Similar in Scotland still, except flush with the ground in a rubberised floor, this could be worse? Ground lever must increase potential for high speeds?
I remember these monsters, and much bigger than this photo....................
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
156 points (92.4% liked)
Casual UK
4516 readers
1 users here now
Casual UK
A casual place for banter and anything that doesn't fit in anywhere else.
Have chat and a natter. Talk about anything and everything that's not political!
Keep it casual.
Rules
- No politics.
- Be friendly.
- Be kind & civil.
- No Generative AI Content
- Follow Feddit.uk site rules.
Other communities:
Here:
Elsewhere:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Witches Hat! We had one like this, but quite a bit bigger, in my town. All the danger of a swing and a roundabout combined. Mounted on concrete.
So that slide in the background, I remember the one at my local park being about five stories high. My mother insists I am wrong but I know what I remember. That slide in the background does look like it would fit the bill though.
I smoked my groin so hard on one of these while trying to jump on while it was ferociously spinning. It sucked at the time but the character it formed has stayed with me for life.
Is that character sterile?
Thankfully no! I may someday produce offspring who will also misjudge playground physics.
It's on grass. It needs to be on concrete slabs which are uneven and sticking up.
You'd get your older cousins to bring the thing up to orbital speeds when you were having a birthday party in the park. At least a couple times a year, some would get a broken arm on that thing, and once a generation a kid would end up underneath.
My brother swears he fell underneath, one time we were playing. Thankfully, he was towards the edge and he was small (at the time).
Teenagers with dirtbikes. Such glorious stupidity was something to behold.
I remember getting spun up to warp speed and one kid slipped and flew off. Not normally a problem but he happened to get flung onto his bike that was parked there. He did not ride off into the sunset.
...we used to have this hybrid see-saw / merry-go-round thing where pumping the two crossed see-saws advanced a central rotation mechanism on great exposed child-chewing gears...
Pfft! Grass?! Try sand that's 3000° from the American Southwest sun, and full of broken Budweisers. Also, I'm not seeing any old, disintegrating railroad ties anywhere. How are you supposed to get your daily tar and lead content?
Man I miss those railroad ties and old rubber tires
Kids these days didn't know the flavors they're missing!
That's what the child-sized cigarettes were for
Which generation is that, though? Like basically everybody experienced this as a kid.
No. Only my generation. The Best Generation.
Around here they started getting rid of them in the 80's. The story I was told is that kids would play "dropsies" where you'd drop a shoe under the platen and then try to grab it on the next round. Some kids would throw it far under and the kid reaching for it could get his head caught under and it could break their neck.
That's the gruesomest story I heard but I found many, many other ways to injure myself on these things.
Wow, that's messed up, most what we did is just throw people off it or throw drinks at em when the thing was up to relativistic speeds.
Ah, the furious carrousel. I remember once how my legs were flying almost parallel to the ground while, with my arms, I was trying to hold to this structure. Never really liked it, but it was a question of honor.
Our big thing was daring each other to get the swings in the playground to go so high you'd flip right over the stand. You had to stand up on the seat and pump hard to get high enough. I always chickened out, but some of the kids did it. The problem was the chains were then wrapped around the stand, making it harder to swing.
And yes, the surface under the swing was hard asphalt.
Mythbusters did this. Its not possible - you have to replace the chain with solid bars.
But I think this is all entire human race thing. Idk anyone who has never tried this, or seen someone who has. No generational thing about it.
Hmm, I'm beginning to think I was scammed by stinky boys who claimed they did it but actually just somehow managed to throw the empty seat over the bar. Because the chain was definitely wrapped around it.
As a kid, going over the bar on the swings was a huge fucking deal!
I have vague recollections of some book or show where a kid went over the bar and as a result his body turned inside out. (Not sure if that was an actual thing or some fever dream I had!)
And the cartoon Recess had an episode where a kid went over the bar and disappeared, and all the kids thought he travelled to another dimension or became a god or something. (In reality he just jumped off the swing and hopped in his mom's car, but nobody saw him because of glare from the sun)
And then Purple Aki was there and everyone hi-fived.
That didn't happen.
Then you've never had Clacker Balls. At least half of my friends received concussions from those things.
That isn't rust on the roundabout, it's dried blood.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" needs to die out because that's not how trauma works. You never recover full strength in a broken bone, never become fully cured of PTSD.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I had seen that in one of my neighbourhoods.
It had already been broken by the previous generations.
American Old: "Back in my day, we went outdoors and did things that built our bodies and minds. Why don't you kids do that?"
American Young: "Cause you defunded all the public parks, demolished the outdoors to build parking lots, and sent cops to harass anyone caught outside the house without their parents."
American Old: "Shut up, you woke antifa little shit. Nobody wants to hear you talk."
They still have these in Taiwan. Plenty of hurt kids.
We cared not for the danger, only that we'd reach the center at max speed
Wait. What? They don't have those any more?
I once got one of these up to speed (solo) at the park near my home, jumped on, and held onto the middle with my legs, while my head spun around past the outer platform. Then, some dickhead bully hit me in the back of the head with a rock and I had to make my way home while bleeding... Only, there was literally no one there. I checked multiple times, and there was nowhere to hide or run to. That fucking merry-go-round dislodged a rock from under it, then the centrifugal force flung it right at my head! And that's one of the milder ways you could hurt yourself on these things...
not from uk but when I grew up we had this net spaceship thing you could climb into like a clubhouse. Made completely out of metal. In a place with both severe summers and winters. I for the life of me do not know how we did not end up with news stories about some kid or adult cooking or freezing or sticking to the walls in there.
I personally prefer swings, who wants to get a splitting headache and puke when you could swing in the cold breeze under a tree and look at the clouds.
If you never got a splitting headache and puked from the swings you weren't going hard enough.
And who haven't seen that one kid who tried to get home while balancing vomit /no vomit "decision"...
My god it was awful, but it was a builder of character 👍
view more: next ›