Engineering Christmas Toys

[tomwalz]

I just saw the banner for Rokenbok toys here. Those toys are great.

I have been giving them to my grandson for years and he and his friends love them.

It bothers me a little bit that my grandkids aren’t messing with home made go carts and coasters or building forts or repairing things. These toys have lot of Mechanical Engineering in them.

Tom


Thomas J. Walz
Carbide Processors, Inc.

http://www.carbideprocessors.com

Good engineering starts with a Grainger Catalog.

 

[btrueblood]

My son inherited my old Erector set several Christmases ago. Most of the wheels and pulleys were long since lost, as were axles, axle connectors, fasteners, and nuts. But I still had the original motor and gearbox, and a winch with several feet of old cotton cording wound on it.

A trip to the hardware store - for fastners and (hex!) nuts, and drivers and wrenches to go with them. New nylon cord to replace the old cotton stuff. Some scrap acetal rod was turned into pulleys and wheels over several lunch hours on the toolroom lathe, and some scrap brass and steel stock made decent axles, couplers and a few other missing bits.

Most of it got combined into a roll-your-own robot that he cobbled from one of these:

http://www.electronickits.com/robot/px28832.htm?gclid=CInN_YXv6p4CFQJaagodg0r9Ug

 

[MadMango]

From what I can remember, my Erector set struts were not plated/painted like the Meccano sets, just the panels. Everything had a nice surface rust on them (humidity and salt spray in Florida).

Legos are still a good bet as well. I was playing with my son when he was 5, we'd build bridges and try to destroy them with a golf ball being bounced onto the span. It didn't take him long to understand why the joints shouldn't be aligned, and how a continuous span was better.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of these Forums?

 

[GregLocock]

The last Mindstorm robot 'we' made ended up with a parking sonar sensor, collision detection, and a rather complex exploring program. You can do a lot with the standard sensors, there are some very clever hacks around. I wish I'd bought the Vision system for it, sadly out of production.

Doubtless the new version of Mindstorms gets around many of the limitations of the old one.

My brother now has 'my' meccano. Not fair, he never looked after it when we were kids.



Cheers

Greg Locock

I rarely exceed 1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight

 

[RHTPE]

Ah yes - the joys of youth. The first memorable Christmas present I got as a kid was a truck crane with a bucket. Made in the USA out of steel, not plastic. I asked Mom for a box of macaroni and played with it for hours.

Subsequent Christmas & birthday presents were:
- American Bricks
- Lincoln logs
- a hand-me-down Erector Set (circa 1940 something) with the AC motor & gearbox
- Kenner's Girder & Panel set (for buildings) - had fun building a tower up through the Christmas tree.
- Kenner's other set with the pump base and tanks, valves, and other associated hydraulic stuff
- A bulldozer with tracks that really worked (not self-propelled though).

Never experienced Lego stuff.

Most all of my childhood was the unstructured creative stuff, especially Summer vacations:
- Exploring the woods between my house and my boyhood friend up the street.
- Building tree houses & forts.
- Spending entire days playing in the brook building dams & raceways and unknowingly learning about hydraulics (today's Inlands Wetlands would have a fit about what we did).
- Spending hours in the sand box creating roads & buildings. Made even more fun when I discovered how to add water to topsoil to make a "concrete" that I poured between boards and let the sun dry it out.

My career evolved from drafter to professional engineer - all of it in the concrete construction industry no less. Interesting how your formative years can influence your career choices. I guess I never got too far from the sandbox.

Merry Christmas all!

Ralph
Structures Consulting
Northeast USA