Homemade Toys…the Smith Way

Welding and Forging Toys

The Smith’s were well known for their mechanical abilities. When neighbors needed help with their farm machinery, they called the Smith boys to help. Our parents expected us to entertain ourselves, and that entertainment often included welding and forging our own homemade toys in the tool shack.

We spent hours in the tool shack making homemade toys out of a big pile of scrap-iron which we called “the iron pile.” We searched through this iron pile for various things that we could use to weld into toys like our clicker dings and cranker dings. (See “The Great Gopher Hunt” to learn about our clicker dings.)

The Cranker Ding

As you might expect, a cranker ding is a toy that you crank. A cranker ding has wheel on one end (perhaps a bicycle tire) with a 6-foot long shaft, and at the end of the shaft was the crank. You could turn the crank and then the wheel would go forward or backward.

We had a great deal of fun following each other through tracks we made with our cranker dings. Sometimes we played with them when it had been rainy. We would get stuck in the mud and go back and forth with our cranker dings. We called them our “Studebakers”. 

Our Little Threshing Machine

One of our toys was a little more sophisticated.

We took a fan blade out of an old car and housed it in a wooden contraption with a pulley on one end and a place where you could feed in straw or chaff. Then, we placed a pipe out of the other end of the contraption so we could use it like a blower on the threshing machine. To turn the fan, we installed a big wheel with a crank on one end controlled by a belt and small pulleys.

The fan turned at a high rate of speed. We would throw in dirt and chaff and blow it out of the little pipe just like a threshing machine. We called it just that: “our little threshing machine.” We would crank it and throw in chaff making a little “straw pile” of our own maybe 2-3 feet high.

Our homemade threshing machine was just like a blower on a real threshing machine.

Homemade Pistol

When I was around 14 years old I made a pistol out of a truck tire valve stem. That pistol could shoot six lead shot balls with two match heads. When you pulled the trigger the match heads would ignite and shoot the pellet out the front. The pistol had such tremendous power that it could actually shoot through a ½” pine board. 

Steam Engine

Around the same time I made a steam engine out of the parts I found in the iron pile. I made my own steam valve by modifying a petcock so that it would shoot the steam to the front and behind the piston and also let exhaust steam out. To operate gasoline flow to the engine, I used a vacuum tank from an old car.

Because I had solder one end of the tank to it, I knew that this was not the safest thing to use for a steam boiler. However, it worked quite well for me.

The boiler was in the forge, and when you pumped the handle the forge would heat the boiler and the steam engine would go like you wouldn’t believe. I had a three-foot square piece of tin shielding me from a possible explosion. As expected, when it ran out of steam the temperature went up and the lid blew off this can about 50 feet into the air. Luckily the lid flew off in the opposite direction from where I was standing. 

High-wheeled Bicycle

One of my less-successful inventions was making a high-wheeled bicycle with a buggy wheel for the front wheel and a wheelbarrow wheel for the rear one. The bicycle worked but it took two people to get it started and with all my might I could barely keep it going on a level surface. As you might assume, the weight of this thing was tremendous.

It’s a miracle that we all to survived our homemade toy creations with electricity, welding, and forging.

Story by Daniel H. Smith/Edited by Susan Metoxen