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Tonka Clutch-Poppers are the correct answer to the question "what is the best goddamn toy ever invented by humans?" I keep these two at work to remind me that I could be out playing but I need to provide food and shelter for my family! http://imgur.com/MulXEsT http://imgur.com/I9COi8m Clutch-Poppers are steel Tonka cars with inertial flywheel engines, you load the fly-wheel by revving the car forward and then there's a button on top (the clutch) which engages the fly-wheel with the gears when pressed. Rev them up a little and they drive across the living room. Rev them up a lot and let them have some traction and you can knock out someones teeth with them or plant one in the drywall. There are a LOT of Clutch-Poppers and Tonka screwed around with the design resulting in several sizes of inertial fly-wheel engines for vehicles. These particular cars are heavy (around a pound anyway) and can go very, very fast once you grease up the flywheel roughen the tires (rubber) and run them on smooth cement. These particular flywheel bearings are metal on metal which will wear down but the bigger engines have brass or bronze bearings and a steel fly-wheel that's bigger and heavier than a silver dollar (an old silver dollar). I have a truck (not on hand) with one of those engines, it's geared way, way low but I can rev it up to a whole lot of RPMs and send it about half the length of my block. They also went small and built cars that would fit in a kids belt buckle. They have TINY fly-wheels but they can still race across a table once you've removed the 1980's grease and replaced it with modern grease. Also 4x4 versions with a high and low gearing, amazing cars but almost all of them are wrecked these days. The big engines were also used in 1 1/2 foot long dragsters that do wheelies and make a WHOLE lot of noise. I haven't quite worked out how to shut them up but I will one of these days. These suckers have a plastic body though so when they crash they can fragment everywhere! Anyway when I was a kid I had one of the ones about 1/3 the size of the ones above, it ran well and I used it until the fly-wheel was just rattling around in the frame and it wouldn't go anymore. A few years ago it occurred to me that there might be some on eBay and low and behold there are now about 40 or them resting comfortably on a shelf in my garage. I'm pretty sure I have one of every model made at this point. I've repaired the ones that can be repaired and learned just about every way they can fail too. Other than the fact that these things will break your fingers and smash up the house, they are amazing and I have no idea why nobody is making flywheel powered toys these days. I should really mount a tiny generator on the flywheel and power some LED headlights and poo poo, that would be cool! If you want them it's a crapshoot on eBay, "Tonka" and "clutch" should pull up several pages worth (clutch puncher, clutch popper and some other names all use the same tech) but then you have to figure out which ones you can fix. "In the box" means that someone has found yet another stock in a warehouse and let them go for cheap. These cars will likely not work (because the fly-wheel grease is gone) but you can tear them down, grease them and they're as good as new. You'll see a lot for $40 which is too drat much by far - that's a collector selling them for profit. You want to find the dude that had them in a box for the last three decades, kept good care of them as a kid and wants to unload them. If you ask "does it work" they will likely respond "it makes a race car noise when I rev it up" which means, say it with me this time, that the fly-wheel is dry and vibrating all over the place. The seller will also say that nothing happens when you "press the button" for the same reason, the vibrating wheel won't engage right so it won't go. This guy will sell you the car for $8 + shipping and you will probably have an awesome car to play with after you lube it! When a seller says "turbo sound" it's either a model that had that written on the box or the seller revved it up and heard the engine whine like hell and stopped messing with it. There is a downside though, about 1/6th of them on eBay are beyond repair, kids played with them to death and simply wore the gears to nubs or wasted the bearing surfaces, these will be a loss. If you buy one of the 4x4 versions you will likely be sad, flywheel death rate for these beauties is more like 75%+. Same engine, WAY more play time 30 years ago! Lastly you'll need a small torx screwdriver to get it open, remember that in the 80's torx was "security" since there simply weren't a lot of them available so you need one. One screw depending on the model, sometimes three. The big truck has like 12 or something. If you ever buy one and have a problem with it give me a PM and I'm happy to share my experiences!
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Dec 26, 2016 23:07
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:57 |
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