Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-dangerous-toy-edition

by doat • 4 years ago

243 185 4 years ago

whyisthisinteresting.substack.com

jerkstate• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm8• 4 years ago

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.

zabzonk6• 4 years ago

it won't cut off your finger, but it will hurt!

zabzonk6• 4 years ago

glow plugs are pretty easy to start - stupid question, but you did have a big battery to power the plug?

dieselgate2• 4 years ago

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

zh32• 4 years ago

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'.

greenbit3• 4 years ago

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.

quercusa• 4 years ago

I saw one start maybe twice. Knowing my dad I suspect the battery was always dead.

zabzonk6• 4 years ago

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.

JoyfulTurkey• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

asdff5• 4 years ago

I still have some lawn darts at my parents house that were illegal even when we got them. Javelins were banned in my state for track and field too.

sjm-lbm• 4 years ago

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)

dieselgate2• 4 years ago

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

zh32• 4 years ago

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.

acomjean• 4 years ago

We had that in helocopter form. You started it (of course hand spinning the prop). It took off, ran out of gas and came back down. There were large blades that slowed it decent.

I remember we first started it, we had no idea what to expect. (the pre youtube days)

Its a wonder kids who grew up with these things have any fingers..

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

I had a similar experience building model rockets with those Estes brand engines.

After many hours putting together the rocket, I launched it successfully but the parachute got stuck in a tall tree and I couldn't retrieve it.

My Dad an I had the bright idea of simply lashing a bare Estes engine to a balsa rod, and launching it like a classic Chinese rocket. The performance was amazing, so we promptly drove to the hobby store and bought the biggest engine they had in stock. The "D" size, if I remember correctly.

That was a tad too much power -- our contraption bent and started going in spirals and nearly set someone's garden on fire.

Fun times.

jeffreygoesto2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I had to Google it, so just FWIW, that is usually called "castor oil" in English. :-)

jeffreygoesto2• 4 years ago

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...

tragomaskhalos2• 4 years ago

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.

WalterBright10• 4 years ago

The German Kosmos sets were the best.

MrBuddyCasino• 4 years ago

The really old ones from the 50s and 60s were magic, and they still made passable ones into the 90s. But there is nothing like that anymore, it simply doesn't exist. I suspect that market is now tinkering with Raspberry Pis?

euroderf3• 4 years ago

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.

greenbit3• 4 years ago

Been there, done that, burned holes in the T-shirt too.

denton-scratch4• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm8• 4 years ago

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.

djmips2• 4 years ago

You found out why they called it brimstone! I did exactly what you did as a kid and I wondered if it didn't permanently damage my lungs...

greenbit3• 4 years ago

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-scratch4• 4 years ago

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.

mauvehaus• 4 years ago

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.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

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

xkcd-sucks• 4 years ago

For all the broke young thrill seekers still out there and reading hn, KNO3 is readily available as "stump remover / killer" (for which it's ... better than placebo) and dirt cheap since it's technical grade

__MatrixMan__• 4 years ago

My friends and I found documents authored in the 70's and went around the 90's trying to buy saltpeter--whatever that is. Luckily time had changed "Do I need to call your mother?" into "What the hell is that?" and our mothers were never called.

We eventually gave up and graduated to shoplifting model rocket engines, which we powdered with vice grips.

nigamanth2• 4 years ago

Life was so safe back then, I remember not even locking the door in the mid 80s LOL.

The door to my house was open, and we were sure no-one would enter.

anthk• 4 years ago

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...

Finnucane• 4 years ago

I had an Edmund Scientific cloud chamber kit that came with radium and uranium ore powder in a plastic bag.

I also recall a cousin had one of these Cox planes and almost gave me a haircut with it one day.

jmspring• 4 years ago

I remember, when young, I would always find these old chemistry sets for sale at garage sales around my grandmother's neighborhood. Parents didn't really care, so long as you didn't destroy / damage anything!

zenon• 4 years ago

My friend had a chemistry set that included a lead bar. We liked to chew on it -- imagine, a metal soft enough that you could easily dent it with your teeth!

cafard• 4 years ago

Really? I remember us having problems buying magnesium ribbon back then. A friend got some from our chemistry teacher with a bogus reason. Unfortunately, the thermite mixture wasn't done right--pebbles rather than powder--and it didn't get going.

yial• 4 years ago

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.

wrp2• 4 years ago

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.

WalterBright10• 4 years ago

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.

wrp2• 4 years ago

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.

fxtentacle2• 4 years ago

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.

denton-scratch4• 4 years ago

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

WalterBright10• 4 years ago

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.

meheleventyone3• 4 years ago

Don’t worry these days kids fuck their fingers up on quadcopters instead.

giantg23• 4 years ago

But will they know the joys of dangerous chemistry sets?

stavros4• 4 years ago

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.

832• 4 years ago

>25km

Dragonlink, Crossfire, or something else?

WalterBright10• 4 years ago

My toy today is a 1972 Dodge with a 400hp heavily modified 340 V8.

jacquesm8• 4 years ago

Is it legal to fly them out of LOS?

kqr5• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

castor wheels like on a bicycle/motorcycle?

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

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.

WalterBright10• 4 years ago

A rudder might have worked. Also, at the time I had a pretty poor understanding of stability, and no understanding of "oversteer".

Doxin2• 4 years ago

Angling the wheels slightly outward would at least work to course-correct if the weight of the contraption gets slung out. If the car leans left it'll have the most weight on the left-angled wheels, putting it back on all four wheels. The mirrored situation happens if the car leans right.

jfk13• 4 years ago

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.

euroderf3• 4 years ago

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.

fxtentacle2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

WalterBright10• 4 years ago

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.

danuker• 4 years ago

Today we have drones. They are just as capable of poking someone's eye out. With less noise and fumes.

h2odragon3• 4 years ago

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.

CoastalCoder2• 4 years ago

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?

h2odragon3• 4 years ago

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.

ankaAr• 4 years ago

I had one!!

Was fun af, the engine was loud and always was messy (I was not able to refill it, only my dad)

tibbon• 4 years ago

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.

ben7799• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

gumby• 4 years ago

I had this toy and really enjoyed it but assumed that the inevitable crashes were all my fault.

JasonFruit4• 4 years ago

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.

implements• 4 years ago

Wasn’t there a flying toy where an engine was mounted between two counter-rotating disks? (80s or before, possibly)

species9606• 4 years ago

Yes, I had one, and it was awesome. The thing went high enough to disappear from view, then gyro’ed safely back to earth.

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

I remember playing with one of these. I remember it went up and never came back down.

https://www.flyingdiscmuseum.com/novelty/multi-piece/h242871...

speakspokespok• 4 years ago

Wow. Way to bring me back. Looking at the link above I immediately recognized a similar toy that I had in the early 90's. it was of a similar design but with a small electric motor, and a stiff wire about 3ft long running to a control box that also had batteries. The UFO would hover. As I recall it was red and looked like a UFO.

If we're talking toys that don't exist anymore, anybody here ever have a water pressure rocket? You'd add water and then pressurize it with a hand pump. They'd go about 50 ft in the air I think. Once by accident I released a pressurized rocket in my parents kitchen leaving a nice dent in the ceiling.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

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.

JasonFruit4• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that device qualifies, but I've often told my wife that I hate the farewell phrase, "Stay safe!" that's become so common lately. Sometimes you have to balance whether something is enough fun to justify the risk of death.

pjmorris2• 4 years ago

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.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

How about 1950s airplane non-toys? When we went through my dad's stuff, we found some wings that were about three feet across. On the top they said something like "This does not contain anything useful even to an enthusiastic amateur. The owner is a struggling scientist engaged in upper atmospheric and cosmic-ray research. If found, please return to <NAME> <ADDRESS>".

The skin on those wings was insanely thin. You could break it with a fairly gentle touch.

mgressek• 4 years ago

We used to have the cox sky copter with the same engine. It had no control wires, you just let it go and it would ascend until it ran out of fuel and then it descended by auto rotation. It wasn’t that fun though, as it usually got stuck in a tree or on a roof on the way down. One day it just took off and disappeared, never to be seen again. We also had a dune buggy with that engine.

pugworthy• 4 years ago

I don't exactly agree with the article's comment that, "the fuel is ignited by the glowingly hot engine itself" - sort of implies the engine body proper is some hunk of hot glowing metal.

Wikipedia's description matches my memory that "the ignition is accomplished by a combination of heating from compression, heating from a glow plug and the catalytic effect of the platinum within the glow plug on the methanol within the fuel."

kokanator• 4 years ago

For those interested, there is still a very active community around Control Line airplanes as well as world championships.

http://flyinglines.org/

https://www.fai.org/page/f2-control-line

I was the president of the Northwest Fireballs for awhile.

http://flyinglines.org/Fireballs.html

If you are in the Portland/Vancouver area visit Delta park on most weekends and there will most likely be a group flying. If you have the chance to catch a competition at Delta park you will most likely see any number of former world champions.

jimbru• 4 years ago

In the Bay Area you can find people flying at the model airplane field behind the Oakland Airport (https://goo.gl/maps/TBJTFuUoWhHapCwk7). It's quite a spectacle.

m4rtink4• 4 years ago

I still remember those from my airplane model building years! When I joined the airplane modeling club at the local House of Youth here in the Czech Republic, we had a few of them still hanging around under the ceiling - but we never flew them by that point.

People were mostly building analog glow spark or detonation engine powered planes or electric and unpowered gliders.

Interestingly the thing basically all people built at tje start was a throwing balsa plane and then an uncontrolled glider, that you would drag up using a line, kinda how manned gliders are lofted with a winch.

Then every year we would hold a competition where members would compete with the planes they built - IIRC my glider was in the A3 category but I don't think I won any top spots back then. Also one way to assure victory was to build a bigger glider in one of the categories no one else competed. :-)

By doing it this way the club members learned how to use the tools and materials to then build more advanced designs - I managed to also build a RC plan eventually, powered by a 1,5 cm3 glowspark and controlled by a SkySport 4! I think 9 still have it somewhere.

Then high-school started and I had much less time and that was it with airplane building back then. :P

FatActor• 4 years ago

What I remember most of mine was the smell of the exhaust: a bit like overdone cheeseburgers.

Let's talk about Estes model rocket D-size engine bazookas. Because that's where the 70's really shined.

nibbleshifter3• 4 years ago

"Inadvisable experiments with Estes motors" was a staple of the 2000's for me.

Unfortunately around 2009 or so there was a change in regulations that made them practically unobtainium in my home country, the importer started getting demands from customs for an "explosives permit".

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

One year for Christmas I got an awesome Galax IV Hovercraft, also powered by the venerable Cox .049 engine.

Great fun!

https://www.retrothing.com/2008/03/testors-galax-i.html

ChuckMcM• 4 years ago

I had several of these (or more properly went through several) and got proficient enough to do loops, fly it inverted in the other direction, and occasionally "land" as you were supposed to do when it ran out of gas.

It was a lot of fun, but because you were in the center of a SPHERE the axis of control was not as intuitive as one might like. In particular, going "up" changed the orbital "plane" (no pun intended) and as a result was going to intersect with the ground unless corrected. You could do a little bit of hackery by squatting down and standing up to change the spheres center but trying turning rapidly in a circle while in a squat, it doesn't work well!

One of the adjustments that was "picky" was setting the vertical stabilizer for consistent yaw. You wanted the plane to pull toward the outside of the circle, it would do that from centripetal force once it got up to speed but before then a bit of help, well helped. Too much though and if you tried to fly inverted it started flying toward you and that wasn't helpful at all.

The best thing about the engines were that 12 yr old me could completely disassemble them and rebuild them in about an hour. That was something you had to do, Cox would "refurb" an engine (which I had them do once when I found a wrecked plane that clearly had been out in the desert for > a month) but once I got good enough at it I could do the refurb and save the $15 + postage that Cox wanted.

Fun times.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

I had a couple Cox planes at various times growing up. Starting them was a bear - either I flooded the engine or the battery I had for it was shot. Once I did get the engine running on one and immediately got my fingers bloodied up by the plastic prop.

When I got older I found out there's something called a "chicken stick" that you can use to flip the prop around to start the engine. Too bad Cox didn't include one, ha ha.

hackernj• 4 years ago

I had one. I crashed and destroyed it before completing a single rotation!

jdkee• 4 years ago

Also, Jarts.

We had a set. Fun to throw them up into the air and dodge them as they came down.

mkhpalm• 4 years ago

I had the 80s versions of these, a cox P-51 and a red little toni cosmic wind. Super fun once you could get them started but also crazy messy. Playing with them lead me to build an RC Great Planes PT-40 (0.40), a super sportster, a gentle lady rc glider, and another glider that had an electric motor with retractable blades to launch it. Instead of standard gliders which used a whole roll of rubber tubing as large as a soccer field. Then I got into RC helicopters which are pretty difficult to learn how to fly but absolutely crazy what you could do with them 3 dimensionally once you did.

So much of my kid job money, allowance, holiday and birthday money was spent going through the Tower Hobbies catalog. Good times.

the__alchemist• 4 years ago

A modern analogy is remotely-piloted aircraft / drones. These come in several variants. Related to the article, they can be dangerous; ie they reach high speeds, high altitudes, contain 1 or more rotating blades, contain high-energy batteries, and sometimes don't have great failure modes in the event of lost link, out of batteries etc.

I think a fundamental difference re the article's description is modern drones are capable of being flown safely. There are ways to build, maintain, and fly them safely, and ways for them to end in tragedy. It sounds like the 70s toys are dangerous as a default.

Some sub-categories for anyone not familiar:

  - DJI quadcopters: The most popular type. Command-based controls; they're generally safe, easy to fly etc. Use electric motors and lithium batteries. Popular with photographers, as a toy etc
  - FPV quadcopters and fixed-wing aircraft: Often have a degree of DIY and custom builds. Run one of several open-source firmware. Can go really fast, are very maneuverable, and can be flown for long distances. Can have various safety issues such as reckless flying when near people or animals, flying too far from the operator or with obstacles in the way without a good lost-link response etc. User assembly can lead to problems like weak solder joints coming loose. Various degrees of automation including autonomous flight, manned-AC-style autopilot modes, and angular-rate-based manual control.
  - Model airplanes: Commonly flown by an older demographic at airfields, with direct line-of-sight between the pilot and aircraft. Control signals directly command control surfaces without a flight controller. May be ICE or battery-powered. Community-enforced safety standards. Less likely to go lost-link due to no BVLOS capability.

tromp• 4 years ago

Another article that includes videos of the plane in operation and a documentary "Control Line: Wired For Excitement"

https://boingboing.net/2023/01/04/the-cox-e-z-flyer-was-a-ti...

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

Those things were AWESOME!

Also, real steam engines, acetylene-driven.

One of my favorite toys, was a sheet-metal Buck Rogers-style spaceship, with a sparking wheel (think lighter flint).

Don't get me started on the cool chemistry sets...

blacklion2• 4 years ago

I find this division on "hobby" and "toys" very strange.

I participated at local "airplane modelling club" at my 9-11 years and we had these control-line planes with ICEs (hand-built from scratch). Only "glowing plug" ICEs were very high-end and rare in my country and we used compression (effectively 2 stroke diesel!) engines which required very specific fuel: 1/3 of kerosene, 1/3 of castor oil and 1/3 diethyl ether. Ether were hard to get by, but my grandmother was surgeon nurse ;-) And, yes, 9-year old flight these planes under supervision of club's instructor.

R/C planes were known, but electronics for them were available only in very big clubs ("Pioneers Palace", one per city in best case, if you live in big city).

m4rtink4• 4 years ago

I have a very similar experience about a decade later in a follow-up organization to the SVAZARM/pioneer ones.

By that point the control line planes were just hanging from the ceiling and detonation engines were on the way out with glow spark replacing them mostly. People also had general acces to multi channel RC and we had one vintage "communist era" single channel on/off RC set as a curiosity. :-)

blacklion2• 4 years ago

I've fall into hole between rich state (when such clubs were comparably-well-funded) and rich parents and full shops (when it become possible to buy materials, engines, etc., for money of participants themselves), so our small local club has only 2 working carbureted compression ignition engines (it is named so in English according to Wikipedia) and one glow-plug engine, all other were cannibalized for parts...

gwbas1c• 4 years ago

The thing I get a kick out of is that the picture is clearly from the 1990s: I forget what we called those pants, but I remember the giant high-tops were all the rage when I was in 4th and 5th grade.

aconbere• 4 years ago

Parachute pants or just as often “Hammer pants”.

terran57• 4 years ago

This post, and all the comments here, brought back lots of memories for me. I too have the faint scars from hand-propping these things ... or was it from the roman candle exploding in my hands in the midst of a roman candle war with other kids in the neighborhood? Estes rockets, chemical sets, control line planes, all part of my lived experiences as a kid in the 70s. It was certainly a unique time to be a kid - very little direct supervision during play time - few rules - basically be home when the automatic porch light came on. You could do stupid things like take your parents car out for a spin after midnight at age of 13. Then having the only consequence of getting pulled over by the police being a stern lecture and having the cop follow you home with a warning to never do it again...

zafka2• 4 years ago

I am one of the lucky ones! I had the hand me down erector sets- WE made race cars with Rat traps as the motive force. I had several Gilbert Chemistry sets. I asked my favorite aunt to get me sulfer and Saltpeter - I made some rather good black powder- Solder the bulb from a "flash cube" to about 100 feet of found telephone wire, put powder and bulb in a rigid tube, stand behind large diameter tree and touch wires to D Cell. While I do not work in the field, I still love chemistry and will occasionally do silly chem experiments like Instant fire from antifreeze and a strong oxidizer. Make my own lime by calcining shells, and then disolve in water, filter and show how blowing through a straw generated CaCo3 again. Being child like means you can always be entertained easily.

zafka2• 4 years ago

Oh yea, my favorite aunt also bought me a lead casting set along wiht 1 mold for toy soldiers. sigh, I wish I had not lost that mold.

awful• 4 years ago

I got a Cox Red Baron in 1972, as I recall. Sad because I lived right next to a huge school yard but was never able to get it started. I had no one to ask how and why these things worked. It sat in the box on a shelf for the longest time.

Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

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