The 10 most dangerous toys of all time

I enjoyed number 8.

I'd like to have both 9 & 10.
 
I had a lot of fun with the old-style chemistry sets when I was a kid... :yikes:

-Rich
 
SNL replayed their 'bag of glass' skit the other day.

I am still amazed that I survived my youth.
 
I somehow survived lawn darts, bb guns, firecrackers, slingshots, cars with no seatbelts, and riding a bike without a helmet.
 
Matthew said:
I somehow survived lawn darts, bb guns, firecrackers, slingshots, cars with no seatbelts, and riding a bike without a helmet.
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Well, I did, a little kid in my neighborhood fell off a bicycle and died from a head-bleed. Someone else blew off some of his fingers when he turned a mortar&pestle into a mortar grenade while mixing oxidizer and substrate.

It wasn't all paradise.
 
Bob Noel said:
I enjoyed number 8.

I'd like to have both 9 & 10.
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I enjoyed number 8 until I put a lawn dart into my mom's roof. :hairraise:

I'd have liked 9 & 10, but now that I'm older I know how to build 9 and where to get uranium ore.

Mixed my own zinc and sulfur solid rocket fuel as a young teen; learned how to operate a lathe to make my own rocket nozzles. "Rocket Manual for Amateurs" by Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley was my rocket bible as a teen. Good times.
 
Matthew said:
I somehow survived lawn darts, bb guns, firecrackers, slingshots, cars with no seatbelts, and riding a bike without a helmet.
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+1. I also had a bow and arrow without suction cups on the end.

"Hohoho, you'll shoot your eye out kid."

Cheers
 
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I had lawn darts but I never heard of most of the rest of them.
 
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Everskyward said:
I had lawn darts but I never heard of most of the rest of them.
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Lawn darts... aren't those things that pilots say will always be the other guy?
 
Matthew said:
I somehow survived lawn darts, bb guns, firecrackers, slingshots, cars with no seatbelts, and riding a bike without a helmet.
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And .22 rifles at age 12, minibikes, go-carts, cutting lawns with unsafed rotary mowers, welding at age 14, making gunpowder, bucking bales and pumping leaded gas at age 16, etc, etc.

And I've been obscenely healthy in the last 62 years...
 
Everyone of these that I had was defective. Luckily there was a trampoline just off the side of the house our else I could have been seriously hurt.

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****ing trampoline's in my day had everything exposed. Pipes, springs, no safety net 'enclosure.' If you missed and came down with a leg through those springs, that hurt.

Or we would double jump on one and sometimes bounce one of us clean off of the thing into outer space.

I can't believe i'm alive.
 
RJM62 said:
I had a lot of fun with the old-style chemistry sets when I was a kid... :yikes:

-Rich
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Me, too. Back in the mid-60's...my Dad bought me one when I was about 10 years old. Had a lot of fun with it until I almost put the kitchen into orbit.

I thought it was cool...other than the burned counter top. I knew Mom would be pi$$d. I was right.

Mom was not amused.

Chemistry set was disposed of.

Mom was a party poop.

:D

Mike
 
I wasn't allowed to have a chemistry set after I almost burned the garage down with my electronics experiment (age 5). It turned the outlet completely black and looked like the fourth of July. My parents were convinced I would blow a hole in the driveway.
 
Matthew said:
I somehow survived lawn darts, bb guns, firecrackers, slingshots, cars with no seatbelts, and riding a bike without a helmet.
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Not to mention riding in the rear facing back seat of Mom's Country Squire. Good thing we didn't get rear ended, or all three of us would have been goners.
 
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Ted DuPuis said:
I rode in the bed of a pickup truck. No seat belts.
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We used to get towed by a rope attached to a pickup truck while "skiing" on a piece of wood. It only works if the grass is wet.

I had a Rupp minibike that was powered with a 5 hp Briggs engine. My cousins, who were mechanically inclined, disconnected the governor. It would go 53 mph, but the brakes were kind of out of commission. Each fall I got two pair of PF Flyers for the school year. I wore one pair out in two days, using them for brakes Fred Flintstone style.

Dad took the minibike away after that.
 
I didn't come out of it unscathed. But the broken arm and other injuries came from sandlot baseball and not explosives, self propelled vehicles, or sharp objects thrown in the air.

But the next-door neighbor kid was killed when he was playing on the RR tracks. I think he was 4-5 and wandered away when his mom wasn't looking.
 
Old Geek said:
And .22 rifles at age 12, minibikes, go-carts, cutting lawns with unsafed rotary mowers, welding at age 14, making gunpowder, bucking bales and pumping leaded gas at age 16, etc, etc.

And I've been obscenely healthy in the last 62 years...
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Hey that was me, I had 20 guage to, Plus add Black Powder cannons and rocket motors. I would get off the school bus walk 200 yards out behind the house and shoot a couple pheasants for dinner.

I still haven't made it to 50 but so far so good.

Brian
 
FormerHangie said:
We used to get towed by a rope attached to a pickup truck while "skiing" on a piece of wood. It only works if the grass is wet.

I had a Rupp minibike that was powered with a 5 hp Briggs engine. My cousins, who were mechanically inclined, disconnected the governor. It would go 53 mph, but the brakes were kind of out of commission. Each fall I got two pair of PF Flyers for the school year. I wore one pair out in two days, using them for brakes Fred Flintstone style.

Dad took the minibike away after that.
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We used to build rideable carts out of scrap lumber and baby carriage wheels that we, ehhr, found. We learned about the importance of brakes while swerving between the trucks trying not to get killed as we tore through the red light and across third avenue.

-Rich
 
At an antique store a couple years back, I found a kid's lead-casting kit. Had a heater to melt lead, and molds to pour it into.

Years ago, David Letterman had a bunch of Mattel designers on the show. Apparently, at the time, they had a yearly "dangerous toy" competition, where they'd design some sort of toy that would give parents nightmares.

One was called "Battling Blimps": Two remote control blimps. Filled with hydrogen. With a burning candle held forward of the nose. Goal was to ram the candle into the other guy's blimp.

My favorite? "Baby's First Sawblade Shooter." Like a hand-held clay pidgeon thrower, but rigged to throw circular saw blades.

Ron Wanttaja
 
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I had a chunk of uranium ore in my rock collection when I was a second grader. It stayed under my bed, in a shoebox. The ore was a gift from the elementary-school custodian, who had been a miner.
 
Plastic sleds tied behind snowmobiles with good length of rope. We'd bundle up, dad would tow us up to about 60mph. I remember one time, there were two of us tied behind it, and I pulled myself about 75% of the way towards the snowmobile. Wrapped my arm in the rope, and then started pulling my friend's rope up towards me. He looked at me with the WTF look, until I let go of his rope. With the slack, he slowed, and then the sled snapped out from under him when it went taught. big cloud of snow dust as he tumbled through the snow. We also took them out on the lakes, and "cracked the whip." You would bounce and slide forever when you tumbled out.

And then there was tying the Flexible Flyer to the bumper of the Ford....
 
Playing with old electric blasting caps.

Building a Tesla coil using a 7000 volt neon sign transformer.

Locking myself in a deep freezer while playing hide and seek.

Homemade black powder.

The risk of flying is not so bad after all. Childhood was way more risky.
 
RJM62 said:
We used to build rideable carts out of scrap lumber and baby carriage wheels that we, ehhr, found. We learned about the importance of brakes while swerving between the trucks trying not to get killed as we tore through the red light and across third avenue.

-Rich
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We took an old refrigerator box and shellacked the thing to death, made a fort out of it be slept in it for a whole summer. Still kicking.
 
I remember one summer spent most of the time firing pop bottle rockets at each other for most of the summer. Someone had a huge stash of them from the previous year annual trek to the Colorado/ Wyoming State line to get illegal fireworks.

We'd ambush each other from anywhere. Tinder dry bushes, under cars, from rooftops.

When we weren't actively shooting rockets at each other we were down at the hobby store buying the Estes variety. And those weren't always launched straight up either. Heh.

Tossing M-80s in the creek was always entertaining too. :)

Shooting. .22s was an everyday affair. So much so that I'd forgotten that we did it that much. We even convinced the neighbor across from my house to let us set up our target range in his backyard since it was bigger and didn't have a huge hillside in it. He was fine with it. (Imagine the total freak-out nowadays.)

Was a pretty awesome summer.
 
brcase said:
Hey that was me, I had 20 guage to, Plus add Black Powder cannons and rocket motors. I would get off the school bus walk 200 yards out behind the house and shoot a couple pheasants for dinner.

I still haven't made it to 50 but so far so good.

Brian
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Sounds like the apartment complex my wife and I lived in one year in college. On the edge of town. Get home from class, grab a shotgun and go for a walk looking for pheasants. Life was good in college (not so bad now, either).

RV10flyer said:
Playing with old electric blasting caps.

Building a Tesla coil using a 7000 volt neon sign transformer.

Locking myself in a deep freezer while playing hide and seek.

Homemade black powder.

The risk of flying is not so bad after all. Childhood was way more risky.
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That's nothing. We used a 15,000 Volt neon light transformer for the same (and other) purpose in high school physics. I had so much fun in that class (and a teacher would get fired today for what our teacher did).
 
I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan, and the enormous piles of limestone blocks, placed along the shoreline for erosion control, were our "caves" to play in for a few summers.

Some of the caves -- gaps between the limestone blocks -- went quite deep. Some went below the water line. We would spend all day in them, hanging out, smoking whatever we could find. Later, we would add Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill to the mix.

We knew that the blocks moved. Some days, we'd find that a cave that was there last week just wasn't there anymore. And after a long winter, all the blocks were all jumbled. For some reason, none of us died in them.

And, of course, we cleaned our HO model train tracks with Carbon Tetrachloride on a rag. Made 'em NICE and shiny. The skull and cross bones on the bottle made it even cooler.

And we swung from the asbestos-wrapped pipe at the bottom of the basement stairs every, single time. The asbetos would turn to power, and rain down on our hair. Take a deep breath!

Oh, and we ran behind the mosquito spray truck in West Bend, WI, every night in the summer, because they put stuff in it to make it smell good. "It" was DDT, of course.

Did anyone else make "hippie cannons"? Soup cans with both ends cut off, duct-taped together. Lighter fluid in the bottom, tennis ball down the tube, apply flame near a strategically punched hole. Ka-FOOM! Sometimes the ball went hundreds of yards.

Sometimes we'd douse the balls themselves in lighter fluid. Fireballs at night!

And if we were REALLY good, we would get a buddy to light 'em off while we shoulder launched them. AT our friends on bikes.

I did manage to break a windshield with my head in 1973. No seat belts, head on into an oak tree that didn't move an inch.

Miraculously, I've literally never missed a day of work for illness in my life. I'm 55.
 
Lead and radiation are over-rated.
 
Jay Honeck said:
Did anyone else make "hippie cannons"? Soup cans with both ends cut off, duct-taped together. Lighter fluid in the bottom, tennis ball down the tube, apply flame near a strategically punched hole. Ka-FOOM! Sometimes the ball went hundreds of yards.
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A friend of mine confessed to using one when a kid. The ball rolled under the neighbors car, and ignited it. Oops.
 
weilke said:
Lead and radiation are over-rated.
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Funny thing is, to me, it's hard to tell if they are or not given how some stuff that's "bad" just isn't and gets lumped in with the stuff that actually is. For instance two handled shower faucets were outlawed the last place I lived and if you had a two handled faucet pre-ban you were required to put a water temp regulator on your water heater. Yeah... right.
 
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