♫♪♪ 666 . . . the Number of the Truck! ♫♪♫

With apologies to Messer's Steve Harris and Co., of Iron Maiden! We're having a quick top-up on the 1-Ton Humber 'Pig' story today, with a few bits that have come-in over the last couple of years. I have in the past added a few images to the original eight-or-so posts on the subject, but as they have their own tag 1 Ton Humber Mini Trucks (which seems to extend to 18 entries with this post?), they can go here!

These are interesting and I've been after some for years, as you can see I only managed three crappily-painted ones, but they were cheap and I only needed a 'sample' to illustrate a point, or the 'missing chapter' of the original posts.

You can see the black paint (old school gloss enamel) has damaged the polystyrene substrate, as has the green to a lesser extent and where the black was laid over the green on the cabs the damage is worse, so the camouflage pattern remains visible, but I hope they will polish up when I find the time in the future.

They were manufactured - unpainted - by Hasbro, sometime in the 1970's (I think), possibly as part of a transporter, ferry or collapsing bridge type playset; I don't know? And are about 1:76/72nd. But the point is, however, they are not of the era of the Dinky original, nor the Pyro mini- or Sam Toy full-size copies.

They are - in fact - completely re-designed/sculpted, to a new degree of detail, and may be the donor for the NFIC trucks, and probably some of the sub-piracy generations of Hong Kong mini-truck. And when I say 'may be', both are slightly wider/flatter or squashed than the Dinky original, but we did see an interim one in a larger size from HK here?

I also picked this set up a while ago, these are the eponymous 666-marked trucks of the title, the type I originally listed as Type 4's, and they seem to be among the commoner variations of these mini-trucks.

The card-art actually shows those early Matchbox 1-75 vehicles known to have been copied by Blue Box, 'Blue Bow' and many others, in both soft polyethylene or hard polystyrene, but the actual contents are just the 1-Ton Humber mini-trucks.

Two cherry-pickers and two tipper/dump-trucks were the slightly disappointing contents, but random packing . . . I guess! 1 purple body, the rest are pink/yellow and more bodies/plug-ins do exist.

I also picked-up the full set of fire vehicles (also Type 4's), but can't remember if I got a card with them and forgot to shoot it, or if they came loose? But I think it is all the body-types for the 'set'?

Inventive if not terribly accurate as to the equipments available in the real world, and in the case of a couple, just construction-site bodies in silver rather than black plastic - cherry picker (top middle) and crane (bottom left), but nice to have them all and tick that box.

The modern holder of that novelty/pocket-money niche; Kinder's efforts from a few years ago, apart from a bit of flash on the basket of the cherry-picker, they are manufactured to a high level of detail/tolerance, come in multi-parts and are made in a more substantial material, with a higher degrees of play-ability through moving parts . . . just harder to find under the blind-bag [egg] model!