Hi All,

I have made two previous posts on this forum. The first one was about some stuff called Styrospray that can be sprayed or brushed onto various kinds of plastic foam to provide them with hard waterproof coatings. The second one was about the bread and butter method for using a series of lifts to construct hulls for model boats.
This post is to ask if any of the members who own Phlatprinters might be interested in manufacturing pop-pop boats made of waterproofed foam, instead of the tinplate used to produce imported pop-pop boats.
I am one of four co-owners of the Yahoo discussion group pop-pop steamboats. One of our members is a major distributor of imported pop-pop boats. If you go to his website at http://www.buzzboats.com/poppop.htm you will see a warning that his boats are not sold for use as toys. There is also a recall notice regarding several models produced by one of the two pop-pop boat manufacturers in New Delhi, India. The warning and the recall notice are rather alarming because the original intent of companies that made pop-pop boats was to sell them as toys.
I played with pop-pop boats before WW2 when they were probably the favorite toys for small boys. They had sharp edges and paint that contained lead. Nobody in the government seemed to have noticed, probably because most of the toys kids played with then were made of painted tinplate.
Another member is the author of The Pop-pop pages at http://www.nmia.com/~vrbass/pop-pop/ which provides a lot of information, including a list of distributors that might be looking for sources for pop-pop boats that are not made of tinplate before long.
If anybody is interested in getting into the pop-pop boats business, they could ask for more information on this forum or on the pop-pop steamboats group. It is a public group meaning that anybody can read messages without joining, and join without any need for approval by moderators. It is a Yahoo group, so a Yahoo ID would be required. The easiest way to obtain the ID would be to sign up for a free version of Yahoo email— but use Google's gmail instead!
Old Frank, a.k.a frankmcneilll@gmail.com

 

Next they'll be telling us foam isn't any good for us either.

 

They might be right about that. There are a lot of folks who die in bed, possibly beds with mattresses that are full of foam.

 

roflmao

 

I'm putting pop pop boats on my ever growing list Frank. It is going to be a great winter. So many things to try out... Seems never to be enough time.