About Me

My photo
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, December 3, 2015

News, Views etc...Plastic Warrior 2016

So PW 161 dropped through the letter box this morning (yesterday morning, it's that late an hour now!), and with it - for those who don't subscribe yet (?) - was the flyer for the forthcoming 31st show!

Those links in HTML:

Blog: Plastic Warrior
Email: pw.editor@ntlworld.com

Reminders nearer the time!

===============================================================

I also found a bunch of old links in a completely different bookmarks file on CAD stuff!

Ye Old Site of Curiosities - This is a nice blog I've been meaning to follow for ages, Jan posts an eclectic range of things on various topics and scales including the less popular sizes, and lots of Pirate goodies, which as I totally forgot talk-like-a-pirate-day this year is a very good thing!

Toy Memories - I think I did publish a link to them in a Blog-post once, they had a useful document pertaining to some waffle of mine, I tried to get hold of them on Facebook but 'no banana' as they say. The site is a bit old and bitty, with odd chunks of missing/corrupt coding leading to overlaps and dead links etc... But there's still some useful stuff there if you dig about.

1:32 Museum - 'Peter's' small private collection; not updated for a while, but some lovely images of mostly newer plastics.

Micro Machine Museum - One of two very useful resources on this range of diminutive models and their figures I've found, but I don't know what I did with the other link!

Ingap Italy - You'll have to make of this what you will, I don't even know how to describe it really, clearly Italian, clearly a collection of mostly tin-plate and die-cast, mostly Ingap, Gama and the like, but there is some really useful stuff there if you dig about, however navigation isn't easy and the earlier images are better annotated than latter ones. Worth a couple of hours surfing...or more!

This is just some crazy beard shit with toy soldiers.



Blogger's been playing-up tonight, there seem to have been changes to image up-loads, so I don't know if it's them or my Internet connection/broadband....lots of 'error occurred' messages and frozen upload type stuff?

[In the event the post never published - so another Vodafone fuck-up]

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Hugh, thank you for these interesting links!!! The 1/32nd scale plastic figure one (1:32 Museum) is particularly useful for me. The quality and historical accuracy of some of these 1/32nd scale plastic figures – and I’m thinking in particular of the Italeri and later Hat sets – can be outstanding and definitely provide some close-run competition to that of their much more celebrated metal counterparts. Do these qualify as model soldiers as opposed to toy soldiers? I don’t know if you’ve ever come across the 1/32nd scale ancient Gaul set produced by Italeri where (unless I’m imagining it) you can actually make out the teeth in the mouth of the figure with the carnix trumpet I’d be tempted to say ‘yes’. What do you think, Hugh? Unfortunately, both Italeri and Hat seem to have stopped producing 1/32nd scale figure sets a few years’ back. Would you happen to know why that is, Hugh? Intriguingly, the 1/32nd section of the Hat Industrie site is still up and there are upcoming figure sets on there that seem to have been frozen at the sculpting stage for several years. Do you think those Seven Years’ War Austrians and Byzantine Slingers will ever get made now? Best 1/32nd Hat set ever: the Wurttemberg Jaegers in action poses imho – although oddly enough I actually appreciate the detail of the castings more as is straight out of the box - when they are unpainted. They really float my boat. The guy with the fluegel horn was the icing on the cake for me.

Hugh Walter said...

The terms are a bit irrelevent with a lot of this new production, detail is as god as, but they are still playthings, so maybe 'Toy Soldier Models'? or: Model Soldier Toys!

I don't really follow or cover the commercial new production, so can't really answer your other questions, try the Treefrog forum's plastics section...

http://www.treefrogtreasures.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?10-General-Plastic-Toy-Soldier-Discussion

...or Paul Stadinger's 'Stad's' Blog...

http://www.stadsstuff.com/

They both cover new production, and Plastic Warrior magazine (links above) regularly covers new stuff with occasional critique.

H

Hugh Walter said...

'good as' not 'god as'!

Anonymous said...

Thanx for the links to Stad's Blog and the Treefrog forum. That is so helpful of you.

Hugh Walter said...

Pleasure, if you like bigger sizes and are in the UK, you might like to know the Blue Box/BBI 1:18th figures (rrp £4.99'ish) are re-branded in Poundland (Funtastic)at the moment for err...one pound! 4 Romans, 1 gladiator and 3 medievals.

H