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Why are there no more toys like this anymore? As a kid I had all this stuff, Erector sets/Lego/Lincoln logs/etc and how I ended up as an Engineer and maker.
Probably some health and safety issues/lawsuits. Like how you don’t see chemistry sets or lawn darts around.
Lawyers ruin all the fun in life.
And your 100% without research, some kid probably was not using it as intended and burned a house down. And no fun for us.
You can make one of these w/ a vacuum, vacuum box, and your oven.
Not lawyers. Idiot parents who don’t parent and then are shocked when their kid drank the chemistry set are to blame. Stupid people doing dumb things.
But the idiot parents hire a lawyer, ipso facto its lawyers are the issue. Dummy parents got the ball rolling and james sokolov and affiliates ruin the world.
I should have gone to school to be lawyer, its bullshit I can’t test out like you could years ago.
When I was a kid we threw lawn darts over the house back and forth from front yard to back yard, what could go wrong? Gotta stay aware
Same reason playgrounds aren’t fun anymore. A lot of parents don’t want their kids taking risks and the other parents aren’t actually parenting their kids.
So we are “ruled” by the lazy and incompetent, a nanny state… This will end “well”.
I mean, it’s not currently going well 🤣🤣😭 but yeah, I don’t have the link but there’s a study about kids being able to take risks and brain and social development. The short version, kids who aren’t allowed to take risks never learn and never try. Kids who are allowed to, learn how, learn how to fail, and learn how to overcome that failure.
Exactly, I have always been a risk taker and 70% of the time it works out every time (joking).
I know why I’m a risk taker, I was a free range kid. We built forts, we made things that go boom*, dirt bikes/4 wheelers, RC cars, etc. All shit that makes you think and learn. No internet, library and your older friends/adults.
*Well until one kid blew himself up a town over. Always clean the threads and teflon tape them. You don’t need a tighten the end caps. It blows thru the sides. Or so I’m told.
Yeah we would go camping in the summer so it was “come back for meals and sleep otherwise get the fuck out.” So we learned a lot on our own. At home though my Mom was more of a helicopter parent. I can see both the anxiety and risk taking in my life based on things I did as a kid lol.
Yeah mom was (and still is and I’m in my 50s) still hovering a bit. I try not to complain but you know how it is.
Summer were that way, wake up. Eat a fast breakfast and kicked out of the house. We assembled the BMX bike gang and started raising hell. Over to Brians house to check out the latest porn mags his dad hid in the garage and we found. Hustler was my favorite. Then to the railroad tracks to mash pennies or throw rocks at the train (yeah we are retarded). Then get into fights with the older kids or the next neighborhood.
Summer weekdays we were allowed in our house to watch Force Five and Starblazers. We had the biggest TV so it was a default location for this and boxing matches. Saturdays we were allowed to watch “Creature Double Feature” I love Godzilla!
Then we got a bit of hair on our peaches and it was all girls.
Yeah kinda similar with us. We went camping in a place where you saw the same people often so we all rode bikes and raised hell together lol. At home the only cool thing we had was we were the house with the racecar in the garage so all the neighborhood kids wanted to hang out. You know, until my dad stated yelling at everyone to shut the fuck up 🤣
Oh wait that last bit still happens except for a few years it was in my garage so I got to tell him off. But he’s still way career at that shit than we are so you only push the old man so far lol.
The one I had that squished and un squished bugs used heat, and it was a dangerous heat. I think safety measures were a big reason for a lot of these things.
Edit: found it.
It was called The Strange Change Machine
[https://youtu.be/-vVRyo3ZGcY?s](https://youtu.be/-vVRyo3ZGcY
The world is a dangerous place, you can’t wrap everything in bubble wrap to save the children. Getting burned teaches you lessons. Shit I electrocuted myself more than once as a kid. Now I have a very health respect of high voltage and capacitors that will kill me.
I agree, just saying what it was like in the 60’s. A lot of toys that were considered dangerous poofed off the shelves by the 70’s.
I remember “creepy crawlers” which seemed to be the answer to the question “how do we sell an easy bake oven to boys?” It was a lightbulb in a plastic box, some pot metal molds, and some squeeze bottles of colored goo. Squirt the goo into the molds, bake it in the oven, and then you’d have little rubber bugs! Minutes of entertainment.
I had one of those vacuforming toys, it was kind of sold as a make your own matchbox cars kit. It was a lot of work for a pretty shitty matchbox car.
Those toys got proper hot, and they had metal parts that could blister a kid’s finger if used incorrectly. The toys that taught me that sense of “don’t touch the blurry part of a running power tool” are basically banned now because the moms that gave their kids asthma and peanut allergies by keeping them in a sterile bubble until prom night sued them out of production.
Cause making a death looking badge that says “Spook!” On it might not go over so well.
Yes, I miss Lego.its a pity its not made any more and not popular. (Lego sales are higher than Mattel and Hasbro comhined)
I’m going to sound old here, but Lego isn’t Lego anymore. Rather than selling bricks and objects that could be creatively combined, a glance at their contemporary lineup shows mostly kits that have a pre-defined build path. Even the nominally engineering-focused Technic line (for example, compare a vintage Technic set, e.g. https://www.brickeconomy.com/set/8860-1/lego-technic-car-chassis which had a huge number of connection points and opportunities for customization with the current Technic line, https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/technic , with little to no extensibility and almost exclusively custom formed pieces with few to no points visible).
Wut? I was talking about toys that make engineers at no point did I say that Lego or the rest were not made anymore. I was talking about this specific toy as its awesome to learn how to vacuum mold.
There are still Erector sets, they are sold under the name Meccano. I made my 1st wire suspension bridge w/ an erector set when I was 10. Fond memories.
"Why are there no more toys made like this anymore? "
Troll, ok have fun playing with yourself.
It’s like a precursor to the3d printer movement (by a few decades)
Those were really cool, too. I can’t remember which grandparent had them, they only brought them out once. I guess we were not impressed enough
I actually want something like that today, though the price tends to be kinda high for my poor wallet
Adam Savage DIY’d his vacuum forming machine. There are several videos on the topic and I’m not sure which one has the best description/instructions, but I’m guessing maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTy8tsZzT_Q ?
It’s not actually all that complicated: just a frame to hold the plastic sheet, a table with holes in it hooked up to a vacuum pump, and a heating coil.
I had something similar except for that they were cubes and you would heat them up and they would turn into critters and stuff and then you would squish them back again. Rinse repeat. After a while they never squished back together again.
Because eventually all the thermally activated plasticizers in the bugs would have evaporated and entered your lungs.
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I had one of those in the 90’s.
I’m 54, and that looks dope as fuck! Where are things like that nowadays?!
on Temu mostly
