It Took Me nearly 50 years, but I found it!!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Our rocket motors were in the J, L, and M-class; BIG mothers!

Lift a fully loaded refrigerator to 600FT big.

The rocket would ride to launch altitude in an insulated “launch tube”.

The Major rode up in his own specially-designed cabin attached to the launch tube, the tube and cabin would then be recovered via parachute.

That was a nice nostalgic read. We've all lost toys. I am an 80s baby and my "ultimate toy" was the Voltron until I got a Nintendo but that's not really a toy, its a game. My family loved board games too but thats not a toy. The thing is though I remembered Voltron being a lot bigger than 8 inches... Like 12-15 inches. I almost thought I had the wrong one but I guess everything just seems bigger when you are only 4 or 5 feet tall, or less.

I was pretty serious about the Shogun Warriors when I was a kid.
I had the 'Dragun' figure.
I got into a full on brawl with a kid who was older and bigger than me over whether it was a long or short "a" in the name.
I gave him a handful of sand to the eyes that says the "a" is long.

a reply to: skunkape23

The MMM series had an alien, but I can't remember his name. I had one of those too.

He was cool because he glowed in the dark, but I never played with him very much. I was more into the realistic thing.

What was his name??? Hmmmm...(dialing up way-back machine)...

Was it "Callisto" or something like that?

a reply to: skunkape23

I got the hammer and hand saw at age 3. Bad idea, I started trying to saw the coffee table in half

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I had a Callisto!

Had several as a matter of fact.

Oddball kid that I was, I preferred Callisto to the Major!

I think it was because Callisto’s head was this transparent green.

Transparent green head....Sooooo COOL!!!!

a reply to: Bhadhidar

Yeah, that's a lot bigger stuff than we had, but we were just kids.

One time we were launching this brand new rocket I'd built. It wasn't real big or anything, but it was kinda' cool; it had preformed plastic fins so it was supposed to fly really well. The little guide tube separated from the rocket just a split second before we launched it, and the rocket tipped almost all the way over sideways when the engine fired. Took off like a missile straight across the ground!



It flew straight alright! ...at about Mach 60...right into a concrete block wall of a bathroom building on the athletic field we were launching it from. Vaporized it!! ...the rocket, not the bathroom building! LOL! There was nothing left but a crushed/mangled cardboard tube and shattered plastic!

S#-house - 1
Space Pioneers - 0

Moral - Never mess with an outhouse. They tend to always win.

We had lots of really great launches, but a few spectacular fails too. I remember this one kid who was a fantastic model builder. He built this 'advanced' Estes (and expensive) rocket that had a glider attached to it. The glider was attached to the rocket with a pin that slid down into a 2nd guide rod tube on the other side. The idea was the rocket would reach apogee and fire the chute charge which would separate the glider from the rocket; then the glider would come back down while the rocket parachuted down. He'd done a fantastic job building this thing, and the paint job was superb. I was totally jealous.

Launch day rolled around, and even the parents showed up for this one. It was time to launch Nels' rocket. Pressed the "Fire" button on the remote and liftoff!! The rocket made a perfect parabola with an apogee of about 30 feet off the ground, going so fast it was a blur (at least Mach 150!). It arced up and over and slammed right back into the ground! POOF!!

Nels was really good at building models, but it turned out he was a really crappy aerodynamics engineer. He'd put ailerons on the glider, canted in an up position. It looked cool, but they worked exactly as ailerons do.

I'll see if I can find a picture of one of these things. It was a really cool rocket...gone in a flash!

ETA...here's what it looked like, and Nels' version looked exactly like this...



The part he missed was that he was supposed to cant the ailerons on the glider up a bit, but he needed to also cant the ailerons on the rocket wings down a bit to counteract the aerodynamic forces until the engine quit. This way the rocket and the glider would separate in dramatic fashion when the chute charge fired. So rather than getting a lesson in fine aerodynamic engineering, we rather got lesson in structural engineering about objects of little mass colliding with objects of immense mass (i.e. Earth). Earth handily won the competition!

And speaking of interesting kids stuff, toys and hobbies, does anyone remember HeathKit(s)? They were these electronic kits that you could build.

The story above about Nels and his rocket just reminded me of this. Nels was kind of a genius in a way. To look at him, he just looked like a scrubby kid, with a devils grin. He was in his mid teens when I knew him, and I was much younger. He was one of those people who just had to take everything apart (and I mean EVERY-THING), didn't matter what it was.

Well, one day Nels saw an advertisement in the back of some magazine for a Heathkit oscilloscope. (You know, those things that draw squiggly lines on a scope and analyze circuits). I didn't even know what an oscilloscope was at the time, but it sure looked cool. (I know what one is now though, more than I ever wanted to know). Anyway, Nels decided he was going to build one of these things. He had no idea why, or what he would do with it, but he was going to build one...just because it looked "cool" and he'd look smart as a result.

So he built this thing (unbelievable)! My dad always thought Nels was full of crap and a bad influence, but Nels' father was a good friend of dad, and Nels' sisters and I were ski buddies (my age). Anyway, so Nels builds this Heathkit oscilloscope. Dad hears about this thing and is telling me there is..."simply NO WAY on planet Earth that Nels Christian could build a working oscilloscope!" So, I'm egging my dad on about it, and finally he calls up Nels dad, Jim, and asks him if this thing really works. Well, Nels' dad was the GM of a public TV station, and says he has no idea if this thing works or not, but he knows some engineers down at his TV station who damn sure will! This turns into a big deal. Finally, one Friday evening this TV station engineer shows up with a TV and they hook up Nels' Heathkit oscilloscope to the circuits and tubes in this TV and, by golly, the damn thing DOES work! In fact, it works so well the guy wants to buy it!

How Nels ever did that I will never know! But I'll never forget it...just like I'll never forget Major Matt Mason!

I don't ever know what happened to Nels; he's either dead or running around with Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Bezos, I'm sure.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Didn’t see this one myself, but an artifact of the incident was placed on public display for years in the NV town of Gerlach.

Similar to what you described, someone had a “launch incident” with a high-powered rocket at an event held on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property on the Black Rock desert.

BLM official parked his SUV in a restricted area close to the designated launch pads.

Rocket went sideways, skewered SUV going in through the right rear and out through the left front of the vehicle, setting the vehicle on fire in the process.

A truck tire with a rocket piercing it was mounted out front of the little town’s cafe to honor the incident.

Good times with dangerous “toys”!

The oscilloscope I was talking about....

Look at it like this, if you hadn’t been exposed to Sea Devils perhaps you wouldn’t have developed an interest in scuba diving. Personally I blame GI Joe for my crazy quest to do many exciting things.