toys with the most danger

raggie33

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man anyone recall the toys we used to have.which to you seemed the most unsafe?i recall lawn darts and wonder how we survived them
 

metalhed

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I remember a toy from the late 60's that a neighbor kid owned and always seemed like a bad idea.

It was a kit that included moldable plastic that you could make your own designs with. I think the pieces baked in a light-bulb fired oven in a mold, but it always smelled toxic and made me kinda sick feeling when he used it.

Wish I could remember the name of the damn thing...

...can't get the damn smell out of my brain after 40 years, of course. Go figure. :laughing:
 

Sierra_Bill

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raggie33 said:
man anyone recall the toys we used to have.which to you seemed the most unsafe?i recall lawn darts and wonder how we survived them

My bicycle. I'd go down the hill at high speed with no helmet (they were unheard of in those days). I coulda been dead or a vegetable the rest of my life. My mother did give me a bawling out one day when I went down that hill on the left side, which would have been against traffic if there had been any that time

Bill D.
 

nikon

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Another time, another place.
When I was a small child my parents gave me woodburning set, which consisted of a soldering iron and some pieces of wood you were supposed to burn pictures into. What the heck were they thinking? Fortunately I wasn't interested in it and didn't wind up with serious burns.
 

metalhed

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Oh yeah, we used to ride our bikes behind those mosquito fogging trucks. Does that count?


And we wonder why I'm a little slow...no we don't. :D
 

Vee3

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Super Elastic Bubble Plastic - Loaded with Acetone.

Slip-N-Slide - Lots of neck/back injuries and joint sprains.

Daisy "pop guns" - Often loaded with dirt/mud and fired at close range.

Dart guns - with the suction-cup removed from the shaft.

Pogo sticks - Obvious problems...

Some of today's toys are still the most dangerous (And somehow haven't been demonized) - Baloons (Many kids die every year choking on them) Bikes (Thousands of kids every year with head injuries) Baseball bats (More head injuries.

Statistics prove that firearms are safer than toys (But if tortured enough, numbers will confess to anything).
 

Sigman

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How about those "clacker balls" that were on a string and you moved your arm up and down and they smacked together at the top & bottom of the arc...

I think they were cracking/fracturing...plastic shrapnel!
 

Solstice

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My mom said that cereal/cracker jack boxes used to come with little mazes which you tilt to guide along a little ball...of mercury!! Needless to say, they don't give those to kids anymore.

Not exactly "toys" but a couple of similar examples she remembers:

At the shoe store, there would be a small X-ray machine just sitting there so you could see where your toes came to in a pair of shoes- kids would keep sticking there feet in there and leave them in for long periods of time because it looked cool, and parents didn't know it was harmful.

Every so often, a pesicide truck would drive up and down the streets spraying airbourne pesticide to control certain pest populations. The spray was an opaque cloud or mist which (once again) looked cool, so kids would come running out into the street and chase behind these trucks as if it were an ice cream truck, playing in the cloud of pesticide.

I think people smartened up a lot since then, at least on the health front. The only toy I can remember playing with that was "dangerous" was the "slap bracelet" which turned out to be a sharp piece of metal covered in very thin cloth.
 

IsaacHayes

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Heheh I can relate to a lot of these. Only time I got hurt was on a trampoline at a friends house once. My back bent backwards some how just jumping, and hurt for days. lucky it wasn't worse!

Hey I remember those slap bracelets. I might have some burried somewhere. God that was a long time ago it seems.
 

Coop

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I remember I used to have a "Zongo jumping disc" They were quite the craze when I was a kid. These things were very simple half spheres out of rubber. If you turned it inside out and threw it on the ground, it would flip back to the original position, causing the thing to jump up. Ofcourse, it was way more fun to put them on other things than the ground. Like your head, or like some dumb kids, your eyesocket.... Which caused more than a few accidents where an eyeball was sucked out of its socket, as the flipping back to original form of the half sphere formed a vacuum...

Later the Zongos were sold with a little hole in them, preventing the vacuum thing from happening...

I also remember the Loloball, which was a ball with a plastic disc around it (kinda looked like saturn). You were supposed to stand on the disc while clamping the ball between your feet and jump. Sort of like a hands free pogostick (minus the stick :thinking: ) These things caused quite a lot of broken ankles...

ofcourse there is my bike... It started with my BMX, later upgraded to a mountainbike... Did some really stupid things, got quite good at it, got into competition, but in the last season before I could ride in the adult classes, had an accident and busted my knee.
 

LumenHound

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I'm surprised nobody's mentioned a chemistry set.

Mine included a really cool alcohol Bunsen burner and about 60 different chemicals. I think it took me all of about 7 days to crack or explode most of the test tubes and other glassware that came with it. If an impromptu experiment smoked, bubbled, or hissed ominously then it just had to be repeated with double the amount of chemicals.

I learned quickly to not tip over the Bunsen burner when it was lit.
 

Mini-Moder

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What about those lead molded soldiers. Thats prety toxic.


I remember a toy from the late 60's that a neighbor kid owned and always seemed like a bad idea.

It was a kit that included moldable plastic that you could make your own designs with. I think the pieces baked in a light-bulb fired oven in a mold, but it always smelled toxic and made me kinda sick feeling when he used it.

Wish I could remember the name of the damn thing...

...can't get the damn smell out of my brain after 40 years, of course. Go figure. :laughing:

I remember some ones that you made bugs, I think they were called creepy crawlers. They are still around today, in a slightly different, less deadly way though.
 

Manzerick

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we had inventions called "poppers". We would take a medicine bottle (or any round plactic cylinder (that was open on both ends) and attach a finger from a rubber glove.... all I can say is don't load a pencil or chop stick in it... OUCH!


It was so bad a kid @ my old middle school got a BB in the head from one. Dam near killed him!
 

Pydpiper

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metalhed said:
I remember a toy from the late 60's that a neighbor kid owned and always seemed like a bad idea.

It was a kit that included moldable plastic that you could make your own designs with. I think the pieces baked in a light-bulb fired oven in a mold, but it always smelled toxic and made me kinda sick feeling when he used it.

Wish I could remember the name of the damn thing...

...can't get the damn smell out of my brain after 40 years, of course. Go figure. :laughing:

Was that "Shrinky Dinks"?
 

Spudman

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It has already been mentioned, but that was the Vac-u-form. I had one and I think it heated the plastic over a section like a hot plate, not a light bulb. Then you switched it over to the side with the item you were copying and pumped the air out until it molded to the piece. I remember making race car bodies.

I think I had all the danger toys as a kid, the vac-u-form, thingmaker, Gilbert Chemlab, clackers.

Oh, and while watching VH-1's toy show I was reminded that my pogo stick had no handlebars, just a rubber cap on the end of the pole. :huh2:
 

bucken

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Matchbook Rockets - Anyone else remember how to make these?

And anyone else remember the Bobby-pin "flippers"?
 
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