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, July 28, 2023

S is for Sandown Park - May 2023 - Civilian Vehicles

The civilian vehicles I picked-up at Sandown back in May are probably more interesting than the military stuff, but it's a question of personal taste, and it's not like you're going round a show trying to work out what's cool or not for a future Blog post! Although you do sometimes buy things for a blog post, mostly it's filling-gaps, ticking boxes or grabbing interesting, or unusual curiosities or novelties!
 
 
A couple of bagged Hong Kong rack toy vehicles, seperate purchases I think, but shot together for this post. The Surry wagon is my second, and with the first in storage, I'll wait until I can compare them before I open and construct one. The tractor I may have loose somewhere, but I thought I'd better get this one to tie-in the Thomas-Poplar looking driver.
 
A pair from Tudor Rose, A London Taxi and Bedford / Morris (?) type minivan, the Taxi will be off to New York soon in exchange for the Marx one we looked at the other day, and it has slightly more realistic wheels/tyres than the van!
 
A few shots of the van, with the Taxi's belly-mark inset, bottom right. The marking on the van was quite poor, due to play I think. Garden/beach toys, the van has working rear doors and a sliding side-door. Those wheels though - "Purest Grreeeen, Blackadder!"
 
This was lovely, an Archer steam road-roller, I don't know if they were imported from the US at the time, I suspect not, but rather imported more recently by a collector, I will try to get a Tudor Rose (or Kleeware) one, and a Lipkin one, so we can compare with the Merit one! The red button on the nose is the knob of a pull-cord wind-in motor, not that common a motive system, but there were a few back then. I also have the Pyro (and Banner?) in 'army' khaki!
 
Not sure about this at all, the card looks fake, home-printed on a PC, but a small company may well have done something like that back in the early years of computing and desk-top publishing, yet the contents are genuine enough, and maybe it was last-minute clearance or something of a 'Friday Afternoon' or 'Monday Morning' project? Also despite the busy graphics, there's no real branding, but it's hardly a typical generic either?
 
Poplar Plastics; this looks to be an early and not wholly stable plastic, but only the v-point of the blue moulding seems to have distorted slightly? A nice model anyway, and I'm a bit of a sucker for plastic racing cars!
 
Airfix - another! I put a Hillco cowboy on it in the absence of a motorcycle rider. I've picked up a few of these now, and that page on the Airfix blog will get an update with new images. Blue body with red wheels seems to be the commonest combination, I have several now, different shades of both though.

Another Poplar product, this shares the baseplate/chassis with the Easter Bunny egg-cart we looked at a few years ago, albeit with slightly different mountings. The wheels and chassis are polystyrene, the horse and cart-box, polyethylene.
 
The cart doesn't seem to come with or be fitted for hay-racks, but has seating, presumably from it days as a Thomas Toy when it would have come with a set of those seated PVC rubber kids?

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