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.

Saturday, December 23, 2023

D is for Dapol

This is just a quick box ticker to get the stuff up here, I have a lot of Dapol stuff in storage with header cads and suchlike, but as a quick box ticker, this will have to do!

An early catalogue shows the same Hong Kong sourced PVC figures that Hornby, possibly Thornton and Lifelife I think have carried in the last 20-40 years at one point or another.
 
 
Later catalogues carry the imagery of the sets they seem to have inherited from Airfix, with the bases being changed from small squares and oblongs to landscaped (or lumpy) 'cloud' bases.

They also carried the Station Accessories, but in the same soft cream-white polyethylene as Airfix, and as the set seems to have become harder to find in recent years, the suspicion is they only obtained back-stock of Airfix production and have slowly used that up?
 
The three sets with a few other ex-Airfix kits in a later catalogue.
 
When redesigning the bases, Dapol also added their own corporate marks to the old Airfix tools, meaning they are now, indisputably Dapol product!

Example of the Dapol runner, complete, they tend to sell three runners in a set, passengers or workmen, and being polystyrene kit plastic can be remodelled or converted with relative ease!



Dapol are still going despite the bad luck of past works-fires and the BBC's underhand pulling of the Dr Who licence, just before announcing they were bringing the time-traveller back. These are the current shots of painted-up sets on/from their website;

https://www.dapol.co.uk/

2 comments:

jon attwood said...

Also worth looking out for in the Dapol range are the ex Kitmaster/Airfix Stephenson's Rocket, which has two crew figures, and the Scammel Scarab, likewise with two crew.
J

Hugh Walter said...

Yes! And I believe that the rail-crane kit had figures at first, but like the Control Tower, lost them quite early? Cheers Jon, and thanks for everything this year - very much appreciated.

H