"Hi All,

I am an old person who played with little tinplate pop-pop boats before WW2 when they were some of the favorite toys for kids. Anyone who doesn't know what a pop-pop boat is could find out by visiting the pop-pop pages at
<http://www.nmia.com/~vrbass/pop-pop/>. The author of this website is a member of a Yahoo discussion group at <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pop-pop-steamboats/> that I started several years ago to encourage the development of a new generation of pop-pop boats for a new generation of kids. This hasn't happened yet because commercially available pop-pop boats are still made of tinplate steel and are not equipped for remote control that might make them more competitive with a flood of cheap remote control toys manufactured mostly in China. One of the major distributors of imported tin pop-pop boats has a website at <http://www.buzzboats.com/poppop.htm> with a Warning! These boats are not sold as children's toys as they may have sharp edges. These boats are sold as metal replica collector items only!
It is beginning to look like that new generation of kids won't play with traditional tinplate pop-pop boats, so I started another group at <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cardboardshipsandboats/> to encourage conversion of card stock display models of ships and boats into reinforced and waterproofed working models with motors and components for remote control that might be provided by using Lego Powerfunctions components.
It would be nice if those components included servo-controls similar to those used for radio control cars, boats and planes. Perhaps someone who works for the Lego company will pass this suggestion along.

Best wishes, Frank McNeill
"