Dangerous Toys - Gas Powered Pogo Stick from 1960's

hey guys backyard scientist here and i have been pretty busy lately i've been working on this musical tesla coil i finally finished renovating the bathroom after i destroyed it eight months ago i became a disney princess then i committed a war crime against a yellow jacket that's for stinging my girlfriend [Music] so i know you guys liked the video where we made our own toys extra dangerous [Music] but i was thinking what about toys that were already originally so dangerous on their own that they got pulled off the shelf i mean everybody's heard of lawn darts before but did you know that it took over 28 years for them to pull it off the shelf but have you heard of the water wiggle this toy was invented in the early 1960s and pulled off the shelves after only 17 years so by that logic it must be more dangerous than lawn darts let's take a look the sun is getting hotter look at that some water what's this crazy so to find out how dangerous this toy actually is i found the original patent and i reverse engineered it and 3d printed a nozzle from the design you can see that it's angled this way so it'll shoot the hose up with the water pressure and it's also angled to the side so it'll shoot and spin at the same time and create all these crazy movements so all i gotta do is attach it to a flexible hose like this and put a cap on top and it'll go crazy and i don't know it seems like a pretty cool toy i don't see what the big deal is getting hotter look is that some water what's the crazy thing okay maybe i miscalculated this toy actually isn't as cool as i thought it was gonna be and maybe it is even a little dangerous and not even the fun kind of dangerous now speaking of the fun kind of dangerous let me introduce you to a toy called the swing wing it was also invented in the 1960s this seemingly safe toy was basically a skippet that kids would wear on their heads swinging it around head banging and giving themselves brain damage i made my own version of this toy and it may seem safe but upon closer inspection it's actually a machete bolted to a hard hat okay so this toy may have given me a slight concussion i see where they're coming from with banning this toy but don't worry i can't get brain damage i'm immune i've already had it from reading all of your comments on my youtube page i was looking for more dangerous toys online and then i saw it my holy grail i had to have it but it's nearly impossible to get i am talking about of course the legendary hop rod motorized pogo stick sold for only one year from the big 1961-1962 is here it's the hop rod the world's first powerized pogo stick that's right a newly designed gasoline engine powers the hop rod and fires you back up every time you come down one year so that must mean that this is the most epic dangerous toy to ever have existed i have to have one but like i said they are super hard to find they're very rare maybe one goes for sale per year on ebay and it sells for thousands of dollars so i might not be able to find a hot rod but i can build one i found the original patents online for the machine actually i found two different patents by two different people each slightly different so between both of those i might be able to make my own working one so i've been up all night studying the patents and this is what i've came up with my own version of the hop rod and how it works super simple just like a car engine you have a piston that travels up and down inside of the cylinder fuel and air get injected into the cylinder the piston compresses it the spark plug ignites it and it pushes the piston down and it pushes you up into the air so we got to work welding it together and this is what i have this is my mad max version of the hop rod pogo stick i still need to figure out how to get it to fire but it does jump i can jump on it so far so good right but the problem is i just can't figure out how to trigger it i'm either thinking limit switches or a hall effect sensor on the shaft or something like that it sat alone in the corner of my garage rusting away until something amazing happened a hop rod appeared on ebay screw this thing i'm getting the real oh no it shot up to 3 000 and i was out bid well back to the drawing but hold on there all hope is not lost i found someone on youtube with two hot rods and he agreed to sell me one of his so big thank you to pete for selling me a hop rod now i can break all of my bones in new and exciting ways we got it this is the pogo stick the first thing i noticed is the uh the box is pretty light oh look at there it is it's it's actually kind of smaller than i thought it would be here we go the hop rod pogo stick it's in pretty good condition like the label still looks nice the paint is nice i thought this was metal but this is plastic up top i'm debating whether i should take it apart and kind of pull it apart and you know see what everything looks like and maybe give it a little tune-up or just uh put some gas in and send it i say we put some gas in and send it all right time to mix up some gasoline oh my god add it to the gas tank below the carburetor and add eight c batteries to power the spark plug okay i'm kind of nervous about this let's try it oh it worked oh it hurt my ankle oh i wasn't ready for that wow man that kind of hurt i like sprained my ankle right there wow this sucks i don't light i mean i feel like it's going off at the wrong time it's weird the timing is unsettling well we tried it over and over practicing and practicing until we could hop on the hot rod without hopping off right away it took about 20 minutes for us to learn how to ride it and keep our balance but after that easy well look at this i'm bleeding on both of my ankles there and there because if this thing's at an angle when it goes off it's just gonna like knock you right in the ankle so i think i figured out why we were having so much trouble jumping on this and the reason is it's not a normal pogo stick but we were treating it like a normal pogo stick because in a normal pogo stick you kind of jump up with it when it's on the ground to push yourself back up but with this you can't do that because it can jump up faster than you can and if you're not ready for it it'll practically break your ankles even when you are ready for it the kick from the piston can be pretty strong but the question is can we make it stronger so the original one had its own fuel called like pogo or something weird like that and everybody has a different idea of what was actually in it some people said it was castor oil and alcohol some people said it was gasoline some people said it was white gas so i have no idea what the actual fuel for this is supposed to be to solve this mystery i'm testing different fuels to see which one works the best i tried mineral spirits naphtha alcohol 20 nitro methane and i've got to say the best one is definitely naphtha that okay that works good i wonder if we got an actual reading for this oh my god oh my god that's scary from the footage you can see the naps that seem to be twice as powerful almost reaching 12 inches maybe even too powerful okay ouch i want to show you how this works because it's actually a really cool design so inside of this is a piston that moves up and down like a car and when i push down on it you can actually see the piston so what happens when you jump on this is the piston goes up to the top of the cylinder and then underneath the cylinder it sucks in gas through this carburetor hole right here you can actually see this happening right here on the slow motion so when you jump on this and the piston goes up two things happen at once it's compressing the gas mixture on top of the piston and it's sucking in new fuel through the little hole at the bottom of the piston then once the piston ignites and gets forced downwards two things happen first the exhaust travels out through the exhaust port and then as the piston is lowering it's compressing the fuel below the piston which gets forced out through the piston through a valve in the piston back up into the cylinder so every time you jump on it there's fresh gas mixture in the cylinder and it fires every time oh yeah and the spark plug is actually a spring that's connected to the batteries and it physically touches the piston at the top making a spark and setting off the gas mixture i just thought that's pretty cool i have figured out why all of these are in such good condition despite being 60 years old they're all really nice and new it's because people wrote them once broke a leg or something and threw it in the closet until it went up for sale on ebay again in 60 years and it's not just this toy it's all the toys from the 60s we've talked about today they all beat you up when you play with them and i think i know what's going on with the people in that generation too they all have some sort of mild brain but let's take a break from all the hopping around because i don't 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use code backyard14 for 14 free meals plus free shipping again use code backyard14 for 14 free meals alright guys that's the end of this video i hope you enjoyed it if i ever get my own version of the hop rod working i'll post a video about it but for now this thing will do just fine

Channel: TheBackyardScientist

Views: 2,258,899

Rating: 4.9384575 out of 5

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Id: iyM0rkoO-XI

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021