[HN Gopher] Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
___________________________________________________________________
Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys
Author : doat
Score : 153 points
Date : 2023-01-04 05:59 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (whyisthisinteresting.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (whyisthisinteresting.substack.com)
| tibbon wrote:
| I had one of these in the 90's! My father and I put it together,
| got it working and went to fly it. Unfortunately on its first
| voyage he crashed it pretty hard into the ground and it wasn't to
| fly again. I was pretty sad (10 years old or so), but now I know
| that such wasn't uncommon.
| pjmorris wrote:
| In the early 70's my local park had a flight circle for these. I
| could only envy the gas engine flyers, but had a good time flying
| my Guillows balsa wood gliders and rubber band planes.
| jerkstate wrote:
| I had one of these as a kid! I could never get the "glow plug"
| engine to actually fire up, though, so I was never able to fly
| it. Sounds like I missed out on a spectacular crash.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or a missing finger. Those things are pretty nasty to get going
| without a starter motor. Some of them come with a spring loaded
| starter, those are a little bit safe, but the ones that you
| start manually are really nasty.
|
| edit: Hah, that's actually mentioned in the article.
| zabzonk wrote:
| it won't cut off your finger, but it will hurt!
| jacquesm wrote:
| It can do much worse...
|
| https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=60153
|
| Really, the mechanical integrity of the motor/plane mount
| and everything else comes into play when the thing starts
| up and if you're not treating it with all of the respect
| that it deserves you can get hurt _very_ badly. I used to
| live right next door to a model airfield and more than one
| person left that field with serious injuries from spinning
| props. Starting them is the most obvious moment when things
| are dangerous but then the speed is still quite low, once
| they rev up you are much better off not to be in front of
| them or in the plane of rotation.
|
| Electrics aren't much safer. These models are nothing short
| of amazing but the safety issues are very often overlooked
| and minimized.
| zabzonk wrote:
| depends on the capacity (and hence torque) of the engine,
| a sensible person would always wear a thick glove!
| besides, kids back then were pretty impervious to injury.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Right... well the number of times I've seen the ambulance
| ride out to that field tells a slightly different story.
| The problem is that every time it goes right your risk
| tolerance goes up and after a while people stop seeing
| the risk entirely. Same story in machine shops.
|
| I think the real issue is that these are not toys, some
| of those motors pack an awful lot of punch, much more
| than the size of the motor would convey to a casual
| observer. Likewise for LiPo packs, those things are
| extremely impressive from an energy content perspective
| and yet, the number of idiotic things I've seen people do
| with them just baffles me.
|
| After a long history of making, building and using all
| kinds of dangerous stuff I still have all my fingers. But
| I did manage to break my leg on an experimental bike so
| even the cautious can get caught out.
|
| Oh, I just noted the helpful little table on that article
| I linked above:
|
| Ultra Micro- Micro= Break the skin/ light bleeding, can
| cause serious eye damage
|
| 20"- 25" wingspan= Deep cut requiring surface stitches
|
| 25"- 35" wingspan= Deep cut through muscle, damage to
| tendons requiring multiple layers of stitches and
| possibly even surgery.
|
| 35"- 50" wingspan= Can cut to the bone, cut tendons,
| surgery required to fix damage.
|
| 50"- 70" Wingspan= Damage to bone, broken fingers, cut
| tendons in arms hands and legs.
|
| 70"- Large Scale= Lost fingers, serious deep tissue and
| tendon damage, cut arteries potential death
|
| Giant scale= Dismemberment, can take off fingers even
| arms or legs, can likely kill especially if it hit you in
| the head.
| watwut wrote:
| Kids back then were not "impervious to injury". Accidents
| and injuries did happened in the past. So did fires cause
| by kids.
| zabzonk wrote:
| glow plugs are pretty easy to start - stupid question, but you
| did have a big battery to power the plug?
| dieselgate wrote:
| from the article it seems it's not a true "glow plug" heating
| element like one may use to start a diesel engine. my
| impression was the engine is so small the radiant heat of the
| engine is what causes the fuel to ignite in the chamber -
| seems tough to start cold
| zabzonk wrote:
| diesels don't have a glow plug. a glow plug has a radiant
| coil that ignites the fuel, and then the heat of the engine
| keeps it firing, which is different from diesel fuel.a
| diesel engine depends on heating the fuel via compression
| with the energy being provided by the human flicking it.
| there is no battery input to a model aero diesel engine. a
| car diesel engine uses a starter motor to provide the
| initial compression.
| stonogo wrote:
| Just about every single automotive diesel engine sold
| since the 1950s is equipped with glow plugs, so the above
| post might be confusing.
|
| Automotive diesel glow plugs do not ignite the fuel; they
| lower the required compression in cold weather by warming
| up the air going into the combustion chamber.
|
| They're not the same things as glow plugs found in
| methanol-fueled model engines, which also do not ignite
| the fuel directly, but serve as a catalyst so the
| methanol can combust via compression instead of electric
| ignition.
|
| When talking about glow plugs, it's important to specity
| the sort you're talking about and the context in which
| your discussion is taking place.
| zabzonk wrote:
| i admit i am not an expert on modern auto diesels (i
| remember my brother muttering about having problems with
| this on his Merc). but 1960's model diesel engines did
| not require a battery to start them.
| stonogo wrote:
| Mercedes diesels were push-startable well into the 1980s.
| They still had glowplugs (even in the 60s) and if you did
| have a battery they would heat up the precombustion
| chamber to lighten the load on the starter motor.
| zh3 wrote:
| Yes, it was a big dry cell - there's a wire in the cylinder
| that glows orangey-red when powered (it was easy to unscrew
| the cylinder head to inspect the 'glowplug'.
| greenbit wrote:
| The "glow plug" was kind of shaped like a spark plug, but
| instead of a gap for high voltage arcs, it had a small loop
| of platinum wire.
|
| To start the engine, you had to pre-heat the plug. This
| entailed attaching a battery, clipping one terminal to the
| top of the glow plug and the other to the engine, to send a
| current through the platinum wire. You'd use a 'D' cell, or
| maybe one of those big old No.6 types. A mere 1.5V, but you
| needed enough current to heat that platinum wire.
|
| This electrical apparatus had to be disconnected from the
| engine before you could fly the plane. Not sure if you could
| detach it before starting or not. That little wisp of wire
| would cool pretty darned fast with the current removed. I
| know with the larger RC planes the practice was to leave the
| glow plug heater attached until after the engine had started.
|
| Anyway, once the fuel mixture hits that hot wire, there's
| this catalytic reaction where the fuel at the platinum
| surface burns extra hot. This imparts enough heat to the glow
| plug wire to keep it hot enough for the next stroke. Idk what
| magic keeps the fuel from detonating before the piston
| reaches top of stroke, but I can attest these engines are
| fussy little things. They didn't idle very well; throttle
| them down too much and they just conk out.
|
| You can see other examples of this catalyzed combustion, and
| get a sense for what goes on inside the glow engine. These
| butane cigarette lighters that burn blue have a little bit of
| catalytic wire in them, you can often just see it glowing
| white hot just inside the flame opening. There also used to
| be these propane powered space heaters that had a gauze mesh
| of the stuff to boost the combustion efficiency.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Disconnect after it runs, definitely. They'd cool down way
| too fast.
| quercusa wrote:
| I saw one start maybe twice. Knowing my dad I suspect the
| battery was always dead.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I had the P-51 Mustang one in the late 80s. At the time I wanted
| to be a pilot and was busily building balsa models, windup flying
| models, plastic Testors models, and Estes rockets.
|
| The thing with the Cox airplanes was they were cheap enough for
| your parents to actually buy one. RC stuff used to be really
| expensive and clunky. My first RC plane was in the late 2000s and
| it was about 5 foot wingspan and had an even bigger, even messier
| glow-plug engine like the Cox flyers. I had to join a club to go
| fly it cause the radio equipment was still kind of sketchy. Total
| cost once all the accessories to fly it were included was
| probably closer to $1000 and even though it was "Ready to Fly" it
| still probably took 10 hours of work to get it actually flying
| well. (By that point the models were starting to be partially
| assembled in China)
|
| If it cost near $1000 in the late 2000s with it being partially
| assembled in China you weren't getting much in the 70s or 80s at
| an affordable price with it assembled in the US, so anything good
| meant many hours of you assembling it. Hence the Cox type stuff
| that was a couple pieces of cheap plastic.
|
| I crashed mine for sure, but never that badly. It was pretty good
| fun and I used it for a good period, though never without
| supervision. I never managed to learn any tricks, but I remember
| seeing an adult at the school fields one day who had one and was
| very good and did all kinds of tricks.
|
| I have a DJI drone.. it's amazing.. but is it actually as fun as
| that old stuff that took 10x-100x more work to get it to work?
| No, I don't think so, for me it's so easy it's kind of boring,
| though a good portion of that is that it's a quadcopter. Fixed
| wing is so much more fun to fly.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > I don't think so, for me it's so easy it's kind of boring,
| though a good portion of that is that it's a quadcopter. Fixed
| wing is so much more fun to fly.
|
| Makes some sense you find it boring, it's essentially flying
| itself. Conventional remote-control helicopters have gyros for
| stabilisation but I don't think they're anywhere near as easy
| to control as quadcopter drones.
| zabzonk wrote:
| i don't get this - control-line planes were very popular in the
| 1960s and were not particularly dangerous. I built and flew a
| couple of diesel engined ones myself - not very well, it has to
| be said. the main danger was not getting your fingers out of the
| way of the prop when you flicked it to start it.
|
| the advent of cheaper radio-control systems kind of saw them off.
| one of my flatmates in the 70s built a beautiful r/c slope-
| soaring glider.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| We removed the engine from my control line model and made a much
| more dangerous device! We mounted three wheels on the edge of a
| Frisbee and mounted the engine vertically in the cut out center.
| Then we started it and let it uncontrollably bounce, fly, and
| spin around the driveway, scattering gravel, until it ran out of
| gas or quit running from sheer abuse.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My dad made something like that, except not with a Frisbee. It
| had two helicopter blades, and a dowel sticking out opposite
| the engine for balance. It had a little ring at the center of
| it holding the other parts together. He'd launch it from a
| screwdriver through the ring.
|
| And once he did, it was pretty random where it went. Once it
| just went horizontally at about ten-year-old-me's head height.
| I ducked under it and it kept going. Sometimes it didn't do
| that much. And once it flew up... hard telling now, maybe 50 or
| 100 feet, and traveled maybe 1/8 of a mile before it ran out of
| gas.
|
| You could sort of steer its initial direction by slanting the
| screwdriver. After that, you had no control, not even a kill
| switch.
|
| Fun. And danger.
| implements wrote:
| Wasn't there a flying toy where an engine was mounted between
| two counter-rotating disks? (80s or before, possibly)
| h2odragon wrote:
| I have seen one of those engines powering a drill bit: Someone
| needed a hole drilled into concrete under water; and building a
| single use tool was their solution. Worked pretty well, too.
| [deleted]
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Sounds interesting, can you elaborate?
|
| I.e., was there just a tiny bit of water, so they needed to
| avoid electric drills?
|
| Or if the water was deeper, how did they supply air to the
| engine?
| h2odragon wrote:
| this was before battery powered drills were a real thing, I
| should mention. And this was a crew that would spend a day
| inventing a solution instead of spending $20 to buy one.
|
| Big concrete block, in a waist deep puddle. This block is the
| base of the drain pipe for a pond; the drain is opened all
| the way so there's a _lot_ of water flow happening in the
| area, too. They 're drilling an anchor hole and had a long
| enough drill bit to keep the engine out of the water. We had
| a rope on them to pull them out in case they slipped somehow,
| too. Probably wasn't a situation where we should've had a
| human.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm surprised the engine could produce enough torque. Did
| they just push the drill bit really gently or something?
|
| (Also, that's a really long bit!)
| h2odragon wrote:
| I want to say it was using most of an air drill as a
| mechanism? I dont recall details if i ever knew them.
| These folks were mechanical hackers of the first water;
| this wasn't the most insane thing i saw there. by far.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| The 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 magnesium in a short
| series of pyrotechnic orgies? Merit was the go-to brand in the
| UK, but I also had a set from an American company that contained,
| among other exotica, potassium ferrocyanide. This is decidedly
| non-lethal but the very name never failed to send a poisoner's
| frisson through my teenage brain.
| anthk wrote:
| In early 90's, in Spain, a kid was seriously injured with some
| toy chemistry kit because of some bad mix.
|
| [Spanish]
| https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/vigo/2014/12/21/jugand...
| euroderf wrote:
| Who among us lit up the chunk of sulphur and (out of innocent
| curiosity) took a good snork off it, realizing too late that it
| was a stupid thing to do ? I sure did.
|
| Tinkering with chemistry also motivated me to look for sources
| of hydrochloric and sulphuric acids, but in New York state the
| guy at the pharmacy said I needed parental permission. Wasn't
| gonna happen.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I ended up with a fair bit of unusable glassware after a week
| or two. Fortunately we had a whole kitchen full of stuff. Bad
| idea. Lots of pocket money got docked.
| greenbit wrote:
| Been there, done that, burned holes in the T-shirt too.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Hydrochloric acid: My hardware store sells 30% HCl as Spirits
| Of Salts, for removing limescale from toilet bowls. It's
| effective, unlike toilet bleach. It's nasty stuff, and if
| your seat-hinges are metallic, you risk corrosion. And
| remember to flush before you crap.
|
| Sulphuric acid: No, hardware stores don't sell that here. You
| can get it from car batteries, and builders use the strong
| stuff for clearing drains. I have no idea how I could legally
| buy fuming sulphuric acid.
|
| Nitric acid: Even less. Fuming nitric and sulphuric acid
| mixed gives you nitrating acid, which in turn is the gateway
| to nitrocellulose (and I suppose nitroglycerine), fulminate
| of mercury, and ghod knows what.
|
| It's just as well that these latter two acids are restricted;
| if they weren't, I'm quite sure I'd have tried to make
| guncotton, and probably blown myself up.
| deepspace wrote:
| I had the same idea when I was in school, and wrote a
| chemical company I found in the yellow pages for a price
| list and order form for Sulphuric and Nitric Acid.
|
| The happily provided both... with a minimum order quantity
| of around 250 gallons.
| euroderf wrote:
| Two words: ice bath.
| greenbit wrote:
| Those sure were different times. I recall in the mid 1970s, as
| a kid no less, being able to go into a pharmacy and buy sulfur
| or KNO3 w/o any trouble at all. However it wasn't more than a
| couple years later, when a request for phosphorus was met with
| an icy "do I need to call your mother" stare, that my budding
| career as a chemist came to an end. Besides, the Radio Shack
| across the street had this _computer_ set up for customers to
| play with..
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Sulphur? My local hardware store sells flours of sulphur for
| gardeners. It's used for acidulating soil, and for combatting
| some kinds of fungus. I don't know why anyone would want to
| regulate the sale of elemental sulphur; it's not toxic,
| caustic or explosive. It's less flammable than a piece of
| wood.
| chihuahua wrote:
| GP mentions S and HNO3 in the same sentence. Those 2
| combined with charcoal results in black powder.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| So regulate charcoal. And black powder requires
| saltpetre, and doesn't require nitric acid. You can make
| saltpetre from piss, but I don't know how.
|
| And is black powder so scary? You can get it out of
| firecrackers, which are sold (here) without ID, although
| I guess you might have to prove your age to buy
| fireworks. It doesn't detonate, so it can't be used to
| prime a high-explosive like ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Saltpetre was available from chemists (ie pharmacies) in
| the UK, but me and my pals had limited success making
| decent gunpowder with it - I strongly suspect it was
| heavily laced with some form of fire retardant precisely
| to thwart pyromaniacal little herberts like us.
| thesaintlives wrote:
| Dry all parts. Mix in food blender, bingo!
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Can't even buy 30% peroxide anymore over here :/ Some
| regulation, some scare mongering and it only got sold to
| business customers... I can do that, but the quantities are
| also business-sized, and I don't need 20 liters of peroxide,
| but can't buy it in 1L bottles anymore
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Some pharmacies still sell saltpeter, which you're of course
| using to make corned beef. Maybe don't ask for sulfur at the
| same time though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The German Kosmos sets were the best.
| ankaAr wrote:
| I had one!!
|
| Was fun af, the engine was loud and always was messy (I was not
| able to refill it, only my dad)
| yial wrote:
| I remember these as a kid! I always wanted an RC version, but
| couldn't afford one until I was an adult.
|
| The minibee ? Microbee? I can't remember what the engine was
| called was so small!
|
| I still love the smell of castor oil to this day.
|
| If you built one from a guillows kit, it really was more
| emotionally painful when it crashed than anything else.
|
| The little engines were really pretty safe - even hand starting
| with a stick.
|
| Once you got to an 0.25 or a 0.46 you might have a bad time.
|
| My favorite plane though, wasn't control line, it was actually a
| much much much later hanger 9 alpha. Technically a trainer. But I
| put a much larger engine on it. (Though the evolution .60 on it
| was amazing in an Escapade .40 ...) (Actually the escapade .40
| might be a good second...)
|
| I still have a control line somewhere... though I think it was
| cloth covered.
| JoyfulTurkey wrote:
| I had one of these in the 80s, a P-51 Mustang.
|
| I vaguely recall it being annoying to start, but was with my dad
| so he definitely helped with getting it going. We had a bunch of
| soccer fields behind where we lived, so we flew it there to avoid
| any accidents.
|
| It did eventually crash, but was fun while it lasted.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
|
| Speaking of most dangerous toys of that era, I'm troubled to
| recall that we dumb kids threw around lawn darts, which already
| looked of vintage design by the time we got them, second-hand.
| There must still be holes in our garage. We're so lucky no one
| ever got hit, because now I realize those things could easily
| maim or kill.
|
| We must've also had figurative guardian angels when (pre-
| helicopter-parents era) speeding around the streets on our
| bikes, walking through active train yards, disassembling and
| repairing high-voltage and motorized appliances and machinery,
| wandering off on trails and into the woods, etc.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| I had one of these in the 90s, an F4U Corsair.
|
| It's weird to think that these are considered so unsafe you
| can't have one anymore, seeing as by that time people were well
| into complaining about how the nanny state and/or lawsuit-
| concerned companies wouldn't let anyone have fun anymore.
|
| (it was, to my memory, an annoying and silly toy, like everyone
| else is saying)
| dieselgate wrote:
| I'm sure most kids aren't big on personal protective equipment
| but seems with some gloves it wouldn't be too bad to start. This
| reminds me of a "friction welding" toy set from around the
| 70s/80s that was featured on HN a few months ago, which may seem
| potentially more dangerous without experience on either
| wrp wrote:
| Something not mentioned is that these things were pretty messy.
| At least mine was. It burned a mixture of oil and gasoline, and
| the plane got coated with a film of oil.
|
| I only used mine a few times. I found it rather tedious just
| spinning around in place. Much more exiting were the model
| rockets that used solid fuel engines.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad wouldn't let me have the rockets. Sadly, by the time I
| was old enough to just get one, I had lost interest.
| wrp wrote:
| There was a concern about starting fires when they came down.
| I heard the rocket club at my school had to notify the fire
| department beforehand.
|
| I just remembered I also had a gas engine helicopter. Much
| more fun since it was free-flying. It would go pretty much
| straight up then rotor down when it ran out of gas. Couldn't
| do it on a windy day.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Those helicopters were very difficult to fly, or so I've
| been told, as they were unstable. The modern electric
| copters cheat because they use a computer to stabilize
| them.
| kqr wrote:
| I was going to say. Helicopters are difficult to fly,
| period! It's not just those -- also the big ones.
| dTal wrote:
| Large helicopters are not as difficult to fly as small
| ones, simply because the time constant of their
| instability is longer. This is similar to how it is
| easier to balance a broom on the tip of your finger than
| a pencil, and a pencil is in turn easier than a
| toothpick.
| robotguy wrote:
| I keep trying to explain this to my friends in the
| aquarium and terrarium hobbies.
|
| "I want to build a tiny one. It'll be so cute."
|
| "It's going to crash in 30 seconds if you so much as look
| at it funny."
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Kids at school used to buy cheap Jetex rocket engines, and
| mount them on little balsa gliders or Dinky cars. They went
| _fast_!
|
| [Edit] https://jetex.org/index.php/the-jetex-heyday
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Back in the day, you were allowed to bring ESTES toy rockets in
| hand luggage... I'd guess today they'll put you into prison
| just for bringing them to the airport.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Hey, 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 never could get the
| wheels aligned perfectly straight it would inevitably try to turn
| and flip into a wild crash.
|
| One of the neighbor kids had a free-flying one, that was supposed
| to fly in a circle. It sorta did, as the circle moved with the
| breeze, and eventually it broke someone's 3rd floor living room
| window.
|
| Good times.
|
| Toys today are boring.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed
| them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why
| a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble 12+
| LEGO sets.
|
| Back in the day, when I was playing with LEGO Mindstorms, I
| thought the fact that you compile binaries and flash them with
| a USB cable was a feature, because it gave you full control.
| There was even alternative OS choices like [1]. I'm not sure I
| would have learnt the same amount with the modern version,
| which is centered around an iPad app with video tutorials.
|
| Similarly, chemistry experimentation kits were amazing - until
| they started making them idiot-proof and removing anything that
| could be dangerous if you eat it. Nowadays, as an adult, I need
| a special permit just to refill the chemicals that I
| experimented with as a 10 year old ^_^
|
| [1] https://brickos.sourceforge.net/
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed
| them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's
| why a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble
| 12+ LEGO sets.
|
| I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never
| understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want
| something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate
| the exact thing shown on the box? Why wouldn't I just ask for
| the thing pre-made instead? And furthermore the bricks were
| useless for actually creating things. It's nothing more than
| a slightly more advanced wooden block set.
|
| K'NEX on the other hand was awesome. You could actually
| _build_ things. Erector too. And those came with all sorts of
| cool accessories like electric motors and solar panels that
| you could use to build crazy contraptions. Sad that those
| things aren 't as popular anymore.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never
| understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want
| something that comes with an instruction booklet to
| recreate the exact thing shown on the box?
|
| 1) The same motivation as a model kit... except what you
| build is intended to be played with and won't be
| (permanently) destroyed by play.
|
| 2) Same motivation as a puzzle.
|
| 3) Modern Lego instructions do a lot more hand-holding than
| the ones I had in the 80s and 90s did, so I'm not sure how
| true this still is, but the ones back then were basically a
| series of sometimes-pretty-challenging spatial reasoning
| puzzles. So anyone who enjoys that kind of thing might
| enjoy assembling Lego sets.
|
| 4) Once assembled, you could customize, re-dress, and mash
| up the sets in ways you couldn't with other toys, and fall
| back on the directions to fix anything you screwed up too
| badly, if you wanted to get back to baseline. For example,
| one of the "good guys" bases from the Pirate series spent
| more time as a marine research base than it did hosting
| swashbuckling shenanigans, for me. My big castle sets would
| grow castle towns from a mix of smaller castle-series sets
| and custom builds on big flat plates. That kind of thing.
|
| 5) You could _really_ destroy a Lego toy built from a set,
| then put it back together. You couldn 't smash apart any
| bit you liked of an ordinary airplane or ship or castle toy
| and _not_ ruin it permanently. With Lego sets, you can.
|
| For my part, I've never understood people who don't
| understand the appeal of Lego sets, because I find the
| appeal so multi-dimensional and obvious.
|
| [EDIT] FWIW I do find a lot of modern Lego sets worse for
| some of these purposes than the ones I had as a kid.
| They've leaned more into the "model" side of things and
| less into the "play". Exposed nubs get covered up (looks
| better on a shelf, or on the box photo, that way) so you
| have to tear pieces off to attach other things to it.
| Builds are incredibly fiddly and use tons of really tiny
| bricks even for basic things like a wall, so re-building
| from memory or a little simple reasoning after destroying a
| small part of a set is now far more difficult (I suspect
| CAD run amok is to blame for this one).
| allturtles wrote:
| There's a sort of zen pleasure in putting pre-designed Lego
| sets together, especially the more sophisticated ones where
| you discover along the way the little building tricks or
| "easter eggs" included by the designer.
|
| Lego bricks certainly aren't "useless for actually creating
| things." You can make lots of cool things with Lego, and
| there's lots of creativity to be found in the Lego
| community, beyond just following the directions.
|
| I do agree with GP that the listed ages on LEGO sets are
| absurd if taken as difficulty levels. My elementary age
| kids have no trouble with "18+" LEGO sets. I think the ages
| instead serve a marketing role: the 18+ rating gives adults
| permission to buy a toy.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Lego are a different kind of snap-together model like those
| found in hobby stores.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I also loved K'NEX. I built so many things, expanded the
| Big Ball Factory with additional logic gates at the top,
| got hands on experience playing with gear ratios, tower
| cranes, and built vehicles to race against my brothers down
| the stairs (of course the K'NEX man had to stay intact!).
|
| It was fun building chunks of a big structure and
| assembling them together, and inevitably having to rebuild
| a chunk because of some missing pieces.
|
| I do wish they built a control system akin to Lego
| Mindstorms though. Turning motors on and off manually was
| fine, but I really would have love to to be able to, for
| example, build my tower crane such that it could rotate via
| motor, and have separate controls for lowering the bucket
| and moving the load closer/further from the tower.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have a bone to pick with LEGO. LEGO destroyed Erector sets.
| Erector sets were great because they were metal parts that
| you screwed together, and the machines you built look like
| machines. (My mom was reluctant to get me an Erector set,
| assuming I could not handle the tiny nuts and bolts. But I
| had no difficulty with them.)
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/133855778156
|
| Lego machines look like cheap plastic crap with all those
| bright colors.
|
| https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/airbus-h175-rescue-
| helico...
|
| Sorry I just gored all the Lego lovers, but that's the way it
| is.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I remember seeing my dad's erector set from sometime in the
| 1940s. He'd made a working saw, using the lid from a tin
| can as the saw blade.
| fipar wrote:
| In Uruguay and other spanish-speaking countries those were
| called "mecanos" (which, judging by other local customs
| such as calling sneakers "championes" and bubblegum
| "chicles" was probably a trade name) and they were great.
| I'm from 1978 and got to play with some sets from my dad
| (who's from '49). Besides being entertaining, they were a
| great way to develop mechanical affinity (if that's the
| right expression in English? I mean things like knowing how
| far to turn a screw so that it's as tight as it can be but
| you don't break the piece)
|
| Sadly, you can't get them anymore here, at least not ones
| good in quality. There are similar building games but they
| all feel rather cheap and I know from personal experience
| they only survive a few repurposing of the pieces.
|
| I do love LEGOs though, even though I played with copies in
| my childhood as my parents couldn't afford the originals.
| My main gripe with them is the sets. As a child, I just had
| a bunch of blocks and would build whatever I wanted. Now
| you can still buy "just bricks" but most of what kids get
| at stores are sets that tell them what to build. They feel
| more like 3D puzzles than building games.
|
| Erector-like sets and LEGO-like sets can go together well
| though: I enjoyed demolishing my brick buildings with my
| mecano machines :)
| fein wrote:
| Take a look at Cobi toys for the less garish models,
| although they aren't going to be like Technic sets.
|
| I still have my old erector set for my kids, as well as
| several boxes of knex. When I was young, I eventually lost
| all interest in legos once I had an erector set and a large
| enough knex supply.
|
| Those erector set electric motors were downright scary and
| I have many memories of bruised and cut fingers from making
| an airplane with a single odd numbered hole bar.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > bruised and cut fingers
|
| Is that really a bad thing? Minor things like that teach
| the kids how to handle tools and machinery, so they can
| operate safely the dangerous tools adults use. Like most
| boys, I had to learn the hard way to not put my finger in
| a light socket, and how to not stab myself when the
| screwdriver slips.
| fein wrote:
| Nope not at all. I didn't intend for that to come across
| as a bad thing. These toy sets epitomized learning
| through failure for young me.
| Cerium wrote:
| As my professor would say "We learn by doing!" I learned
| so much from my erector set: about the dangers of
| spinning objects, how gears mesh, and even seemingly
| minor things like how frustrating tiny screws and nuts
| are when you are still learning the required fine motor
| control.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I took the fine motor control for granted until I saw
| some young adults unable to get the blade of a
| screwdriver in the slot, then apply force to keep it in
| the slot and turn at the same time.
|
| (Maybe that's why people keep reinventing the screw head,
| so I need multiple sets of screwdrivers. arrgh)
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is two kinds of Lego (actually, a couple more but for
| this two will do). Lego bricks and Lego Technic. Lego
| Technic was conceived from day #1 to make proper machinery
| possible, the colors you are free to ignore. The old
| Technic sets such as
| https://thelegocarblog.com/2011/11/20/lego-
| technic-8860-car-... this one were really quite nice from a
| mechanical point of view.
|
| Lego created the technic line because in Europe 'Fischer
| Technik' (from the factory that makes those plugs to hang
| stuff on the wall) was eating their lunch, especially in
| Germany and NL, two major markets for Lego. Fischer Technik
| was both more durable and far better suited to building
| machines than Lego and they had a whole line of electronic
| components to go with it.
|
| Erector sets and Meccano were fantastic too, but not nearly
| as quick to build with, nor did they stand the test of time
| as well, clearly Lego did something right in making this
| stuff accessible.
|
| Meccano is stil sold today, As is Fischer Technik
| https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/products/learning/stem-
| robo... and Lego is available just about everywhere.
|
| So Lego did not 'destroy' anything, it all still exists
| it's just that the markets have shifted considerably and
| with Lego being heirloom grade plastic some of the bricks
| that we have here are now in their 6th decade and still
| being used by my kids.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I haven't thought about Fischer Technik for about a
| decade. Back in high school, there was a Principles of
| Engineering class (part of the Project Lead the Way
| curriculum). One of the projects was to make a marble
| sorter.
|
| My group wanted to make a continuous belt marble sorter,
| rather than fully processing one marble then working on
| the next. Our chute to sort to buckets at the end didn't
| move very fast though. On the demonstration to the
| teacher, one of the marbles rolled along the seam between
| two buckets, only to fall into the correct bucket giving
| us 100% accuracy. He wasn't impressed with that part, but
| gave us the grade regardless.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Don't worry these days kids fuck their fingers up on
| quadcopters instead.
| giantg2 wrote:
| But will they know the joys of dangerous chemistry sets?
| meheleventyone wrote:
| They're making slime out of household cleaning products so
| yup!
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's a little different from stuff like The Golden Book
| of Chemistry teaching you to distill alcohol and create
| chloroform.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Oh cool, thanks for reminding me that this book even
| exists. What's really cool is you can just read it on the
| internet archive! [1] Almost makes me want to invest in
| some borosilicate glassware and lab safety equipment, and
| make a youtube series based on experiments in the book or
| something haha
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/1960-the-golden-book-of-
| chemistr...
| meheleventyone wrote:
| _Gestures at the Internet_
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Kosmos All-Chemist set was pretty much a Germanized
| Golden Book of Chemistry.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I used my chemistry set also to distill wine and drink
| the results, and for what I recall, it tasted good.
| Problem is that I was like 12, but did that only a couple
| times: creating stinking bubbling blobs was a lot more
| fun.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I liked created smoke bombs using sugar and potassium
| nitrate. One day, they went off while cooking them on my
| front porch. I poured some water on it so that any embers
| that fell between the board wouldn't ignite any leaves or
| debris under the porch. I mush have poured 40 gallons on
| it, because it was a cold day and the water was creating
| steam that I mistook for smoke. Not funny at the time,
| but pretty funny now. At least I had the sense to do it
| on a hotplate outside instead of in the house.
| pjmorris wrote:
| We did our toy shopping at thrift stores in the early 70's
| and the old Gilbert sets I had as a 10-12 year old were
| much better (for dangerous values of better) than what's
| available today.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't know what toys you have, but my toys today are RC
| planes with a 25km range that transmit HD video so you can fly
| them with a first person view.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My toy today is a 1972 Dodge with a 400hp heavily modified
| 340 V8.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Is it legal to fly them out of LOS?
| stavros wrote:
| It depends on where you are and what license you have, but
| generally LOS is different from VLOS (one means there are
| no obstacles between you, the other means you can't see
| it).
|
| Generally, there are limits to how far you can go, but you
| can get a license and file flight plans.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh that's neat. I always thought the limit for any kind
| of model plane is LOS and no exceptions. Have to look
| into this.
| 83 wrote:
| >>25km
|
| Dragonlink, Crossfire, or something else?
| stavros wrote:
| ELRS can easily go 25km for the radio link, and DJI O3 goes
| ~24km for the video.
|
| For radio it basically doesn't make sense to use anything
| other than ELRS any more, it's years ahead from anything
| else.
| 83 wrote:
| Thanks, this gives me something to look into. I've been
| too busy the past few years to fly my long range planes
| and need to catch up on what's changed.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh you're going to love it! Feel free to email me if you
| want more info.
| kqr wrote:
| > 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.
| cdot2 wrote:
| castor wheels like on a bicycle/motorcycle?
| kqr wrote:
| That is clever! Does it work when the vehicle is four-
| wheeled and does not lean? My experience with prams with
| castor wheels says no.
| shakna wrote:
| It's not a perfect fix, but adding a sail to control the
| direction of the castors can often help a bit.
| sokoloff wrote:
| You need the center of drag to be behind the center of mass
| (think "feathers on an arrow" as the mental model). Free
| castering front wheels with fixed rear wheels that develop
| progressively more drag as the yaw increases will help, but
| you've got to get the mass forward as well.
| kqr wrote:
| Would castering rear wheels with mass (engine?) forward be
| simpler?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think you want non-castering rear wheels, because you
| want the side forces to be generated when the vehicle is
| yawing with relation to the direction of travel. As the
| sled starts to spin, non-castering rear wheels will tend
| to oppose the spin. (If anything, you might even want to
| set the rear wheels fixed and slightly askew [toed-in] to
| increase the drag while traveling in a straight line
| [with near-zero yaw angle].)
| WalterBright wrote:
| A rudder might have worked. Also, at the time I had a pretty
| poor understanding of stability, and no understanding of
| "oversteer".
| euroderf wrote:
| A pal and I mounted an .049 on a slab of wood and added three
| wheels and let it zoom around a school parking lot. It would go
| in expanding circles until it hit a curb or it crossed the road
| and hit a ditch. Pretty sturdy. No disintegration-on-impact
| like balsa airplanes.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Wow, that little Cox engine ... that's a blast from the past.
| Must've been 1972, if memory serves correctly. Being in Sweden
| at the time, mine was attached to a (highly simplified) little
| balsa Draken plane. Good times indeed.
| [deleted]
| zh3 wrote:
| The 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.
| gumby wrote:
| I had this toy and really enjoyed it but assumed that the
| inevitable crashes were all my fault.
| danuker wrote:
| Today we have drones. They are just as capable of poking
| someone's eye out. With less noise and fumes.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Oh my. I got a then already very old Russian compression ignition
| engine like this [0] as a child. It needed a mix of petroleum,
| aether and rhizinus oil and was extremely hard to start. I did
| not have any spring or electrical starter and it took forever.
| Will never forget the sound and smell once it ran though.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbureted_compression_ignit...
| lproven wrote:
| I had to Google it, so just FWIW, that is usually called
| "castor oil" in English. :-)
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Oh. Thank you, I did only check the direct translation
| indeed. Learned something today. :)
|
| That oil is for lubrication, the petroleum is the real, main
| fuel and the highly flammable aether is needed to be able to
| ignite at all at the comparably low temperatures you can
| produce with cranking. Too high compression and the first
| firing will see a too high counter force to continue, too
| little compression (that screw on top of the cylinder head)
| and it won't ignite...
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