I had an Erector Set as well. I’m still alive.
Lordy, it’s a miracle!!
It’s fair to say that nowadays, such toys would be an absolute impossibility, not just because of the CPSC, but because the moment little Jimmy burned himself, or blew up the garage or whatever, the parents would file a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
With regard to the Atomic Energy Set, can you imagine the hysteria the media would go into? “Oh my God! It’s the al-Qaeda junior jihadi atomic bomb toy!”
I remember blowing glass using an alcohol lamp with an attachment that allowed the user to blow air into the flame and increase the temperature. Burned myself several times on hot glass. My parents reaction? “Guess you learned that hot glass will burn you.” Or words similar to those. A friend and I also made our own gunpowder. Can you imagine a 10 or 12 year old going to the neighborhood drug store now and asking for 5 lbs of salt peter? Here comes the ATF!
A ‘mail box flag’ hatchet was a must have item, even though the original owners weren't too happy about finding their mail box missing the ‘flag’.
They were made of steel back in the day, an inner-tube strip wrapped handle and a sidewalk honed edge did make a hatchet able to cut down small trees.
A variety of things could be fashioned with enough small trees. Forts and rafts were popular projects. Both required lots of rope. Area clotheslines supplied ample rope to lash together fairly large rafts, so large in fact that we soon learned that they had to be built ‘on site’.
If not we would have needed to ‘borrow’ a tractor or bulldozer to move them.
Even at a young age we knew adults would find no humor in ‘loaning’ us an item that valuable.
After a week or so, and turning several acres of wooded lake frontage into a clear-cut of brush and stumps, it was finally launch day.
Our dreams of Huck Finn like adventure were soon dashed by the fact that green log rafts with a small fort on top didn't float very well.
We were able to get it into water about chin deep of the tallest in our group before we tried climbing on and it sank to the bottom, never to rise again.
A couple days later we were setting on the bank thinking up ways to raise the raft, when we noticed lots of fish gathered over the raft. We invented the first man made fishing structure!
The rest of summer was spent making fishing poles and fishing over the raft.
And drank water from a hose, played mumbly peg with my pocket knife, baked potatoes under an open fire in the field, rode my bike without a helmet and snuck a smoke or three behind a billboard. Not to mention successfully burning designs with my wood burning kit and playing sports without adult supervision. I'm still here in my 80th decade. So there!