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That Mattel Sonic Blaster guy looks like a young Kurt Russell.

PS, I want one (the air blaster, not the Kurt)

I had a couple of the Fanner 50s.


Back to the POres question.
No prolly not.

We were too poor to buy any of those toys. We had to settle for building our own.
I'll never forget the marble guns. Galvanized pipe with an elbow, drill a hole in the top just big enough for a firecracker, roll a marble against the firecracker and tell your buddy to start running.
Those were the days. Of course I never did anything like that, it was the boys across the street. They were really bad.

What a blast from the past! I had the first two when I was a kid. I always wondered what happened to the cap pistol. My father once shot the window in the garage when he was showing it to a family friend and that is when I learned how to replace glass panes. I know I lost the bullets pretty quickly but kept the shells and the sticky caps for quite while.

Thanks for the memories!

jmra wrote:We were too poor to buy any of those toys. We had to settle for building our own.
I'll never forget the marble guns. Galvanized pipe with an elbow, drill a hole in the top just big enough for a firecracker, roll a marble against the firecracker and tell your buddy to start running.
Those were the days. Of course I never did anything like that, it was the boys across the street. They were really bad.

We never used a marble, but we'd take a pipe with a cap on one end (kinda half a pipe-bomb). drill a hole in the cap so you could pass the firecracker's fuse thru it. Then you take two firecrackers and push the fuse of one into the end of the other. Then pass the free fuse thru the cap. Firing the first firecracker would propel the second firecracker and ignite it's fuse. With luck and practice you could get the 2nd firecracker to blow-up midair. We called them firecracker cannons.

Today. fireworks are only for professionals. Like this one...
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I remember making thee Coke can cannons for tennis balls. Back when we had "pop tops", you could completely remove top and bottom of the top can, remove the top of second can and then open bottom of second can with punch can opener with about five holes, put about five holes in the top of bottom can with the punch can opener and put a small hole in the middle of it. Tape them all together and squirt a little Ronsonol lighter fluid in it, swing it around a couple times to get the fuel/air mixture right, set it on the ground, drop a tennis ball in it and light the hole in the bottom can.

If you did it right a tennis ball would shoot up about 100 feet. If not, remove tennis ball and try again. My dad always wondered where all his lighter fluid went - he should of known, he was the one who showed us how to do it.

With the invention of the stay in place opening top and necking down the size of the cans this fun activity was ended.

jmra wrote:We were too poor to buy any of those toys. We had to settle for building our own.

Oh yes I remember those days. We used to go out and rid our bikes all day. I had no restrictions except that I had to "in our neighborhood" by night fall.

We had bottle rocket wars, bb gun wars, "borrowed" some of dad's gas out of the lawnmowers to fuel up and melt various objects. We beat the snot out of each other with wooden "swords". The only time I got a disapproving word was when we took our bikes apart to make a go cart. I was told that was fine but that was the only bike I was getting so I had better be able to put it back together.

Nope. I don't think they would. But, it is strange considering all the other different commercials that are on these days that used to be considered taboo.

Syntyr wrote:

jmra wrote:We were too poor to buy any of those toys. We had to settle for building our own.

Oh yes I remember those days. We used to go out and rid our bikes all day. I had no restrictions except that I had to "in our neighborhood" by night fall.

I was the same way. Be back by dark or call to give a location. Nothing to do with the parents for hours on end....

My how things have changed...unfortunately.

I don't think so...

Reading through these posts reminded me of our blow gun experiment. We took a bunch of q-tips (the kind with plastic shafts) and cut them in half, stole all the pins from mom's pin cushion, and a few drinking straws from the kitchen.

We'd heat up the plastic shafts to the melting point and stick the head of a pin in. As the plastic began to cool, you'd pinch it down around the pin head. After it set up, you had a blow dart. Stick the blow dart into a drinking staw (pin toward what you wanted to stick, fuzzy end toward your mouth) and blow (make sure you get your breath in before you put the straw close to your mouth). We started out shooting at our dart board, graduated to frogs and lizzards, and eventually shot them at each other (until my mom had to remove one from my brother's forehead). After the swelling and bruising in my backside went down, I decided blow gun hunting wasn't all it was cracked up to be...

I guess if a kid made one of those now, he'd be suspended, arrested, found to be "troubled" and referred to counseling, or all of the above. We just thought we were being normal kids.

I actually had the Sonic Blaster. Waited for six months as a Christmas present. The concept was a hand pump pneumatic device that knocked down cheesy targets (included). A mouse fart was more powerful. Then it stopped working after about 5 minutes. I was pretty much bummed for the rest of the day so I took out my frustration on some unwitting ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass.

My father had a huge vertical antenna out behind the barn, which had a permanently attached gin pole socket that we could swivel up and down. The socket had a "weep hole" at the bottom to keep water from accumulating and said hole was ideal for a firecracker fuse if you could find a way to thread it down the 24 inch long pipe. We came up with a way involving a coat hangar and some string.

We started out shooting pretty much anything that we could get to fit the tube with "Black Cat" firecrackers and other slightly larger ones, including some efforts at getting our bombs to "burst in air" Then we discovered that lemonade cans fit the tube perfectly.

In an effort to improve the ballistics of the lemonade cans, we started adding various levels of fillers. One third full of paraffin wax over sand worked great for various small crackers, many of them landing on the barn roof and rolling back down, with the occasional one making it over the barn and endangering the cars in the driveway, but we discovered that they didn't propel a can full of plaster very well.

And then someone got the bright idea to use a cherry bomb as the motive force. We hit the house roof, luckily no one was home. Years later my father was investigating bees nesting in the roof and discovered the divot that the can took when it hit, but never could figure out what caused it. He decided some unknown piece of hardware must have dropped off a plane flying over and declared that it was a good thing nobody got hit.

Of course that was far in the future.

And then we tried an M-80.

The can was still going up when we lost sight of it and we hunted for it in vain, and decided we had hit the danger point. Someone finally noticed a "dent" in the middle of the macadam (the old kind of compacted stone with tar and waste oil poured on it) highway out front of the house and upon investigation we found it contained the top of the can and some plaster dust. Glad we didn't hit any cars. The tube was pointed up at about 75 degrees (reconstructed) when it was fired, we hadn't wanted to take a chance on the shot going too far.

From the antenna to the barn was about 45 feet, to the house, about 160 (where we hit it) and a full 270 feet +/- from where we fired it to the impact mark on the road.

AndyC wrote:

sjfcontrol wrote:We never used a marble, but we'd take a pipe with a cap on one end (kinda half a pipe-bomb). drill a hole in the cap so you could pass the firecracker's fuse thru it. Then you take two firecrackers and push the fuse of one into the end of the other. Then pass the free fuse thru the cap. Firing the first firecracker would propel the second firecracker and ignite it's fuse. With luck and practice you could get the 2nd firecracker to blow-up midair. We called them firecracker cannons.

We did the same thing but with a cheap Bic ball-pen which has a roughly 22-cal barrel. Remove the ink-tube then light a mini firecracker, drop it in base first and quickly stuff another mini in after it, fuse first.

I'll confess to a few mildly stinging fingers until I got the timing right - and then a stinging bottom from my mother when I hit her one of her best sheets hanging out on the line

Firecrackers in slingshots. It was a crew-served weapon for my brothers and I.

One would load a firecracker into one of our slingshots, and then the other would light it. Shoot it before it exploded.

I can remember firecracker "wars" with neighbor kids where the firecracker in the slingshot was our "mortar".