About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Monday, December 23, 2013

C is for Corgi Crowds and Crews

Corgi produced a small range of accessory sets for their range of die-cast vehicles, to enhance the play value, and it's these we are going to look at now. Some of the poses were also copied by Hong Kong pirates in larger scales.

None of these are a complete set, and while I might have the missing figures elsewhere, I don't think I've got all of them. Basically they are a set of racetrack pit-crew and a race-winner figure, a set of spectators, the track-side officials and the press.

All around 35/40mm there were two main runs of these, one lot in polystyrene, the other in a quite stiff or dense PVC.

Another set of Mechanics gives rise to the main variants, as the chap leaning forwards with an oil bottle, becomes a grabber in the pit-crew, and a stand-alone spanner holder with some individual vehicle models - the turquoise one with the ovoid base coming with the Land Rover-based cherry-picker - if memory holds? With the orange boiler-suited chap being included in the big US style twin-boom wrecker?

By far the most common set, the garage (service station) mechanics turn-up lose on the sprue all the time and clearly there was a large reserve or out-painters stock kicking around at some point. I love the sheep-skin wearing salesman, come to give the mechanics a bit of his wisdom..."You see the thing is Martin...mending a car is rather like making love to a beautiful woman..." Swiss Toni


These have that peculiar mildew type growth on them that PVC often suffers from, usually it can be cleaned-off without the product suffering any detriment, but presumably on a molecular level the material must have 'dried-out' a bit, or suffered in some other way, that might increase the likelihood of eventual failure?

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