnot?

13

Lots of places prohibit the use of lead fishing tackle period, and the price of lead is through the roof lately, but I still smelt lead in the garage during the winter to cast my own fishing jigs. My safety precautions include opening the garage door and not spilling beer directly into the molten lead.