For the OLD Furts....remember?

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I had a cap shooting M3 grease gun replica. It shot roll caps. You wound it up, I think it shot faster than the real thing.
A birthday present from my brother who was in the Army in the late 50's.

My dad got me a rocket than was powered by air pressure, on top of a water filler. You pumped it up with a tire pump, hit the release. It went up maybe 200 feet, then lowered itself on a small parachute. Modeled on a V2 rocket. I don't think it would be considered safe enough for kids now.
 
A friend of mine had one of those 'Grease Guns' around the same time, sent to him by a relative in the 'States. He also had a Thompson SMG, about 2/3rd the size of the real thing, I think made by Matel in the USA. Pull the bolt back, squeeze the trigger, and the 'action' went forward on a ratchet, making a firing sound.
The rest of us kids had 'Sten' guns made from a length of broom handle with a nail for the barrel, so boy, were we envious of his guns !!!
 
I had a Thompson like that! was the first gun I remember having. had a front pistol grip and a drum mag ( which was actually the speaker device ). you pulled the charging handle on the side back and when you pulled the trigger it made a "eh, eh, eh, eh" like sound.

I also had a water air rocket. you clipped it onto a small pump after filling the rocket to a certain point. you pumped it up and pulled the release...it went up maybe 10 or so feet.

we had those parachuters.....airborne solder you learned to wrap up the chute then tossed him in the air. its amazing how much time we spent with these...and them making chutes and attaching them to different stuff.
 
Yep, I remember those. There was an American show on British TV, called 'Skydivers', or something similar, around the same time that 'Whirleybirds" was also showing (with Bell 47 choppers). This would be around 1962 to '63 I think.
About four of five of us kids were mad keen on the parachuting bit, and we made a cage attached to balloons, with a long, thin cord attached to a trap door in the bottom, above which was a doll, with one of our home made, static line parachutes attached (made from the fabric from a golf umbrella).
When the (tethered) balloon got to the right height, one of us would pull the cord, the trap door would open, and out tumbled the doll, with the parachute streaming behind it, to land sometimes a quarter mile away !
We also got a hold of what was probably a drogue 'chute, and we'd take it in turns to run along the flat roof of a sports changing room building in the local park, inflating the 'chute, then jump off, to land ten feet below, after a slight drift !
The experience must have stuck, as not many years later, I ended up doing it for real, and continued with sport parachuting, after the military stuff, until the mid 1990s !
 
I had several Heathkit projects, like the digital alarm clock, the AM radio (with Delco can-type transistors) and we even built a console television set.

The RadioShack kits were good, too - one of my most memorable projects, was the FM transmitter...I even did my own "radio station" during my 8th and 9th grade years and it had a pretty good broadcast radius, quite a few friends used to tune into it in the evenings for the "radio show".
 
In the mountains you didn't just mount the antenna on the roof or the closest high tree.
Our antenna was about 1/4 mile away, on a mountain top, in a tree behind the house. Had the railroad track type of wire to the antenna.
If a branch blew off a tree, and laid across those wires, it'd weakened the signal, or break the wire. So after a storm, me or dad would be walking the wire.

Then if a strong wind blew the antenna around, it'd take the whole family to set up a shouting relay to fine tune the antenna.
And this was all for 1 channel.
 



I would have been delighted to see the gaze of the boy staring at one of these, just identical to my Father's one… and still seen on our roads.



 
Elmas said:
I would have been delighted to see the gaze of the boy staring at one of these, just identical to my Father's one… and still seen on our roads.



Click to expand...
Those certainly seemed to be popular little cars - they could be spotted everywhere in the background of a movie or TV show like "The Saint" or "I Spy"!

I recall our neighbor across the street had a red Dauphine and was perhaps my first experience with a French word. I was mystified when Mom explained to me that the word Renault was pronounced "Ray-No". I'm also sure that many American service atation attendants were just as mystified about the engine location in it, too!

Here's a photo of a 1964 Dauphine that is identical to the one he owned:

 
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