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.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

V is for Velodromatics

I bought this at the weekend from Adrian at Mercator Trading and it's brilliant!

I guess it's probably French, most cycling toys are, and while it looks like the Britains one, it also looks like several other ones! I think the rider's posed most like the Britains one, although the hats wrong however and pose is where the similarities end as . . .

. . . this chap is articulated, and attached to a offset-cam wheel mechanism which forces the raider to pedal furiously as you push the bike across a smooth by slightly gripping surface - shiny kitchen worktops don't cut it!

Also of interest is the juxtaposition of materials, metal handlebars, clipped to a - possibly - polypropylene frame with a hard styrene rider - everything then held together by the glue on his hands. 

Close-ups of the mechanisms by which the rider pedals, and you don't want to know how he's fixed to the frame, but we Brits killed a king with a similar novelty - ouch!

Briefer than I'd like today as my Britains cyclists are in storage (and not a great sample!) so I can't expand with comparison-shots and such like, so I've also added a pistol to the jig-toy page and another figurine to the Goebel 'Mainzelmännchen' post.

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