R is for Recent Aquisitions

Various bits and pieces that have come into the collection in the last few months, other than all the loose stuff that is!

Three Imai caricatures based on Star Wars, or at least using the coat-tails of the Lucas cash cow to 'fly'! A robot 'walker' from Bandai, this is apparently 1:144, but as it's a lot bigger than the Takara 1:144 robots I covered back at the start of this blog, there's a lot of flexibility as to what scale it - or any large robot - actually is. With some being manned, and others autonomous, and with most either imaginary or based on TV cartoons on the other side of the world, you can make them any size you want. I'll probably make these up as they're all pretty modern.

Finally a nice early pattern StuG in resin and white metal from Alemany, not a bad kit but the tracks are quite poorly moulded, and as the cheapest item in the kit, could have been replaced at source.

Dkwookie on the HaT forum brought these to our attention the other week and I managed to pick some up that weekend, still available from 'The Works' discount book/craft shops here in the UK, at 1:90 they are passable for war-games in 15/20mm.

They also do three different M1 Abrams paint variants and some helicopters or aircraft.

The LCF train set came from Peter Evans, one of the founders of Plastic Warrior, who knows the eclectic, completest nature of my collecting well enough to buy a piece of Hong Kong tat - so bad it's good - whenever he sees it!! It also arrived a week before he said he'd send it, thanks Peter!

I've already put a battery in it and rolled it round the floor a few times. There are now 4 or 5 of these in the collection, mostly civilian (plus a Skooby-Doo tie-in), and another only adds to the whole! [That's two mentions for Skooby-Doo in two days?......spooky!]

The HK 'Cattle', copies of the Airfix farm were an eBay purchase a while ago, but as they were still sitting on the 'still to be sorted' table, I took them for the photo-shoot.

Finally, this came from Mercator Trading (link to right), I sometimes help out on his stall at shows, and had watched it not sell for a couple of outings, but people did keep looking at it, so in the end I coughed up and will cover it fully in a day or two. A whole box of Dregeno wooden tractors from the former East Germany...Bargain!