T is for Two - H is for Hong Kong Hovercraft

We haven't had as many hovercraft as we should have done, given their box was in the attic this last 11 years, so I'll have to redress that when I get to final [alive] resting place, but I can make a start here with two bog-standard rack-toy brands, one in Picasa for a while, the other sourced off feebleBay a week or so ago.

Woolbro's Hovercraft with Friction, is more of a whacky Intergalactic US Space Marines space-car, although with the body entirely filled with two large turbines, of limited use beyound getting two humans from A-to-B in a uncomfortably noisy fashion!

I actually have the Jane's Surface Skimmers and Hovercraft tome (and a tome it is, good for bodybuilding) and it is amazing to see how quickly Hovercraft went from British post-war excentricity in the 1950's to hundreds of designs all over the world by the 1970's (I think I have the '72 edition), and some of them do look a bit like this I think, but the forward perambulation isn't clear and the book's currently buried!

Carpet wheels aren't part of a real hovercraft which would have a hollow-belly to fill with pressurised air! Branded to an MMF and numbered 812, mine is obviously missing an ariel, but I will look out for another, better one as it also has that yellowish staining on the starboard side.

Learning something every day; although it sounds like the sort of thing Mum would have told us as kids, I learnt the other day that before 1844 it was Larboard and Starboard, but the Roayl Navy changed what was an obviously confusing (under fire/in a storm) convention, in that year.

The other reason to look out for another one is that the box on this one is shot to bits. The Woolbro stamp looks like the kind of overprint a few of their earlier sets carry, so there may be a generic version of this out there somewhere?

On safer ground with the SRN6 (Saunders-Roe, Naval, Type Six), this is another regular rack-toy star; Clifford Toys, and would seem to be a copy of the Matchbox die-cast, in military colours (which Matchbox also did). The Royal Marines used these for years, and the Griffon's they use now are quite similar in design.

I have the die-cast black & white civil one in the under-visited box, and this copy must be a slight scale-up; because, although small; it wouldn’t fit in the standard 1-75 range's box? It's also all plastic and like the Woolbro/MMF one, mostly polystyrene.