Y is for ♫♪♪♪ "You Spin Me Right Round, Injun', Right 'Round, Like a Ranch Raid, Right 'Round, 'Round-Round!" ♫♪♫

One of the best things I got at the recent (a month and a half ago already!) Plastic Warrior show in South West London was this spinning top, which Michael Mordant-Smith had found and saved for me, some of the riders had come loose, so I had to take it all apart and renovate it with a bit of glue and a duster, phases which I either forgot to photograph, or might have actually delated the photographs from!

Fully restored and put back together, there are no marks on it, not even in the hidden areas I could look at while it was all in pieces, but Google reveals similar tops by Chad Valley, Fuchs, LBZ/KSM (very similar handles and contents; trains, circus performers &etc), Schilling and RedBox, so there are a few out there!

 

Of course, the attraction was the little Native American Indians charging round the rancher's place a'whoopin' and a'yellin' their war cries, and a'firin' their ar'ers! Years of centrifugal charging had broken two off, at the horses fetlocks, and third came away as I was taking it apart, so once I'd matched them back with the hooves - still firmly glued to the tin-plate - I also gave the fourth a collar of glue on each ankle, to hopefully reinforce them through capillary-action?

 

Only the three poses, with a duplicate of the white one on the opposite side, they look a bit Comansi-like, but the horses are different, and I guess they would have been manufactured by some small, unsung, local plastics fabricator, commissioned to knock-up a small tool with the three poses and possibly, three horse cavities?

 

The first time I put it back together, I got the smaller gear-cog in the wrong place, and it wouldn't spin properly. As I had realised by that point, that I hadn't shot the earlier strip-down, or had lost the images, I took this shot of the parts, after glueing.

 

The lower dome and the spinning plate are tin, the two washers and the twisted-shaft, steel, everything else is in a polystyrene polymer.

Close-up of one of the riders after mending, the horse's feet are glued with dobs of PVA wood-glue, by the looks of it? Anyone recognise the origins of the horse or riders.

The central shaft goes through/is partially hidden by this rancher's hovel, with the shaft exiting the chimney! The main gear-wheel is under the raised plinth of the building.

 

Many thanks to Michael for saving this for me.

An hour later - Peter Evans has identified the horse pose as Dulcop along with two of the riders, the other (archer) being originally a Marx sculpt!