Creepy Crawlers, where you poured Goop(tm) in to metal molds, and cooked them into bugs and lizards and skulls and what not.
The Mattel Vacuform, which you could use to make plastic models. You heated up styrene sheets and folded them over molds. I think we had some army missile truck mold set. I think this toy was a bit advanced for us. Molding was easy, assembly -- not so much.
We also had the Hot Wheels Factory, which was an injection mold system to make rubber cars. It was nice because you could carve up the cars you made and feed them back in the machine and melt them back down.
Then there were the Erector Sets, Toggles, Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs. We also had a zillion feet of Hot Wheels track. It didn't hurt living in El Segundo, with the Mattel factory store very nearby in Hawthorne.
My brother and I managed to make through our 5-10 years while maintaining all of our fingers, toes, limbs, and avoiding skin grafts. I think we did little damage to the floor (we always played on the floor, never on a table). We may have scorched a carpet here to there.
Yup, good times indeed!
All that said, kids changes, toys change. I remember buying some castle toy set for some friends young boys (4-6) for Christmas. It was a step up of from "Fisher Price" detail. Had horses and soldiers, and big castle.
I honestly have never seen anyone so excited to receive something (well, maybe my wife when I gave her that ring thing). They were just bouncing up and down. This was a hot ticket toy and I bumbled into. As a kid, I might have enjoyed something like that. We had our GI Joes and Major Matt Mason stuff. But, I don't think these kids were missing out much on not having toys that had open heating elements.
We did learn you shouldn’t pour lead into an old bullet casing/cartridge: some residual gunpowder or primer blew molten lead everywhere. The splatters lasted on the roof until the house was sold much later. Christchurch, New Zealand, so not rural or nothing.
Never got into home-made explosives, as I'd moved to Texas by the time I was ten; we did try to make napalm and hydrogen, but never too successfully.
Easy bake ovens even, so much fun!
Then one kids does something stupid and of course the parents blame and sue the companies and now here we are.
Caution small parts, don't put in mouth, hot, et al.
One idiot ruins it for the rest, as always =(
Im so glad to find these videos so I can show my kids what fun we used to have w/o cell phones =)
https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2007/new-easy-bake-oven-recall-...
https://easybake.hasbro.com/en-us/product/easy-bake-ultimate...
Was it Schleich, by any chance?
http://www.timepassagesnostalgia.com/&searchkeywords=vertibi...
Like any good helicopter toy I was unable to fly it when I first woke up on Christmas and shoved the batteries in. You actually had to control the lift (not a collective but speed control on the rotor) and the pitch. Too much pitch and you lose lift so had to compensate with extra lift.
By the New Years I was flying like a pro, swinging around and pulling back on the pitch to reverse thrust and stop over a dime....
My favorite "make stuff toys" of the 70's were my Erector set and Lego set of course.
But then I also had this trippy Buckminster-Fuller-meets-Light-Bright building toy called an Astrolite:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/01/16/vintage-toy-fun-astroli...
I can't resist telling this story: As a little kid, I could not figure out why my erector set was so superior to all of my friends' kits. I finally asked my parents about it: My grandfather worked for AC Gilbert as a tool and die maker, and he made a lot of the original tooling for the erector set. (We had the original big red metal box filled with pieces (from the 30s?), and another cardboard box with the overflow.)
We also had a killer American Flyer train set (also an AC Gilbert product), and the Lead Castor kit: Molten lead for kids! Hard to imagine in the current age. https://picclick.com/Vintage-Ac-Gilbert-Kaster-Kit-Furnace-T...
Fortunately, we did not have the Gilbert Atomic Energy Kit. I probably lost enough brain cells on the lead.
I assumed this was a joke but I googled it in the off-chance that it wasn't, and I'm glad I did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_La...
There's something about toys like that at a formative period in your development that means that small details seem to stick in your memory. I can even now remember the feel or the rotating spring that took the horizontal rotation of the shaft through 90 degrees to meet to the propeller blades, and which wobbled to a blur when the machine was running.
I seem to remember it didn't hurt much when you got hit by it, and you could trip over it repeatedly without breaking it, so it was very well designed for a typical 8 year old.
I didn't have the erector set, but plenty of lego. The technics stuff had come out and I built all sorts of stuff with it. I remember getting this http://technicopedia.com/853.html which was released in 1977 for christmas.
The Legos I had in the 70s did not have any mini figures (did they exist in the US at that time? None of my friends had any either) and there parts were only a few standard sizes as I recall (no small ones like today). I don’t even remember “kits” so much as “here’s a bunch of Legos, go build something” like another version of blocks of Lincoln Logs.
Did you actually have kits with build instructions that came with the kit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girder_and_Panel_building_sets
What I really liked to do with them is to make all kinds of all-terrain trucks with lots of wheels and stuff. This was all just from imagination, and they I came up with fresh designs every time.
I really don't understand what people do these days, with kits that are supposed to be assembled just so. I mean, I get that people like to build scale models, but why not just do that? With lego, it's not going to look like the real thing anyway, so why not use it for your own expression?
I remembered the JC Penny's and Toys R Us catalogs but forgot about the sears toys sections!
Does anybody remember something like this: a wheeled toy that I vaguely recall had stylings something like a tank or an APC or something - or maybe one of those weird vehicles from Damnation Alley[1] - but with a bunch of buttons on top with numbers and directional arrows. You could "program" the thing to roam around on its own by pushing a sequence of directional arrows and numbers. It was something like "Go forward 5 units, turn left, go 4 units", etc. I don't even know now what distance units it used, or if the speed was programmable. Once you programmed it there was a "Go" button that would send it off on its little adventure crawling around the living room (and promptly getting stuck under the TV stand or something, but that's neither here nor there).
edit: oh boy, relevant patents are expired, there's a hacker community and everything. This looks like a delightful rabbit hole.
oh boy, relevant patents are expired, there's a hacker community and everything.
It would be fun to build a modern version of this, with an Arduino or Rpi or something providing the "brains", and with some input sensors (ultrasonic distance sensor, camera, etc). But instead of just having the input buttons on top, you could also program it over the network (or USB) using a real programming language.
I guess that wouldn't be much different though, than some of the other low-end experimental robotics platforms that are out there?
I'm glad to see they're still on the go. Their adverts in Wireless World and Television were a great source of wonder for my geeky friends and I when I was at school some 30-odd years ago, and finding they're still as batshit as ever has cheered me up no end.
Now I wonder if Display Electronics ever shifted those 9" bare chassis Microvitec colour monitors from National Air Traffic Control, or indeed their deactivated heat-seeking missiles?
It works wonderfully! Once I rounded up a ton of D-cell batteries...
It has the pull-behind trailer, which is a genius design. The hitch pin is also a TRS plug which transfers the signal from the tank to dump the trailer. It also allows the tank to do a complete 360 while towing, since the hitch reaches out and over, then down, to the center of the tank.
The whole thing is just a brilliant piece of engineering and represents, as far as I can tell, the first fairly affordable "AI" home toy.
Pic of it on my shelf: https://imgur.com/a/5JLoXoJ
I think there was a knock-off one that was vaguely similar.
There was also the Mattel Strange Change: https://flashbak.com/youll-burn-your-fingers-remembering-mat...
Just like the "Thingmaker", everyone burned themselves on this one.
Ooh, a term for a relatable problem, apparently coined yesterday by this blog post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32241020
"when piece of information A has a name similar to another, very different, much more popular piece B. This makes searching for A difficult because you always get results for B instead."
(Wow, Yandex was what found the HN submission, not Bing or Google, in whose results it was ironically camouflaged by other consecutive uses of the two words)
https://www.amazon.com/Crayola-03-9000-Crayon-Maker/dp/B0029...
It was centipedes and the like made out of a rubbery material that you melted into moulds.
The Kenner Electric Mold Master sounds like what you remember.
The caveat is that you need a lot of protection to not harm/kill yourself:
- Eye-Protection so the welder doesn't burn out your eyes
- Long clothes so you don't get irradiated/sunburn from the welder
- Welding gloves so sparks don't burn into your skin
- Protective Glasses in case the disc of the angle grinder explodes
- Ear protection because the angle grinder is loud enough to permanently damage your ears
Aside from that, its an awesome toy and allows you to fix quite some things. And other people automatically assume you are doing serious work, even when you are just fucking around.
Its not suitable for kids in case you were looking for that.
I had an angle grinder disc shatter on me and one piece took a huge gouge out of a wooden toolbox I had built. I am afraid of angle grinders now.
Basically anything that spins at a high RPM is one loose t-shirt away from strangling you and embedding itself into your fleshy bits.
Brazing is more flexible, requires less expensive, less complex gear and considerably less training.
MIG welding with a self-feeding wire welder can also be a little bit easier in the sense of not requiring combined dexterity between both hands simultaneously, which is something that doesn't come naturally to everybody. That said, if one can learn to solder, they can probably learn to braze.
If you happen to have a high-school or community college nearby with a welding program, it would probably be productive to ask one of the instructors there where they source their practice material. When I was in high-school I think most of ours came from Horton Iron & Metal[1], the local scrap metal recycling firm. Probably many areas have something similar?
It is marginally possible to fuse pieces of PLA together using ethyl acetate (sold to consumers as "acetone-free nail polish remover" or "MEK substitute"), but this is not nearly as accessible, effective, or reliable compared to other plastics.
I just checked with the datasheet of a current commercial spin welder.[0] The rpm's given on the datasheet are 500 to 2500. I think the author might have slightly exaggerated the capabilities of their 1970s toy for effect.
[0] https://www.sonics.com/site/assets/files/2949/spin-welder.pd...
I doubt the motor was capable of 1000rpm and it certainly wouldn't be necessary.
In other words, I agree with your kazillion interpretation…
I would have KILLED for some of the robotics and electronics kits that are widespread today.
((1 mm)^2) * 1 gram * (((183 339 * 2 * pi) / second)^2) = 1 326.99551 joules
It would have 1300J of rotational energy if there was only 1 gram of spinning mass at 1 mm distance.
This is really well worth seeing, pharao's serpent <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQdK7gaZS0k>. Some of it even looks like CGI but it's not.
Pharao's serpent when lit gives of vapours of metallic (elemental) mercury. In some youtube vids you can even see some of it condensing on the glass of the enclosure.
You could buy this stuff over the counter at joke shops back then and I did. The instructions said "windows and doors should be opened wide". People complain about health and safety regs now, but...
Edit: seriously, if you've never seen this before, watch the vid
I was that kid who wanted toys that did actual stuff. This toy was one of those. Kept it for years to fix that odd plastic problem. When I ran out of the little rods, I remember trying every polymer I could find, until I found some little sticks that worked in a similar way.
To this day, the melting plastic smell gives me nostalgia vibes... Probably not the healthiest in hindsight.
Years later, I built another dragster from the Lego Technic 853 Car Chassis and the steering from the 854 Go-Kart.
It also included the Vertibird helicopter (mentioned in another thread), Big Jim Ski Jump and also the Big Jim sky commander play set, SSP smash up derby, a couple of barbie things that went to my sister and a bunch of other stuff I forget.
It was the most awesome Christmas imaginable for an 8 year old and a 10 year old.
Unfortunately the rivets turned out to be a choking hazard (two children died) and it was recalled (though I kept my set):
