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.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

S is for Sorting-out

Having mentioned 50p bags somewhere in the comments section, I dug out this old article I prepared for posting just before my old Lap-top crashed last April. This is the contents of a small bag someone brought to the big toy fair at Birmingham's NEC. Needless to say they aren't 50p any more and I think this was about a fiver's worth. And thanks are due to either Trevor R. or Jack S. - I can't remember but they've both saved me useful stuff for years now.

This is the contents of the bag spread out in a vague order, like a spider-diagram, you start in the middle and work out adding in themes! Airfix ending up top right, Kinder top left etc...

Some of the better pieces, the two pink flats came soon after I covered some others in one of the 'unknown' posts I did about a year ago (I'll do some more soon), Quaker at the bottom, a Marx soft plastic African warrior and a couple of tiny racing cars for the Waddingtons Formula One board game I'm working on...I want to increase the number of lanes and run 6 teams of three cars each with a few rule tweaks! The problem has been finding 3 grey and 3 orange cars so I'll probably resort to painting some spares, but most teams have 3 original cars now, I'll post them sometime...

Three modern HK figures from some die-cast play set, unknown unless you know better (Majorette, Johnny Lightning, Tesco?!) [Arlin Tawser kindly confirms/identifies these as being from the Matchbox Safari Pack - Action System 5 (7 piece set, stock number 50711-5, copyrighted/issued 1996, made in China) and pointed out that there are a couple on eBay at the moment!], an HK copy of an Airfix Guardsman , Disney Dalmatian food premium and a common horse which keeps turning up so again probably came with a Matchbox 1-75 sized safari thing?

The Kinder in the bag, the Ancients are always damaged! Note: you can just see the RP of Res Plastics if you click on the image - behind/below the saddle of the brown horse.

Other purchases at that show included a nice Woolbro bagged Giant copy, the WWI tree moulding I've already covered, an old bubble-gum tank (HK copy of Manurba), Diver and mini-sub (HK copy of Manurba again!), two die-cast flat race horses from a board game and a superb space tank with mile-high carpet wheels! Kleeware ship and HK Olypian wrap it up.

2 comments:

WOTAN said...

you get all the best stuff in the unknown bags! I had a whole battalion of the gum tanks - blue, green and red. As i recall there were two turret types and they all hooked together for an armoured convoy!

WOODSY said...

Never seen those gum tanks before. Someone commented about them on my SWORD blog too - and hey presto, a few days later I find some here! a a cool bag of delights!