H is for Housekeeping

Probably had that title before, but I think a few duplicates have slipped through over the years now!

 

♪♫♪♪♫ It was forty years ago, today . . . ♪♫♪♪♫ * We were confined to barracks and light duties, due to reports coming out of the - then - Soviet Republic of Ukraine (Ukrainian SSR), about some shenanigans in a place called Chernobyl. As it happened the radio-active plume spent several days curling round to the South East, South, and then West of Berlin and dumping its shite on other people, we got it around the 4th May, by which time we'd all stopped taking precautions, and got a full dose of whatever was on offer . . . low levels of caesium I think? I mention it only because there's lots about it in the media at the moment, and I keep thinking "I know, I was there!", when I wasn't, really! And, we was robbed . . . if it had been strontium, we all would have become super-soldiers, huh?

 

*No we didn't, nobody knew anything about it until the evening of the 28th, when the Soviets deigned to admit what was going on! So we probably got our frowny, concerned pep-talks around the 29th!

 

We have family in Penrith and their sheep were still being tested and rejected years later. They didn't get a major blast, but the plume did hit in early May, and hung around for a bit, so I guess, rather like the rainstorms which occasionally flash-flood Aldershot or Guildford when they meet the Hog's Back and decide not to slip over, the plume hit the hills there and deposited a lot of caesium on the grass?

 

It's why I'm not a fan of nuclear power. Wind, solar and wave, yep, bring it on, but nuclear . . . Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Windscale . . . when it goes wrong, it's serious, it costs billions, and it affects millions, for several generations, and that's without the growing problem of what to do with the waste.

 

I was quite busy yesterday, I added some follow-up stuff to the parachute page;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_14.html 

 

And I'll be adding a couple more sections in the next few days, I added a second recent lot of content to the HO-OO Romans page on the Airfix blog;

 

https://airfixfigs.blogspot.com/2010/06/1967-ancientimperial-romans-s31-hooo.html 

 

I also added a lot more to the WWII Japanese page, and blurbed it up, I'd rather forgotten how many of the posts over there still need text, and the Japanese was one of them!

 

https://airfixfigs.blogspot.com/2010/06/1964-wwii-japanese-infantry-s18-hooo.html

 

And I'm not going to escape with a text-only post am I? So here's some 'seen elsewhere' stuff, involving mixed lots - proper eye candy!

 

This was a bag of bits Peter Evan thrust at me at a London show in Camden I think, they may have got a subsequent breakdown post nearer the time (2023), but there's fun stuff to spot.

 

I seem to recall this was an evilBay lot (2022) which I won, but which Chris Smith had brought to my attention, as it had a couple of the German premium bandsmen (bottom right) and some small scale copies of the Manurba Wild West swivel-waist figures, also done as premiums or wundertüten, in solid form?

 

These were the February 2023 purchases, and some is still in the queue (the Buzz Lightyear movie stuff and the Fortnite keyrings), some has been blogged (dinosaurs and jig-puzzles), and some went straight-on to storage, however, Peter just included the farm animal set in his latest donation, so I should get that up soon, or maybe RTM, it's not that far away now. It's the one with the cows head on, the others were amphibians, dinosaurs and wild animals.

 

This was my 2021 attempt at an arty set-up! The book is the family recipe book and seems to date back to the 1840's or thereabouts? We've seen most of the figures in individual, donation or show-report posts, but yeah . . . It's all about the composition, innit!

 

While this was my attempt at 'concrete poetry', while at Kingston University back in '93/94, I was quite pleased with it, it has a certain rhythm or metre, and refers to its own shape, which is the main point of the exercise, or it was how it was given to us, as an over-the-weekend exersise!
 

And finally, how fucking cool is this? And it's approximately 1:32;

 

Garden war gaming never looked so good!

"Godamn, I love the smell of solenoids in the morning!"

R is for Recent Events

Had a mare of a day yesterday (Thursday), although it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and I managed to get back to Waterloo OK, despite the impending strike by tube workers, and some bus staff! The main event being the picking-up of a lovely lot of loot from Peter Evans.

 

I had a better Saturday last, attending the BMSS show in Reading, where among other things I picked up the above ephemera, all relatively useful, especially the colour facsimile of a Lineol catalogue. I may already have some of it, particularly the Corgi checklist/customer leaflet, but if so, it'll make a useful spare to swap for something!

 

The Hausser farm and zoo flyer is an original, and there's some German language stuff which seems to be either a dealers lists, or trade orders of some kind, and which may or may not have future use. The V&A monograph is a bit of fun for the library, and a picture of a diner from Route 66 heralds a parcel from Brian, which I'll hopefully post in the next few days, while Steve Vickers gave me both his cards!

 

Two Elastolin facsimiles got left out of the other shot, and I won two items on the raffle this year, the Land Rover kit has no figures (shock horror!), so I may just make them up 'as is', and photograph them against future Land Rover posts, in their neutral . . . gray - I just (a while ago) remembered I had to go to the bank, so shot off, forgetting I'd been doing this, then thought I'd go for a walk, it's a nice day, or it was, it's dark now! And actually wrote 'neutral' about ten hours ago!

 

As well as show plunder, which needs photographing, and the box from Mr Burke, which has been shot, I also picked up a big lot from Chris, which also needs photographing, but I have sorted it, and there are some interesting bits winging their way to these pages!

 

When I was on Faceplant, I'd thank Chris when a parcel arrived, with the Collected Paratroopers image, a few days or a week or so before they got posted here, but, as I'm not on Faceplant at the moment, here it is! The red one is actually a stand-alone figure from Processed Plastics, but he made the line-up neater, and was needed in the flyboy zone!

 

And while I'd happily draw a veil over yesterday's shenanigans, as I said, I did manage to get to Peter's and pick up a collected bunch of donations and car-booty, which is also in the queue to be photographed, along with some charity shop stuff I picked-up this afternoon, next to the bank!

 

Given that I haven't cleared any of the stuff I was intending to clear, back in January, because I've had a month off, like a lazy fuck, there's no shortage of stuff to post, and I fear the capsule-toy mini-season may join the HO railway outstanding's in the never-never section of the short queue! We'll see, what will be, will be!

 

The next event will be the London Toy Soldier Show, on the 9th of May, with a Sandown the next weekend (16th of May), so it's lucky PW has moved to June really!

L is for Local Loot - 2 of 2

It looks like I might be picking-up two lots of donated loot at the BMSS show this Saturday, if I can swing my carcass out of bed, early enough, something I have been struggling with recently! So at some point I'll have to get back to a more regular posting, but with over a million hits since Christmas, the Blog seems to have reached a self-supporting momentum, based around it's existing content, which is nice, but may be one of the [subconscious] factors contributing to my lack of motivation? Never thought I'd accuse myself of sitting on my laurels! Anyway, in continuing the plan of some weeks ago - there was a second successful trip to charity shops at the start of the year . . .

 

A bag of bits, a bag of animals and a couple of Stegosaurii . . . Stegosauruses?

Before and after cleaning - three Galanite infant-toy vinyls from Sweden, the poorer brother of Tomte, Both in accuracy (although the BMC 1100/Mini is quite good), and the wheels, which are no way as nice as Tomte's, or even the cheap 'W.Germany' (Stelco, Vinylline) and Hong Kong (Miniflex?) clones which were around at the same time. But collectable nevertheless, and there's a tub of them all somewhere!

 

There was also these . . . they went to 'Recyche'!

 

I'm pretty sure these are from the Corgi Chipperfield's Circus sets, and will need to be compared to the others, there's a bigfull somewhere, to get the best samples in the 'master collection', then the others can be disposed off, probably to charity! They all suffer from paint loss due to play-handling.

 

I suspect these are Corgi too, I don't remember a Zebra, but the same Hong Kong identifiers, and lack of marking, suggest they go with the giraffes? Close to the Britains sculpt, they are also very close to the various Blue Box, Redbox, Holly and New Maries zebras, which I'm one day going to have to try and sort out!

Likewise, note-wise, these two yellow tigers, the white one being marked and probably Holly? Again, someone, someday is going to have to sit down with all the boxed, carded and bagged sets, any catalogue images and all the loose examples, and try and sort them all out and get them annotated correctly by plastic colour, paint, markings etc . . .

 

Britains Llama, Corgi Rhino; a later vinyl moulding, and the bear, which again, may be Corgi, it's quite common in mixed lots, and has a lot in common with both the Rhino and the Corgi Bull from the Lamborghini, so it may be another Corgi, but I'm not sure I have it listed?

 

Modern, Chinasaurs, two makes, both unknown, but we may have seen them in show-reports, or carded acquisitions/donations, all to be sorted another day!

 

 

 

I also picked up this for next-to-nothing, a couple of the figures are damaged, but they just join a growing sub-branch of the collection . . . Box in the recycling bin, and I kept a couple of the accessories, as a sample!

 

Popular movies or other licensed productions, TV, Comics &etc, produce a plethora of crap over a shortish period (unless they really take off like Star Wars or TMNT), and while there's a lot of Minions stuff around at the moment, in 30-years, they'll be more like Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite or Richard Scarry animals are now - half-forgotten, and "What was all the hype about?"!

H is for Happy Easter . . .

  . . . although I'm not sure what's supposed to be so 'happy' about the crucifixion of a human being? 

 

There's a number of reason why I haven't posted recently, and I'm not going to list them all here, but really, what is there to be happy about? America is being run by a potty-mouthed, narcissistic, inveterate, constant liar and megalomaniac, who seems, along with his friends Putin and Netanyahu, to be determined to destroy the world economy, the world order and international rule of law, maintained since 1945, sometimes at great cost, for what? So he can rename everything after himself?

 

Starmer, along with the King, are proving to be a pair of gutless fuckwits, and while they seem to be starting to stand-up for themselves, Europe hasn't preformed much better. Easter has become another money-fest with most supermarkets only closed today, and otherwise observing none of the Bank Holidays, and with an October storm in March, the weather is clearly as fucked as a Messiah with nails through his hands and feet.

 

Sighs . . . anyways, here's some Easter stuff, both new and from the archive, with a better post later today.

 

Scanned in '22, I don't know if these where from then, or earlier, it was a major scanning session with several hundred bits of ephemera scanned, most of which is still in the long queue! But, card flats, to join the card-flat zone! I don't know if the names change from box/batch to box/batch, and they are obviously renditions of the Lindt chocolate bunnies, from the back of a Lindt egg box.

 

One of my fondest memories of Easter was hunting the Lindt foil-wrapped, mini-eggs; in the garden if the weather was nice; in the house if Christ's tears prevented outdoor activities.

 

Mum would buy them from the big glass jar in Richard's newsagents in Hartley Wintney, and she would have the staff ensure there were equal quantities of each colour (maybe she just ate the spares?!), which I remember as two shades of gold, a pastel green and blue, a heliotrope-purple, a mauve, and a red which was closer to pinkish-crimson/maroon.

 

Anyway, there was a big divvy-up at the end, between my brother and I, and if the two piles weren't balanced, we'd have to go off again and find the missing ones! I don't think you can even get them any more, it's all unwrapped, licence-related eggs, in plastic bags now, and getting very expensive in the last few years, for a number of reasons, not the least being the chocolate-loving, 8-billion souls.

 

Somehow missed when I did the chocolate bunny season back in '24, this was the Kinder effort, I thought it might have a 'maxi' egg, but it's a bog-standard sized capsule, with what appears to be a lamb in a blanket, but it's not 100% clear, and the toy's 'aint what they used to be!

 

Staying with the edible theme, I actually ate these weeks ago! Branded to World of Sweets, I think they were in B&M, but I honestly can't remember, they might have been in The Range? Anyway, they were a sort of generic tutti-fruity flavour, and are 'Spring', not Easter, is that Trump's hated 'woke', or just canny marketing, from money-grubbing, middle-class executives, no better than Trump himself?

 

Some actual Toys! These WERE in The Range, a couple of weeks ago, and remind me of an old Christmas stocking gift we got one year, which were egg-shaped vehicles, with fat 'racing slick' tyres, like the Marx fire engine we saw here, but as animals, so, more like the Pelican marker pens we saw here, given that one was a grey mouse and the other a pink rabbit, if memory serves? I occasionally look for them on eBay, but haven't found them yet!

 

These are a selection of sort of monster/alien types, using the same craft foam you can buy in sheets, applied to basic blown-plastic eggs, Not sure what the plastic type is, but it seems very thin, so some ethylene hybrid probably?

 

And, as I said at the top, something better, which you might have anticipated, latter today! Bah! Humbug!

L is for Local Loot - 1 of 2

Managed a quick pass through the charity shops at the end of January, and succeeded in grabbing a few things, among which were a couple of real oddities.

 

A bag if bits, a bag of animals and a large squidgey . . . thing!

 

Starting with the squidgey thing, is it a lizard, is it a dinosaur, is it some kind of salamanda? One of those soft silicon-rubber toys filled to bursting with expanded polystyrene beads, which give it a stiff 'beanie baby' vibe, and no markings to speak of? The primordial amphibious ancestor, whose existence annoys the anti-Darwin brigade?

 

Probably a full set of ten smaller PVC-alike animals, not sure, but they are all of similar size, quality and material, and with so many of these sets out there, something we will return to one day, when I try to ascribe all, or most of them properly!

 

Three that don't seem to match the rest, and might be from one than one source?

 

The bag of bits contains some right oddities, with a bit of Kinder, some Kinder-like, a few 'army men' and other oddities. The apple with worm, might be a Pokémon, or one of those Studio Ghibli vinyls, they produce 25-figure advent calenders these days, so there's quite a few out there to find.

 

These are both mildly disturbing, the green spider has a gold, polypropylene key hidden in a slotted pouch in its belly, while the eight-legged chrysalis type thing, seems to be designed to contain a larger solid? Both are a soft rubberised polymer/elastomer of some kind, and may be connected to some of the other odd things in the previous image, such as the pink crab, or strange yellow baby?

A is for A Bit of Fun!

Picked these up the other day, an end of line I'd missed in The Range, I saw them and thought "Well, I'd better 'av some a'that", and took them home with me!

 

A stack of Robot highlighters! The pad-reservoir is only about a centimetre long, so they won't last, and will dry-out quite quickly, even without use, but it's six more Robots, and it's funny, whether it's white-buttons, erasers, Christmas baubles stretchies, or other novelties; Robots always seem to join the collection in multiples!

 

The upper shot is colour true, after which, my new, hideously expensive Canon camera started to misbehave and is currently shooting in the 'cold' spectrum of white, and I'm having to recolour in Picasa?

 

While I was there I noticed they had the dig-for-space-stuff balls, seen here a while ago, back in stock, and having satisfied myself they did ONLY have the two designs/combo's (Jupiter/Shuttle and Earth/Astronaut), gabbed another of the latter and dug the astronaut out.

 

Colour is a bit shot on this one too, but you can see, A) it's a darn-sight messier than the plain gypsum-plaster ones, as the (presumably) powder paint used to colour the mix and decorate the outer ball is all powerful!

 

B) there are a bunch of buried 'jewels' which aren't even mentioned in the packaging blurb, and C), the astronaut is larger than I was expecting, at around 28/30mm, and a softish polyethylene, who cleaned-up but had slight staining, which will need bleach - it's all water-based colour.

 

So six Robots and another spaceman in the collection, sorry the images are a bit shit.

F is for Follow-up . . . Vickers . . . Plus

And an example of my utter incompetence! Off the back of my Timpo Vickers MG post the other day, Brian Berke sent me a bunch of images from the Big Apple (a rather frozen Big Apple, I might add!), I thanked him, and mentioned I'd just seen two images of machine-guns somewhere in Picasa (literally a day or two before his eMails), and would dig them out for a fuller (more full?)  post.

 

I downloaded his images, and thought no more about it for a few days. Announced a machine-gun follow-up, as the next post (intended for that (Saturday) evening), and then spent about eight hours over the next two days, trying to find the images.

 

I went from the top of Picasa, to the bottom (some 1200 folders), and from the bottom to the top, even all the old college stuff, and non-toy folders, I tried everything on the desktop, I looked in other esoteric locations, I tried tricking myself by going back to one I knew I'd just looked at, in case they had magically appeared while my head was turned, I opened the folders in case they weren't showing in Picasa, I was going stir-crazy mad!

 

Starting to convince myself I'd imagined it, despite being able to picture both images, I thought I'd check the folder where things are waiting to go on the dongles, and bloody found them! Only to realise that when I'd found them the few days earlier, I'd thought "What are these doing here?", and moved them to the 'done' folder! We actually saw them here in 2022!

 

But, we only saw them briefly in posts which were making some vague point to someone, somewhere, so we'll look at them again, in this unstructured look at machine-guns! Indeed, the only structure, is the stuff from Brian, which is all Vickers, except some of them are probably Brownings, and technically, they are all Maxims!

 

Left to right in the upper shots, clockwise from the top-left, in the lower collage, we have a lovely bit of plastic, owned by so many of us back in the day, and among my favourites of the era, the Timpo 'solid', later Action Pack, 8th Army gunner, here the earlier painted version, Action Pack's were unpainted, but give us several colour-variations to look out for, we saw some of them here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2019/09/m-is-for-monty-and-is-mob.html

 

Then we have two versions of the Britains hollow-cast gunner, one, the pre-WWI sculpt, which would become the early-war accurate representation, the other the inter-war head-sculpt, who is both late WWI and early (BEF/Home Guard) WWII accurate. A change Brian wondered if Britains were happy with having to do, but I guess, you have to move with the times, especially when you last as long as Briatins did . . . I've highlighted in the past how Zang, Herald, Swoppets and then Herald Hong Kong & Deetail, changed, over time, often while running along-side each other, even unto replacing Lee Enfield's with SLR's, and - these days -even our cheapo china-troop 'Army Men' mostly have Kevlar Fritz-helmets and bullpup automatics!

 

Lastly a US Dime Store, or home-casting figure, hunched over what would have been a Browning version of Hiram Maxim's steel-sleeved, water-cooled, single-barrelled, automatic-action, gas-blowback, rifle-ammunition firing 'Machine Gun'!

 

Brian then found a couple more, with the Bergan Toy & Novelty Company (Beton), on the left of each pair in a hard-wearing polystyrene, or earlier phenolic type polymer; dense, hard plastic, but relatively infrangible.

To the right another, more obviously Dime Store, or is he a die-cast, he looks pretty chunky, and relatively uniquely to America, there was a trend for cast-iron toys, from the 18-something's, to the mid C20th. Also, it's nice to see a Crescent sizer, they've rather taken a back-seat this last few years, as mine are in storage, I should try to dig one out, and keep it around!

 

Then he spotted another one hiding on a shelf! It's another Dime Store-looking chap, and if any American readers can ID any of the three US metal ones, that would be appreciated. Many-thanks to Brian for all the above, but, as discussed, I was on a mission by now!

 

Seen before, better light this time, one of the two errant images, and mostly 'Maxims'! My favourite here is the Japanese novelty blow-mould (back-right), it always amazes me that such delicate models ever survive, but thus is the creditable job of collectors, especially those collectors who aren't hooked-up on the 'big names'!

 

Down the left we have a bunch of minor-make composition, I can't tell you who any of them are made by, and they look to have been repainted anyway, so, as far as hard-core composition experts go, no more than curiosities, even if there are Lineol or Elastolin among them?

 

Bottom left is a less common Polish chap, probably PZG, but could be a lesser make, or even an East German? A modern-production Jap, in the top left corner (BMC or AiP), with a trio of Frenchies front centre, and a couple more foreign troops filling the corner, up by the blow-mould.

 

While the front-right corner is mostly early British plastic; Charbens, Cherilea (note the similarity of the Cherilea Russian and Sikh soldiers with Bren Guns), Crescent (WWI), Timpo, and a Zang composition, along with a late Toyway version of the Action Pack, in shiny grey.

 

Terrible photo (me being an idiot!), but the more interesting shot. The grey machine-gun is probably a Marx reissue, but anyone following Ed Burg, this last few weeks will have seen several versions from Marx and Payton, and I know T Cohn/Superior/Brumberger had several goes, among others!

In the middle we see the late polyethylene Beton, with a lead Timpo GI and two of the metallic-bronze tanned Charbens crew, serving an Atlantic mortar!

 

The Atlantic Maxim is being fired by a Spanish figure, but Russian equipment means a Republican defending democracy from the Fascists (how the Republican movement has changed, eh, Donald?), crescent barbed-wire defending his flank, and a spare Timpo Vickers is up the back-left!

 

Another modern figure in front, an unknown semi-flat, from right, just behind the Atlantic Navy (or Air Force?) gunner, with a bird's eye view of another Spanish figure front centre. The WWI gunner with service-cap, may be Crescent, with a Speedwell/Trojan/VP type in front? And the lead gun next to the Timpo Vickers, could be a 'new metal' jobbie?

 

Which should leave four; three flats and the other wheeled Russian Maxim . . .

 

The more interesting is the metal semi-flat, upper left in the previous shot, as he is a short-lived attempt by Timpo to produce die-cast alloy figures. The common one found is the standing pose, I have picked-up several, over the years, and various sellers told me various tales as to who made him (Sacul was a favourite, as were Clarke Brothers), but, as you can see, Timpo was the culprit. I now have to find the prone rifleman loose!

 

However, it's clear, reading Garratt, Joplin or Opie, that nobody knows what Timpo were really doing at the start, and with moulds bought, borrowed or copied, and the still partly mysterious Zang/Timpolin thing, we probably will never know everything, so these could have been bought-in, or commissioned from a third party, maybe even Zang!

 

The other two RPD-equipped flats are Polish (lower shot), and I used to think (having been told so) that they were Centrum, but I think one of the Poles elsewhere, questioned that attribution, in one of his locally published articles? While the Maxim Gun above, is for PZG gunners, I think?

 

Which brings us to this, and while I've been strict about not doing Russian stuff since the illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I'm slipping this in here, as Chris Smith sent it to the Blog ages ago as a follow-up to the Leningrad Forging Factory post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2014/02/l-is-for-leningrad-forging-factory.html

 

In which I mentioned plain, grey plastic versions, and Chris sent examples (for another day) along with this 40mm (scale, not calibre!) machine-gun which I hadn't encountered, and which wasn't included in the chrome-finish set, in that earlier post.

 

While this 35mm Starlux piece (looks more like an anti-tank rifle!) has been seen before, without crew (and the crew have been seen before, with a different weapon), and the shot has been hanging around in Picasa for ages, waiting for a machine-gun post, I guess! And this, over 53-hours late, is that post! Cheers to Chris and Brian for their help.