Austin - is it the Mad Scientist Club?
THATS IT!!
Thanks, its been bugging me all weekend.
Those stories are a hoot and a half!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Scientists'_Club
The Mad Scientists' Club books build their plot devices around science, mechanical inclination, a do it yourself ethic, and some good-natured pranks, making the boys in these books sort of junior precursors to MacGyver - or a fictional counterpart to the real-life Rocket Boys. The early stories and the first book in the series were published in the wake of the impact of Sputnik and the space race and reflect the thinking of that period (the first book even includes a plug for joining the United States Air Force in the last story, "Night Rescue"). There is one odd, inexplicable exception to the usually science-based, non-supernatural nature of the stories, and that is "Big Chief Rainmaker" in the second book. The level of technology found in these books is of course "low-tech" by today's standards with no home computers or miniaturized electronics, but the technology depicted in the books (scuba, ham radio, helicopters, remotely radio-controlled devices) was, at the time, typical of the cutting edge of technology during the post-WWII, pre-Internet era.
