Gathering and recycling your aluminum cans is great for the environment, but not so much fun. YouTuber Grant Thompson, also known as The King of Random, experimented with more than 10 prototypes to come up with a simple, inexpensive (and super-duper dangerous) backyard foundry. He uses it to melt soda cans into make aluminum ingot, which he then pours into a sand mold to create a cool cast aluminum toy.

The foundry is composed of sand, plaster, and a galvanized steel bucket. It can be used the same day you make it, and all told the project will cost around $20. When it isn’t being used, it can be cleverly disguised as a flowerpot on your patio. Thompson plans to release a tutorial showing how to make the foundry.

In the meantime, this video shows the foundry in action melting soda cans like they’re ice cubes. Seeing the process in action is inspiring for extreme DIYers who want to make impressive things at home but want a slightly more hands-on approach than 3D printing. Thompson points out that aluminum cans are easy to use and readily available, but they’re one of the worst sources of aluminum to cast with. Major safety precautions should be taken if you’re planning to try building your own backyard soda can foundry.

The post Too Hot to Handle: Backyard Foundry Melts Cans in Seconds first appeared on Gajitz.

You’ll hear a lot of noise from people who say that today’s parents are too protective of their kids, and maybe that’s true – but it’s probably just because the parents of yesteryear didn’t seem to ever give a thought to their kids’ welfare. That is, if these “toys” from the first part of the 20th century are accurate depictions of how concerned parents were with safety. These three vintage toys were all produced by the Gilbert Company, the very same “toy” maker who gave the world the astonishingly dangerous Atomic Energy Lab.

Metal Casting Set

The Metal Casting Set gave boys (it was a hundred years ago – girls weren’t really expected to be interested in toys that didn’t involve cooking or cleaning) the ability to melt down lead and play with actual molten metal. The kit came with a melting pot, molds to make little metal figures, and lots of metal for small children to melt in their own homes.

Despite the obvious and almost unbelievable level of danger represented with this toy, it might have been kind of fun to live in an era when this sort of things was allowed to exist. The company produced over 50 molds that you could buy as accessories to the casting set, letting you produce an entire metal figuring army complete with weapons and ships.

Gilbert Chemistry Outfit

Endorsed by Superman himself, the Gilbert chemistry sets went through several iterations through the years. But they all had one pretty important thing in common: they included ridiculously dangerous materials. Things like hydrochloric acid, potassium nitrate, and formaldehyde were not only sold with a children’s toy; they were considered to be chemicals everyone had “about the house.”

Doing chemistry experiments at home might actually have led to a generation of great scientific minds. But having a set of chemicals like this in your home today would pretty much guarantee you’d be arrested and put on the NSA’s watch list.

Glassblowing Set

This is far and away our favorite. Sit a kid down with some glass, a tube, and an open flame and just let him go ahead and make something awesome. Setting aside the potential for permanent scarring, blinding, and just overall long-lasting suffering, it would genuinely have been fun to have a set like this as a kid.

The glassblowing set, and indeed all of the Gilbert science kits, taught the fundamentals of science along with letting kids do quite dangerous experiments on their own. Maybe it was this blind trust that instilled a sense of responsibility in past generations of kids. Or maybe those scarred-for-life kids grew up to make laws that prevented other kids from playing with molten lead, hydrochloric acid, and melted glass.

(via: Jitterbuzz)

The post 3 Ridiculously Dangerous Vintage Toys of the 20th Century first appeared on Gajitz.