Down memory lane for fun

[John1955]

Admit it, you blew up models a few times using firecrackers when you were a kid, didn't you? My brothers and I sure did, they used to sell these at the Grant's store here and amazingly, anyone could buy them. Usually the ones we blew up were cheap ones from not so good brands (Pyro, Palmer, etc) and we hated the way they turned out after building them. 

I recall Palmer models - 1963 Corvette, 1966 Mustang, 1965 Galaxie. And Pyro models - 1937 Cord, a VW bus and I forget what else. Unfortunately, I also recall my older brother blowing up a Jo-Han 1964 Chrysler 300 and an AMT 1962 Galaxie because he had messed up the paint job on them.

Can you remember any models you blew up when you were a kid? 
 

[CapSat 6]

I bought a box of MPC Dodge Monaco Cop Cars at the NNL East several years back. There was one 2-door "Force 440" build in there. Firecrackered. I was still able to salvage a few things from that one, but the roof was blown off at the "a" pillars, and the roof and interior tub were a bit melted. 

I did firecracker a few when I was a kid (MPC kits! ). I remember blowing up an MPC '72 Chevelle (reissue), and a '78 Dodge Pickup. We had a side door in our house that had an inner and outer door that were about 16" apart. I would set the model on the floor inside the two doors, stick the firecracker in it, light it, and close the door. This would keep the noise down to an inconspicuous level (I was a city kid), and contain all of the shrapnel. I would open the door to a twisted body and scattered parts... 

[CapSat 6]

3 hours ago, John1955 said:

Admit it, you blew up models a few times using firecrackers when you were a kid, didn't you? My brothers and I sure did, they used to sell these at the Grant's store here and amazingly, anyone could buy them. Usually the ones we blew up were cheap ones from not so good brands (Pyro, Palmer, etc) and we hated the way they turned out after building them. 

Dude- that's not a firecracker. I think that's an M-80!

[Snake45]

I have never blown up, set fire to, shot, flung against the wall, stomped on, or otherwise deliberately destroyed any model in over six decades of building. 

[alan barton]

Yeah, I'm with you Snake.  Not to say that blowing one up wouldn't have been great fun but money was hard to come by when I was a kid and it usually took a month or more to save up for a kit , or paint and glue.  To this day I am still working with parts that I got back in primary school or high school, so it must have paid off.  I think about the most destructive thing I ever did as a kid was throw rocks at bottles at the rubbish tip when we accompanied Dad to dump garden rubbish or whatever.  

But like I said, it sounds like fun.  Maybe if I found a totally destroyed, glued bombed, paint burned monstrosity at a yard, I could contemplate it but fireworks are banned in Australia so it is a moot point anyway!

Cheers

Alan

[doorsovdoon]

I never blew up any models as a kid but I did destroy a few die cast cars with my friends. Setting them on fire, bending them up and such and imagining we were the rescue crew saving the occupants, Lol. Sounds like Hero Syndrome! xD 

[GLMFAA1]

Us old kids that grew up in Northeast Ohio were influenced by a late night TV horror movie host known as 'Ghoulardi'

He broadcast blowing up models that were sent to him.

Had to see if it was the same in living color as opposed to the B&W boob tube.

Ya I lost a couple of models.

greg 

[iamsuperdan]

We definitely did back in the day. A buddy and I built all the time. And if a model rolled off a shelf once too often, and had too many broken wheels or missing parts or whatever, then it was time for some destruction.

We spent a lot of time staging the whole thing. We'd heat up fenders with lighters and then "dent" them, making them look like they were in an accident. We'd then position them in the middle of a driveway, or garage floor. We'd actually put gas in those black plastic film canisters or whatever and put them roughly where a gas tank would be. Semi trucks were the BEST for blowing up! We'd add match heads under the hood or whatever. We would even put action figures in there, although even back then, I could never destroy my Star Wars figures.

Then we'd light 'em up and watch the destruction.  

 

Yeah, in hindsight, we destroyed a lot of kits that would today be considered valuable. But we were 10, we had no sentimentality about stuff yet, and we were having fun. 

[Tom Geiger]

I grew up as a US Army brat and lived in places like Turkey and Germany. American model cars were hard to come by, so I built, rebuilt, then used them for parts on my newest model-of-all-models!

There were incidents, living in Germany firecrackers and even M-80s were openly for sale. The models that got destroyed were mostly Airfix military models as they were sold at the post exchange on post.

The only incident I remember in detail involved my spoiled friend Henry. He had received a new Cox airplane as a gift, and within a half hour had crashed and busted it. Being mad at it, and having a full can of Cox fuel, he decided to burn the plane. I was an observer.

He put the plane in the sandbox, poured some fuel into the fuselage and dropped in a match... nothing! He did this a few more times with similar results. Then he decided it needed a lot more fuel. As he was pouring a previously lit match caught and the whole thing exploded!

Boom!  Big ball of fire and Henry did a somersault backwards. He was quite shaken! Then we kids noticed he had burned off his eyebrows!  He had a big round face and I exclaimed that he looked like Peter Rabbit!

We called him Peter Rabbit for some time!

[slusher]

I had to cut grass and shovel snow for stuff like models so I destroyed them in learning to build but never blowed up any models..

[misterNNL]

I remember a guy in my neighborhood that would take the time to build balsa wood models of Piper Cub airplanes that were rubber band powered and actually flew very well. This was in the 1940's. he would tape a fire cracker under them and have them explode in mid air much to my horror. I was struggling just to build them without leaving my fingers permanently attached so building them and intentionally blowing them up was unimaginable to me. ad me to the list of those who never destroyed anything I have built. 

[larry ray]

1 hour ago, slusher said:

I had to cut grass and shovel snow for stuff like models so I destroyed them in learning to build but never blowed up any models..

I agree with Slusher. Although I did get some parts from a guy once he said  he caught his kids going out with models and fire crackers and stopped them. Later I looked at the parts, Some had blacken  and melted edges.

[bbowser]

Ah yes M-80s, supposedly a 1/4 stick of dynamite.  I don't recall blowing any cars but once my dad let me blow up a B-17 on the 4th of July on the condition that I pick up all the pieces.  Of course I agreed (I was probably 10-12).  I put it up in the air on the backyard clothesline and lit the fuse!  BAM!  Spent the rest of the afternoon searching the yard for bits and pieces, the wings basically stayed intact, it was only the fuselage that took it hard.  I then took on the project of glueing it back together like a plastic jigsaw puzzle.  It actually only had a couple of small holes when I got done.  Those were the days.

[cobraman]

Sorry to say I blew up more than I can remember. I probably destroyed the same amount with my BB and pellet guns. Stupid !

[Tom Geiger]

2 hours ago, slusher said:

I had to cut grass and shovel snow for stuff like models so I destroyed them in learning to build but never blowed up any models..

I was taught by my father to work for my money by my dad early on. It  set me up well for life, so I instilled the same values n my daughters and they both are frugal adults who own their own homes today!

As I posted earlier that during my modeling years I lived on a US Army post in Germany. Models came to me either via gifts from stateside grandparents or from the Autoworld catalog.

I mowed the lawns in our housing area and washed cars for a dollar each. I had my well worn Autoworld catalog book marked and since I had already used the order forms, I had future orders all hand written out on loose leaf paper.

Each time I reached the goal of one of the order totals, I’d give my cash to my father to write a check and mail in the order.

It took 60-90 days to receive the boat shipped orders. I believe I had several orders in progress a month or so apart.

Every day on my way home from school, I’d walk part my father’s unit and inquire if I had a package. The soldiers there were quite accustomed to telling me “No Thomas, no package for you today.”  Every so often one arrived and it was a happy event!  They’d buzz me in and I’d open the package there because the young GIs were interested to see what I got!  

On occasion my father, as much as I got a tongue lashing about the attention I paid to my models vs school work, would sneak a kit into my order.  And Autoworld always included extras like a sheet of their decals or license plates. I thought they did it because I was a special customer from Germany, but later learned everyone got them!

Those were the days!

[Modelbuilder Mark]

I was not a firecracker user, but my neighborhood model builders build real Smash-up Derby cars. While there were restrictions, you essentially glued everything in place using only model glue and sprue as solid as you could, but you could not put bars over the wheels for example. Then once completed, we would take turns going to different kids houses and on a smooth surface, sit about 10 feet apart and 5-6 kids at a time would on the count of three slide the cars into the center of the floor to collide. This would be repeated until cars were "knocked out" which happened when either both front wheels, back wheels, or both wheels on one side fell off (If you had a right front wheel and a left drive wheel, our childhood logic said it would still "go"), or the engine fell out, or the steering wheel came out. This was great fun.  

[Tabbysdaddy]

I've been wanting to build one so that I can firecracker it. Because it's been a while.

[Ace-Garageguy]

8 hours ago, Snake45 said:

I have never blown up, set fire to, shot, flung against the wall, stomped on, or otherwise deliberately destroyed any model in over six decades of building. 

Ditto. Mindless destruction just never had any appeal for me. None whatsoever.

[Tabbysdaddy]

Mindful destruction is cool though. 

[John1955]

18 hours ago, CapSat 6 said:

Dude- that's not a firecracker. I think that's an M-80!

LOL, yes I know! We used those little ones sometimes, but also M-80's a couple times. 

[John1955]

12 hours ago, Tom Geiger said:

I was taught by my father to work for my money by my dad early on. It  set me up well for life, so I instilled the same values n my daughters and they both are frugal adults who own their own homes today!

Each time I reached the goal of one of the order totals, I’d give my cash to my father to write a check and mail in the order.

I was taught the same thing and I did work for money when I was a kid. I am very frugal today and own my own home, I am probably more frugal than you are. I don't own a smartphone or ANY mobile phone or device, and I refuse to pay for cable TV or satellite TV and watch FREE over the air TV and listen to FREE over the air radio on actual RADIOS. I still use the same Corelle dishes that I bought 40 years ago. 

My brothers and I received ZERO allowances unless we worked for them. We cut grass, we shoveled snow from sidewalks, washed cars, anything to get money. We knew about Auto World and had a few catalogs, but they charged full retail price for kits and we were too frugal to pay that much, instead we bought heavily discounted kits at Kmart, Grant's and other stores. 

As kids, we were also taught how to handle our own money. We were a blue collar moderate income family, my father was a truck driver and mom was a full time wife and mom. I did not mean to imply that we kids routinely blew up models daily but we did do that sometimes for fun. And it WAS fun (as long as our parents didn't find out). As an adult, I've even gone over the speed limit a few times on the highway. 
 

[CapSat 6]

I paid for the majority of my stuff and generally I kept it in very good order (I still have lots of artifacts from those days), but I still think most teenagers go through a destructive phase. I didn't blow up model cars with any regularity, I think I blew up maybe 3 total, and the novelty kind of wore off. I still have built models and parts from when I was about 11 or 12, and I have rebuilt a few of those from back then.

Since I paid for the fireworks (my parents sure as heck didn't buy them for me as they would have just about had a conniption if they knew I had them), I'm pretty sure I wanted to do more with them than light them and laugh, so something had to be blown up. 

I think the thought process was: that I couldn't blow up somebody else's stuff, so I had to use something of my own. At least I was respectful of other peoples' things. I knew a lot of kids who weren't.

I think model cars make a natural target, because they're a little fragile to begin with. My guess is that if you wanted to blow up actual toy cars (plastic or metal) with regular fireworks, you would not get reliable results. You would practically have to use M-80's on regular toys, and my recollections are that M-80's were pricy, rare, and somewhat dangerous. 

I think some friends of mine got an M-80 just one time, and we lit it off in the woods. I think we might have piled wood on top of it or something before we set it off. I think I remember that it left a crater where we set it off, and that we were showered with dirt and debris.

I did know other kids growing up who regularly broke all of their stuff, which did bother me back then. I have a cousin who was the opposite- he had the factory packaging for every toy he ever got, and each toy he had was packed up in the matching box immediately after he used it.

He had a set of "Classy Crashers" (Kenner SSP Smash Up Derby Cars- approx. 1/24 scale - a Lincoln and a Rolls) which I always wanted to play with whenever I went to his house.       

  

  

[Ace-Garageguy]

16 hours ago, Tabbysdaddy said:

Mindful destruction is cool though. 

 

Maybe you should start a thread on "the Zen of blowing things up".

 

Edited April 21, 2021 by Ace-Garageguy

[Reegs]

"Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and blowing things up." How American can ya get? Sometimes I wish I was older; maybe I could have been at the Castle Bravo test shot ("One minute the island was there, the next - Blooey! Nothing!). I remember that one 4th of July when my Dad and my Uncle George used my Marx Cape Canaveral set for their own space program. Some of the rockets launched, most blew up on the pad (cheap plastic). I should have been upset (Hey! That's my stuff! but I was havin' too much fun myself.

Edited April 21, 2021 by Reegs

[Tabbysdaddy]

27 minutes ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

 

Maybe you should start a thread on "the Zen of blowing things up".

 

I think that's what this thread is for.