I can't now remember if this came from a
local evening fair or an early Birmingham show, but I do remember it being
cheap, due to two factors, one, the box was (is!) a bit tatty and two, the
contents were loose and remain to this day un-guarantee-able as to
completeness!
Although this is to a certain extent the
fate of all larger sets, they tend to A) encounter more damaging problems over
a lifetime; fire, flood, damp, sunlight, knocks and falls, and B) start off by
selling in smaller numbers!
If anything is missing from the set it's
likely to a few more figures, with two of the kneeling Dinky mechanic copies
and one lying on the inspection trolly, there are sevearl poses missing, it's
also harder to tell what the contents might have been or where they went as
some items were glued in with Hong Kong's answer to ............... which is a
darker-brown snot, while other items were held in with rubber-bands over
stamped flaps in the floor.
However, what you can see is what was in
the set when I bought it, I added nothing and nothing's been taken out. With a
pretty constant breakdown of one substantial vehicle, one larger accessory
piece and one or two smaller accessories and/or figure/s per tier, it's obvious
that it's probably only missing a figure or three?
Obviously - I bought it for the two
civilianised Bedford RL's! I also
love the artwork of the deeper, top tier, that's got to be the busiest post-war
"Garidge in all Lhaanden Town me'chinah",
I think there may even be some ship-building going-on behind the taxman's back
there! Three mobile-cranes, two tower-cranes and err . . . a conning-tower?
Then there's a mini-bus (at least twenty
years before they'd been invented) and two imported US sedans! While the
helicopter in the bottom tier seems to have landed outside a Bavarian
barrack-town! The camp in Weingarten looked just like that,
with fields five-minutes away!
To hold the three different designs of tier
in the right place to line-up with their windows, a piece of packing card is
placed at the top of the box and while the deeper top tier is now
'independently mobile' it used to be sellotaped
to the other three!
Close-ups of the three larger road
vehicles; I don't know anything about them; I think one may be an Austin Healey? Which might mean the
other is an Austin Sprite, and both Dinky copies (?), but I really don't
know, while a red racing car is usually associated with Ferrari, you can run any make in any colour of plastic and it would
need a GP/F1 fan to recognise the exhast arrangement or nose shape and say
"Yeah, it's a Masterblaster Tart-trap
MkIV, with the billy-blowers and overhead ham-cams".
Of more interest is that one is in
1:48th'ish scale and blow-moulded in polyethylene, while the other two are
glued styrene models closer to the 1:60th of the Dinky donors, with - elsewhere in the box - HO-gauge compatible
trucks, an N-gauge helicopter and forecourt accessories closer to 1:24th
(oil-can cabinet)!
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