Name a Toy You Loved From Your Childhood

I fondly remember finding my father’s stash of gunpowder (he had a shotgun shell making machine) and all the wonderful things possible with that stuff.

Tgen there was the Aqua-Net flame throwers….🤠
On that note, don't set a pile of sawdust in a field on fire and then kick it to put it out.... methane. You live you learn.
 
On that note, don't set a pile of sawdust in a field on fire and then kick it to put it out.... methane. You live you learn.
When setting a ring of carb cleaner fluid on fire on a stump, with the can of carb cleaner in the center- don’t shoot the top with the pellet gun. It only rolls off and lands on it’s side, lamely flailing and belching a quickly exhausted spray of fire.

Shoot the bottom of the aerosol can. It acts as a propulsion source and the can launches off the stump and tumbles wildly upwards like a giant flaming jumping jack firecracker.
 
My friend shot the top of the can. The spray came out, failed to ignite from that ring of fire I told you about (we’d first spray a thick ring of fluid on a stump, place the can in the middle- and light the ring) then rolled onto its side, sprayed the lawn in a greasy coat of petrol based fluid, and eventually the spray started misting the air.

The mist ignited, and in a glorious and terrifying flash, an 8’-10’ ft section of the lawn lit up and began to burn.

Now, my friend’s father was very proud and peculiar about his lawn. So in a panic, as my friend was watching this large swath of his father’s prized Kentucky blue grass burn away, he grabbed the side of the above-ground pool and YANKED it’s framework loose, causing the pool to collapse and list and empty it’s contents onto the yard.

We stood there, now staring at an extinguished but large and prevalent charred burn mark on the lawn, buried under the former contents of the pool, which had flooded that section of the yard and was now slowly turning the newly exposed soil into mud.

We hid the evidence (pellet gun, emptied aerosol cans, Bic lighter) and hightailed it out of there.

A month later our friend was finally off being grounded, and allowed to once again join society.
 
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When setting a ring of carb cleaner fluid on fire on a stump, with the can of carb cleaner in the center- don’t shoot the top with the pellet gun. It only rolls off and lands on it’s side, lamely flailing and belching a quickly exhausted spray of fire.

Shoot the bottom of the aerosol can. It acts as a propulsion source and the can launches off the stump and tumbles wildly upwards like a giant flaming jumping jack firecracker.
At scout camp we always had a big pig roast to wind things up. We'd get a whole pig, dig a deep pit, build a huge fire in it and roast the pig once the fire had settled in. One year we got the bright idea of throwing all of our aerosol cans into the pit after dinner to see what would happen. Lots of things going boom and the occasional thing going flaming off into the woods that we had to run and find before it caught the whole place on fire. Once was probably enough for that one.
 
The cardboard box the neighbors new refrigerator came in. It could be anything. A submarine, a fort, a cave, a spaceship. Me and my friend Jerry spent hours playing in the thing. It finally collapsed and his dad threw it away. Those were the days.

I seriously loved the box, especially big ones.
In SoCal, we get a huge spread of wild mustard plants covering huge areas in the spring, with the rains. These things grow to about 4' tall, and a single spindly stalk.
They then would dry out, and, before we had fire fuel abatement regulations, they'd just stay as tall golden-brown hillsides.

My grandparents lived at the bottom of a large area of hillside that formed a basin, and, that stuff would fill every inch of hillside and basin.
So, we'd haul our boxes to the top of the hills, and, climb into the box, which we cut to be like a convertible car, and, we'd blast down the hills at insane speeds. You see a similar thing at the Little League World Champ Series, where they slide down the outfield slope on pieces of cardboard.
The mustard stalks would be pushed forward and crushed down as we hit them, and became almost like a lubricated slide. We'd slide far out into the flats of the basin before we stopped.
It was this, essentially, but in washer/dryer/refrig boxes:
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