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.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

M is for Merten's Menagerie

While I was taking the shot's of the exquisite little wooden animals yesterday I took these as well, they are not all the Merten animals I have, just those that fell out of a box during the move in November and nearly got left behind! Still they are a reasonable sample to give an impression of what Merten were capable of.

The loose set at the top is set 1001, but there is a question mark over the central horse running without a base, then there are two 1002's (one missing the two smaller animals) to show how the paint changed from batch to batch (or; out-painter to out-painter?), while Preiser went with lesser numbers of animals in a standard box depending on the size (with exceptions for the very large and very small), Merten produced custom boxes for each set, with the N-gauge being left on the sprue.

Set 1003 has the larger native wild animals, common to central Europe with three different types of deer and a couple of wild boar for Obelix to track down!

Below are some more wild and domestic animals, probably the contents of more than one set, with pigs, sheep, goats and some smaller Red deer (fawns?).


Some more horses, with a comparison Airfix piece and one of the aforementioned sprues with N-gauge versions attached.

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