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.

Friday, March 20, 2015

N is for Nuffield Health

These were a part of a recent promotional campaign for a chain of health clubs here in the UK;

I'm not sure if this - clean - image will blow-up at all, it's a screen-grab of a thumbnail I couldn't enlarge, so I've cropped a couple out of a Youtube link, I won't give you a link to as it's got very little to do with the subject of the blog, just a nice use of runners ('sprues') in a design context...


I've tried to ask Nuffield if they actually made them...no reply! Looking at them; some seem constructable, others seem to be missing vital parts, so I suspect just interesting CAD creations to match the promotions theme of wholeness = wellness or some such.

Similar stuff here; Marketing Tools and here; Catch 22 goes Monogram

You'll notice if you follow the links that I used to use 'Sprue' outside the brackets, but it's not correct, and as there are a few etymological usages that annoy me in the hobby (Caisson for Limber among some large-scale or N. American collectors is one, re-cast [for plastics] is another heavily abused term - metal is cast, plastic is moulded) I thought I aught to make the effort to at least get 'runner' right.

The sprue is the deformed (and commonly truncated) cone-shape, usually near the centre of the runner, where the whole thing ('product') was divorced from the mould-tool's injector head. The lack of sign of a sprue-mark on the above is further evidence of their being fantasy creations, rather than the cereal premium stuff I hoped they be! When I first saw them I hoped they were from the same people that produced the recent Dr. Who figures

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