model aircraft + being a kid 30 years ago = laughs

[the330thbg]

awesome article and an even more awesome thread!!!.. Nothing flew quite like an Estes Big Bertha in the back of an Aurora Corsair II.

My brother and I would go through model building phases.., always going back to airplanes.. but we would build tanks., then blow them up or set them on fire.., then ships.., then airplanes.., buttle rockets as JATOS worked really well.., especially on water. That F-5 must have travelled 50 yards..., garsh.. i miss those days of having nothing to do but destroy stuff!!!
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[tom d. friedman]

quite a few hot wheel & matchbox cars attempted to break land speed records with bottle rockets on my street as a kid!! i forgot about those hi tech experiments!!

[the330thbg]

I grew up in the S. Texas.., so we had two important quantities of gadgets as a child.., 1. Bottle rockets. 2. Critters.

Cicadas with a bottle rocket either taped or superglued to their torso worked well..., especially because they would start flying while the fuse was still going then zzzzziiiippppppppp in mid-flight the bottle rocket (JATO) stickless of course.., would ignite and they would zoom in whatever direction they were going.., of course followed by the explosion at the end.., hey.., we were kids.., we were boys and there were no video games so we had to invent our own!!!!!

[Sasquatch]

Tom,

My claim to fame as far as model destruction is the sinking of a USS Constitution--the BIG one. ... but we did have a fun afternoon destroying mine.

Ah, memories!
Scott

Holy Mackarel Scott!...the big USS Constitution?! That would have been awesome to see sink. I had one of those but never managed to get past finishing the hull, much less all the rigging. Very cool that you not only finished building it, but finished it off in such grand fashion, too! I'm impressed!!

--Tom

[tom d. friedman]

the woods behind my parents house looks like a wixers dream....... warbird parts everywhere, like the fantasy of finding them for the 1st time on a remote pacific island, only thousands of times smaller in scale. however, i was irresponsible in my fun...... i failed to bury all the little pilots & crewmen that are with the wreckage. it's fun to go back their once in a while for a laugh when at my mom's!! & of course always with a beer!!

[Second Air Force]

Since it was just "parked" on a little sandbar we only succeeded in shooting pieces off of the ship. Eventually it ended up in enough small segments that we ceased firing and went to the house. Just like the real Old Ironsides, it never sank! The rounds didn't bounce off like in the legend, though......

Like Tom just posted, if I were to dig around in that old pond the remains are probably still there!

Scott

[the330thbg]

maybe some day you will charge admission for others to go back there and take the tour!!! Like our friend in Central Ohio!!! lol

[kalamazookid]

Haha, I think I did most of these things with legos when I was growing up in the 1990s. I didn't play with my models because they couldn't be fixed when they broke, so legos were the next best thing.

I remember my parents buying my a cruise ship set that had a nice big plastic hull. Rather than build a boring ol' cruise ship, I decided to make it into a battleship. I can remember many bathroom tub battles with that and a couple small "destroyers" I made. The ships would have at it and then my model and lego planes would come bomb the hell out of everything. I can remember plugging the bathtub once with lego pieces that had been "sunk" by a squadron of black snap-tite Tomcats.

I actually still have a 30" battleship I built out of legos and put on wheels so I could play with it in the backyard. I can remember rebuilding that several times when my Monogram B-26 dropped a firecracker onto the superstructure. Lots of fun memories

[Warbird Kid]

How bout this as a spinoff...

When I much younger than 22 I was an avid Lego builder. I still have all those Legos but haven't had the chance to pick them up since. Anyways I, of course, built a bunch of warbirds in the "minifig" scale. Meaning they were relatively proportionate to the 1 inch tall Lego figures. I ended up creating a whole bunch of aircraft with mixed results:

P-61
ME-109
Corsair x2
B-25
P-40
Wildcat
Hellcat
B-17

......but my P-38 was one of my favorites. I ended up wanting to do something interesting with it, so I had a large plastic bin that was about a foot deep that I filled with water and placed the 38 in. This was during the winter and of course it froze so now I had my own P-38 trapped in the ice! I tried to extract it that way too. Ended up using my dads electric drill to bore down to it. Needless to say my recovery wasn't too successful. Ended up destroying some of the bricks since the resin-plastic became brittle when cold and chipped very easily. So I waited until the weather was warm enough and i was able to pull the plane from its murky grave. Boy I was weird when I was a kid!

[tom d. friedman]

and i thought i was mental as a kid!!........ only kidding!!

[tom d. friedman]

ok guys, enough of these great models!!!!! how many of us as kids botched, & f'd up models and sacrificed them to anti aircraft fire (bb guns) ack ack (fire crackers) or 1/2 assed knuckle head nasa experiments such as taping estes rocket engines to planes in the spirit of advancement of delinquent fun & laughs??? i plead guilty to all the above!!! :Hangman: the 2 best were as follows...... took an f'd up curtiss seagull w/ pontoons, added a piece of wood & a brick to make a ramp, taped an estes rocket engine to the left lower wing, lit the sucker, & watched the funniest attempt at tight turning you ever saw. i even experimented nautically!!!! took a botched german battleship scharnhorst, taped 2 estes rocket engines to it's mast work above the pilot house, added glue & buckshot to balance the weight, climbed my neighbors fence where they graciously donated the use of their swimming pool unbeknownst to them in the name of pre-pubic science, floated the battle wagon, lit the engines, and probably broke the 1:48 scale model ship record for speed on water across the pool before she burned & sank. the woods hole institute is sending an r.o.v. to examine the wreckage!! those are only 2 examples from my kiddy archive!!!! yes, i'm still warped, but i grew up, but darn that was fun to do as a kid, & thinking of the hi jinx still makes for great laughs!!!! how about your delinquency??? got a model tragedy / experiment to share when you were a snot nosed punk????

with so many new members lately i thought i'd drag up 1 of my most favorite threads to warm us from the winter doldrums!! i can hardly wait for new replies!!!

[bdk]

with so many new members lately i thought i'd drag up 1 of my most favorite threads to warm us from the winter doldrums!! i can hardly wait for new replies!!!

Winter doldrums? It's going to be in the eighties tomorrow!

[Big Daddy]

....with so many new members lately i thought i'd drag up 1 of my most favorite threads to warm us from the winter doldrums!! i can hardly wait for new replies!!!

Just read through this thread and had some great laughs, Tom. Glad to see I wasn't the only screwball who destroyed all his models as a kid. Most of mine were WWII aircraft and met their demise at the expense of my Ricochet BB gun, hanging from a tree in my backyard. We had very strict rules on fireworks in Canada in the '50s so my friends and I would have to make the occasional daylight raid across the St. Clair River to Michigan. My uncle was a Customs officer at the Port Lambton ferry dock so we would trip across under the guise of buying some American chocolate bars, Mounds, Almond Joy etc. and hide the fireworks in our underwear. Those were the days of no border security and freedom of movement back and forth. I'm sure my Uncle Stu probably knew what we were up to, lol.

Probably my biggest sacrificial lamb was a large-scale PT109, motorized, with triple screws, the last of my stash. My sister and I waited for a calm day on the river, loaded it up with a string of firecrackers, lit the long fuse we had rigged up and sent it off the end of the dock. The goal was to pepper it with as many BBs as possible before all those firecrackers blew it to smithereens. It was spectacular, one explosion after another blowing bits of the deck, armament and JFK and his crew skyward. So, so politically incorrect now I know.

And that was the end of my modelling days until I picked the hobby up again a couple of years ago. Needless to say, with the cost of models now, none of my projects will suffer the same fate, at least at my hands. Maybe there will be some grandkids down the road to carry on the tradition.