E is for Excellent or Ephemeral Everything Else!

Bits & bobs, odds & sods, scenic & spares . . . the rest of the contents of Jon's parcel, and there should be something for everyone in this lot! Randomly shot, and then collaged to reduce the image-count on the page, it's in no particular order, but covers the whole gamut of toys and models and other things!

We might as well start with soldiers, that being our raison d'être here! A nice resin tourist piece from Norway, of a Viking, they celebrate their violent colonialist past too! And a WWI German (Airfix) who was so keen to surrender he escaped the box with the small scale (previous post) and was found under the arm of the Viking, in among the dinosaurs!

 

I think this might be Tamiya, although it could be Italeri or someone like that, basic wall sections for early experiments into diorama building . . . a lot of us went there with mixed results!

 

The significance of the booklet (actually a trade catalogue) will become more obvious, further down the page, but suffice to say it's an old school catalogue from the 1950's with explanatory pages, drawings and nomenclature. While the Viewmaster sheet will join a few others I have somewhere - there's often one in a mixed lot of exactly this parcel's type! It will help me remember where my Remco divers did or did not come from - depending upon their plastic colour!

Some random die-casts, the Majorette trailer (circus) is a lovely thing and ID's a loose lion I think I have somewhere, similar to the Matchbox, or Corgi (?) one, but a tad bigger, while the police car is one we had as kids, so lovely to see again, and in pretty-much the same condition ours was in, when I last saw it!

 

Having a driver figure in approximately HO, it'll definitely stay, another (The Austin/BMC 1100 I think) had a dog on the parcel shelf . . .

 

Thought for the day; Why were they called parcel shelves, when all they ever had on them were tartan 'picnic' blankets and/or boxes of tissues, in addition to the odd dog, or nodding fake dog! Parcels went in the boot or on the back seats?

The green racing car is Mattel for Burger King, and reminds me of a holiday my brother and I had once where we found some cheap, generic Matchbox 1-75 style racing cars in a local seaside shop and bough one each, black and yellow I seem to recall, and spent hours racing them down a steep dirt track we'd smoothed out, and built jumps over the exposed roots of!

While the larger one is the Corgi Yardley McLaren-Ford and, of course - both have diminutive drivers . . . bargain!

The greenery, pretty straightforward for those who know what they are looking-at, but the highlight is definitely the trio of single-piece piracies of the multi-piece Britains willow trees, almost a temple to the copyists' art, they must have been very complicated three or four-part mould-tools, too?!!

 

An eclectic mix, with a lovely Matchbox Yesteryear fire appliance, this is the big-scale brother of the Matchbox and Lledo smallies we've seen here in the past, and you don't often see it, I suspect because it's so nice people look-after and hang-on to theirs?

 

A Christmas cracker ship flat (polyethylene copy of 'styrene Euro-premium), a copy of a Bruder 'plane, a copy of the Minic waterline tug and a copy of the Spanish Play-Me parrot-rifle artillery piece.

A bunch of Hong Kong pull-back 'stocking fillers' which I may be able to ID from Bill B's catalogue, or similar stuff, and a lovely Penguin boat. The box is a bit knackered, but there's enough there to scan the important bits, and it's an interesting line as it includes a vulcanised rubber Jeep and other oddities, clearly Frog for older kids!

 

Cable drums! A late Hornby-Triang in brown (the earlier one was green with different transfers), the Randall/Merit pair, one open, one closed, and a poorly glued Airfix, you can find it with blue or black cut-outs to glue on, then a couple of lesser makes in the centre, the two-colour styrene one marked-up 'NordKable', the other possibly from a large set of boxes and crates etc . . . which Märklin's sub-brand Primex carried at one point, but which may have been Preiser or Faller or someone originally?

 

Which brings us back to the blue booklet at the top of the post - it's full of little details about cable drums, with sketches! Fantastic! Even though most of mine are in storage I'm going to do a cable-drum post, just to thank Jon for feeding my enthusiasm for these esoteric things!
 

On the right, street furniture and other bits and bobs, the long marbled grey/brown pieces seem to be polystyrene sections of split-rail fencing, of the sort you'd want if modelling the American Civil War, but I have no idea who made them, while the stop/go signs and silver accessories at the front are from the late Britains mechanics in the Deetail style, so very useful.

And then there was this! Bits of that, bits of the other, bits of Kinder, and a very amusing rugby game I will post separately! There's some Chap Mai I think, some Britains, pencil-tops and an Action Man knock-off pair of bino's . . . they all have their place, their bag, their 'zone'.

Many, many thanks to Jon Attwood for what was a huge parcel, and we'll be returning to bits of it for years to come. Indeed, to that end, there are already a few follow-ups/comparisons of both his and Chris Smith's stuff in Picasa, so along with Christmasy stuff and railway bits, December should be busy here at Small Scale World.

 

Something filthy later today . . . got to get it out before Christmas proper starts tomorrow!