F is for Found Objects - Four of . . . More

Back to the general detritus of lives lived, and where those remnants combine with the interests of the Blog or my collecting habits! Remembering that we've also seen the tub of Christmassy cake-decoration pieces, and the stash of things Mum 'borrowed' for her silversmithing. There was more cake-decorating stuff in the garage, but they were subsumed into the collection a few years ago, when I sorted the garage out.

 

On the left; a Tri-Ang clockwork key-winder, I think it's the same as late Hornby and probably some tail-end Mettoy or Minic toys, earlier, pre-war toys tended to have more original designs, sometimes quite ornate, often individually toy-specific winders.

On the right; a plastic Meccano spanner, probably held-on to became it also fit some of the plastic nuts on the loo-tank/cistern, and Mum felt plastic-on-plastic would do less harm to nuts and threads!

 

We saw the stone 'Shroom, when I Blogged the Giant space and Aliens back in 2021, it will be a false-coloured one, like some of the more garish stone eggs you see, porous rock is dyed under pressure, oven-dried and worked/polished to produce stuff like this surprised being!

 

And we saw the mini-pencils/pencil-tops in the previous post, which leaves two craft style felt animals, built-up on wooden-dowel sections, they were probably Heals or Habitat items, very 1970's in styling, but so moth-eaten when I found them, they went to the fire-gods shortly after this shot! A monkey and a cat . . . I think, it might have been a demented panda!

 

At the front are a Shell-petrol keyring, a pair of magnetic pigs who still have the kissing-power and a small ceramic horse, which will be a 20th century copy of earlier pieces I think, nothing 'Ming', but nice, and often done in Ivory, there's a nice set of eight ivorene premium horses in the oriental style from the mentioned-the-other-day Jacquet.

A vintage Christmas gift box (funny how so much of this stuff harks back to Christmases past, every post so far has had Christmas references), sadly stained, with a slice of crimbo-cake I suspect; the staining has that translucence of sugar or alcohol, and the browning of molasses!

But containing old cracker gifts/prizes/novelties, being a ball-puzzle, mini Yo-yo, key/magnifying glass (never understood the combination, but there was always one in a  cheap set of crackers), pirate's eye-patch and something I've already forgotten, it was either a whistle or a periscope?

And note Santa is riding a rocket. So quite a 'Sputnik-fever', 1950's vibe on the wrapping paper!

I had, in the past, supplied my Mother with empty Kinder-eggs, which she would put a few pieces of fine gravel in, to provide endless hours of fun to kittens and younger, or young-at-heart cats, and as they got lost under furniture, more capsules would be procured from moi!

 

Clearly, at some point, a non-empty one was sent to feline playgroup. Mum used to work as a volunteer at the Barnardo's charity shop here in Fleet (before it closed, and they were all laid-off their unpaid roles!), and she may have got this one from there, I don't think it's necessarily Kinder either, one of the Turkish or Italian minor-brands?

Balls! The Wham-O again I think, an antique, glass, codswallop bottle-stop in front of it, and something I've forgotten in the interim, but which is the smallest size of gum-ball capsule container from the look of it?

 

An eclectic mix here with two tortoises, one a PVC tub/tube/blister/header-bag type with full paint, the other a polyethylene glow-in-the-dark novelty with keychain loop, probably from a Christmas cracker?

 

A piece of non-Lego, a felt-tip pen lid, a pearlescent bead, a very small battleship's turret and a Native American, who could be the remains of my 1980 collection (we moved here in October 43 years ago!), or an errant piece of show-plunder from more recent years?

 

One half of the pyramid puzzle from crackers, we looked at these a few years ago, and there was already a bag of oddments, so this will join them, and I think I've said before, I intend in a year or two, to run that whole mini-season of novelty posts again, but with everything now in the collection, storage, then and since, in each category, and any extra-subjects after Christmas; it will be fun to compare them, day by day.

 

This used to be in each car's 'emergency kit' when we were kids. It's an unmarked generic, probably British rather than Hong Kong, but you never know, it's a lovely memory-thing to find, we used to love fiddling with it when we were kids.

Back then there were two standard promotional items from the tyre manufactures, small model-tyres like this with a compass, sometimes as a key ring, and larger replicas as ashtrays, with either a glass or tin-plate insert as the 'wheel', they would be marked up with Goodyear, Michelin, Pirelli etc . . . sometimes, even depicting a specific tyre type, or new range.

This is obviously a mid-century, rear, tractor tyre, so may have come from an agricultural equipment firm, and with farmers on both sides of the family back then, could have come to us via either?

F is for Found Objects - Two of . . . a Few

Continuing with this little bit of silliness, and I seem to have shot these in different configurations - as I was sorting and putting away I guess? More bits & bobs as found over the least three years.

A bunch of keys, with a PVC peanut, possibly from the old VW Golf Mum had many years ago? Lego bits and a marble, a cat's collar bell (which will end-up on the Christmas tree, they fill all the teeny gaps at the top!) and a plastic ring - probably from a Christmas Cracker's 'ring-toss' game - which will go to 'spares'.

 

An old Remembrance Day poppy stalk (we'll revisit them one day) and half a pistol grip from a small gun, its antler-horn finish has mostly been scraped away, and I suspect Mum was mid-way through reshaping it to replace a damaged or missing one on another weapon when that too was lost or broken? Mum was very handy at that sort of home-craft stuff.

 

A relatively modern looking box of crayons (99p in Woolworth's, they're about a fiver now! And have their own collector community), a plastic bullet (anyone know the toy it came from?), a playing-card joker, bouncy ball, Airfix Paratrooper and a wooden elephant of some style!

 

Two balls, and while I've only just added a collective image of balls to the Jig-Toy Page, these two have yet to be added to that page, although a reverse-colours football is there! The larger one has the same mechanism (i.e. 'simple') as the modern rubber one in that other picture!

Most seen above, but the gold-paper cracker-crown is an addition. I believe the elephant was made by my brother in woodwork classes at school, and may be a pattern some of you will recognise from your own past efforts? And I've mentioned before his private army of red/blue uniformed figures! It contained all his favourite figures from about four different sets, it was officer-heavy!

The card is somewhere between the very small ones you find in Christmas crackers, and normal or full size ones, and I have a small collection of mostly jokers and ace-of-spades somewhere, so this will join them, and I'll blog them at some point!

 

I believe the ball is a Wham-O original, it has that strange creaking noise I've observed with them before, and while I 'know' what the two neutral plastic pegs are from, I can't - right now - remember, and it may have nothing to do with toys, but I shot them together, so I think it must have? Maybe they just looked useful?

Liqueur miniature crates! Very useful for Action Man (beer) or larger doll's houses (milk, or something 'girly'!), I've put the cover in the spares zone as I though it might make a good roof for a sci-fi building or space-station at some point! one is old and has been hanging around for years (red), the other was from TKMaxx a year or two ago -blue one.

T is for The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

It's also for trees, terrible timekeeping and troublesome assistant!

This was supposed to be, or to be specifically accurate; was originally intended to be - the third post on the golf day we had a week or two ago, but, I thought, it would be better used for National Tree Week, once I had become aware of NTW, given it's about the trees with this particular set.

Obviously, plans went awry last week and I never got all the tree stuff out, so it might as well have been used on Good Walk Spoiled Day instead, but, hey-ho, there are no rules to this Blogging malarkey, unless you're my critics in which case apparently there's a whole bunch of rule books but nobody's got round to sending me copies! Anywhoos - here's Carpet Golf from Turner Research, late!

Did I say troublesome assistant? Straight into the packaging like a rat up a drainpipe!

Box was shite, but I didn't get it for the box (which was in the kindling bucket for fire starting minutes after this shot) and a poor box means a cheaper deal! We'll get on the the trees and figures in a minute, but I also kept the two bunkers and the water feature; they may come in useful at some point in the future?

I did measure the figures, but I've forgotten what it was and put them away! I think it was about 110mm - judging from the fingers below! The figures have a lever action which enables them to putt, chip or whack large expanded-polystyrene balls about the place with gay abandon!

I've also kept the green-flag (which is red!) and it will join a plethora of other, larger, wood, metal and plastic flags & standards in a tub somewhere.

Working the leaver to show how simple it is - both the golfer and the mechanism . . . tada! They are manufactured from a very dense PVC which I came to wishI hadn't separated for the 'how' shot when trying to get them to go back together again; but they went in the end with a bit of brute force!

There were only two clubs in the box, there should be six, but - again- I wasn't buying it for the golf!

I was buying it for the bloody trees weren’t I!

Over a decade ago, when I worked for JB, we had a couple of these come through the stock, and since then I'd had it on the 'long list', and from time to time would check it on evilBay; in the end I got one. It's not rare and if you're careful you can pick one up for reasonable money, not for the 'pre-executive toy' executive-toy elements, but for the trees!

Britains style trees, (marked Japan interestingly), but in autumnal colours, which, when placed with a couple of Britains copper-beeches, can make a believable autumn scene, clearly Japanese acers; they can be your very-own Westonbirt! The bases are Britains as far as it goes, but the tree trunks are more original.

As it happens; I think I'm missing an orange sprig, the box suggests using both colours for each tree, and going by the obvious studs (anyone who's made-up these types of tree will know extra fronds can be placed on twigs/branches not directly intended for them!) the two trees are supposed to take eight and six sprigs respectively, which could be 7 & 7 colour wise? But I'll be looking out for a yellow one!

This also comes in the set, also 'Japan', it seems to be complete but could have used a couple-more spreads of greenery? Also clearly channeling Britains, not only in the base-shape, but in the fact that the side branches both follow the Britains 'system' and seem to be copied from the Britains Cedar, despite the main trunk being more original?

However, the similarities are explained . . .

. . . by the fact that an original Britains Cedar was available to someone at Turner during the design phase! I dare say they had more than one Britains tree to so peruse?

I is for Inclusion

I will add a new tag for this post: 'Inclusion Toy', as I have a whole tub of these somewhere with dinosaurs, sea-life, soldiers, N-gauge parachutists* and others with a few brands, but this one stayed on its card and is in with a bunch of other rack-toys we've been working through this RTM.

* They're real fun, between 1 and 5 tiny little almost-stick figures, doing various arrangements of free-fall display above small, aerial-view, photograph-discs also included a few millimeters below the figures.

Obviously the trope here is that a very small (about 1:76th) figure is set into the bouncy-ball, in this case along with a tiny football about the size of a pin-head.

While the branding is more problematical, as it's credited to 'England' (the team), Via the Football Association (FA), with the addition of Hy-Pro (an 'outdoor manufacturer'?) but there will be some management/publicity firm behind that, and they will have commissioned the artifact (along with mugs and t-shirts et al) from a third party who will have approached the same contract-manufacturers as every other rack-toy wholesaler!

The figure (as with all these inclusion balls) appears to be around 1:72nd scale, but that is the magnifying effect of the clear sphere of polymer surrounding it, when you dig them out they are always smaller. Memory suggests we did look at one some time ago - a dinosaur, or a sea lion? If I can find it, I'll tag it with the new tag, and I can build on the tag in the future, when I find the rest.

T is for Ten-pins and Terrasaurs!

For which spell-check is desperate for me to use Pterosaur! Clever spell-check, but no humorous intellectual, not that I would claim to be eye'ther . . . eei'ther but you know what I mean; these AI algorithms improve with every generation (which according to Moor's Law is not long), but they'll never quite grasp the finer nuances of human idiocy.

Anyway, we're back to rubbers, and as I've had had various 'follow-up's' and 'again's' for erasers in the past I needed another title and its explanation has provided the lead-in paragraphs!

From four-quid to two-quid to a pound, and it's probably been halfway round the planet, maybe twice! Novelty shite . . . in one image, you have all the evidence you need for the potential end of human civilisation, it's now a race between whether we will poison the planet before the weather does for us! House of Holland clearance via TK Maxx.

The reason for my purchasing them - given my above opinion - is that A) they were there already, nothing I could do about that and B) you may remember I showed a bunch of mostly Christmas cracker bowling pins a year or two ago, and while the bulk of them were the same size, there were a couple of others, and in various materials - with more than two being a collection; these have increased the scope of that 'sub-' collection!

In the meantime a far easier to justify set of erasers winged its way to Small Scale World Towers via Brian Berke; Imperial Toys being the ultimate culprit for the supply of this particularly pure stash of addictive substance!

They appeared upon initial inspection to be a better version of the Wilko ones we looked at a while ago, but after studying them I decided they are probably all of the same origin.

They proved impossible to photograph so here are two shots, neither is that colour-true, to be honest, but they are (with the exception of the - always hard to shoot - orange) quite muted pastels anyway.

Wilkinson above and Imperial below, the colour reproduction is a little better but the orange has burnt-out. The differences are numerous, in that the dino's are different colours, the egg is slightly different in its base 'dent' and both the mix of dinosaurs and their dino-poses is different.

However the orange carnivore is both the same shade and the same moulding,the ceratopsians are also identical, the two-each of four colours 'rule' applies and so I think the differences are down to batch/contract, rather than any indication of another maker's copying.

The question is whether Wilko are getting theirs from Imperial, or if that they are independently both going to the same factory gate or shipping agent - these days as likely to be an Alibaba wholesaler's page as any of the old firms?

I might suggest that there's probably an eighth pose to find (maybe more?), and I've posed them with Airfix's Boy the 'dinoheard' from the Tarzan set to give you some idea of how very small they are.

Thanks as always to Brian Berke for adding another piece of the puzzle to the whole, which reminds me; he also sent a couple of Jig Toys which I added to that page last Thursday, nothing new, but interesting colour-way on the helicopter.

P is for Pre- and Post-Christmas Plunder Pics

Although 'plunder' is probably too strong a word for the few odds and sods that turned-up - for the most part - in Charity shops over the festive build-up and deflation!

These were covered fully by Colin Penn in Plastic Warrior magazine (Issue 165) just before Christmas, but I thought I'd get one while I was buying similar stuff for little people in the run-up to the big day, and was lucky enough to get the most bearable of the figurines . . .

. . . the reindeer! He comes with a little blue 'ice' disc to sit in which I forgot to photograph.

He's shot with a Schleich cat I picked-up in the Toysaurus because it was in the cheapest price bracket, a foot-bouncy-ball I rescued from our cats as they are too old to play with it now, another which came from the floor of a store somewhere - in order not to steal it I 'accidently' kicked it into the mall hall and then nearly lost it as it took it's newness and freedom as a chance to go a bit spastic!

They'll both go in the Novelty box I started last autumn with the non-figural stuff from the December '15 posts, along with the inclusion balls from Xmas and the soy sauce fish bottle, which is another 'found object'.

The charity shops gave up a mixed batch on the evening of the 23rd, there are 8 in Fleet and I managed to get to 7 of them before closing as I walked back through town. A large Minion pirate, the green one from Monsters Inc (who looks like a loopy fruit pencil top!) and a resin 'wise man' (and there were probably more than three)* who looks like he may be a copy of an earlier Italian (or Spanish?) model.

* As I understand it none of the four gospels mention a total, one names the three who give gifts, another as good as suggests a whole bunch of them, I don't read the Bible; I did once, too much rape, concubines and incest, not enough sex or magic! And that God - he's always killing people, large numbers of people!

Also from a Charity Shop bin, three late Britains animals in good paint condition (10p each), but from the leery-paint era! These all go in a big bag and every now and again I sort out the best as 'main sample' and throw the rest in the rummage box for PW's show.

Save's the best for last; In an eMail following my posting of the multi-set shelfies I found before Christmas Brian Berke was saying he's seen a drop-off of the figures in the US (you may remember he brought them to the Blog's attention first) but had seen 'a few' 60mm ones.

I didn't think too deeply on the comment from what was a longer, chatty eMail, but a week or so later was checking out the sale at Basingrad's TK Max, ostensibly for the tree decoration bears (no joy) and while they had flogged 90% of their pre-Xmas display-stock and retreated to their 'other 10 months' shelf area, I found these!

60mm versions of the 'old school' DC Comics superheroes, and bendy toys! They were in a pile of yellow-tagged 'get it before it's gone' stuff, and if Brian hadn't mentioned them, I think I may have skimmed-over them without 'seeing' them if you know what I mean!

Three quid? That's a-pound-a-figure, a good omen for the coming year? Let's hope so 'cos with Brexit, Trump and Putin leading the march of progress for the next few years there 'aint gonna be much progress, but there may be a lot of marching - if you know what I mean!

B is for Bouncysaurus and Buffalo, or is it Bison

Nah! Yer wash yer'hands in a by'son! An oldie but goodie! And it could be a wisent!

These are funny little novelty items, I bought a fair few about 10-15 years ago, mostly from a party shop down near Eastbourne somewhere, but a few nearer home (somewhere in Aldershot - I think?), there are Soldiers, footballers and tiny little sky-divers around 1:300-compatible in formations, a nice set of Arctic/Antarctic mammals (Killer-whale, dolphins, seals, sea-lions, walruses &etc.), fish and something else I can't remember because they are all in storage! No matter we can look at them again one day, and in the meantime these were on Clearance at the Toysaurus for a quid the other day.

What looks like a Gaur (or poorly sculpted Wildebeest?), the Bison/Buffalo/Wisent type, and a crested dinosaur, now imported by AI&E of the Netherlands. The dino is in an all-clear, hard-silicon or Whan-o secret-formula type polymer, while the two ruminants get a background of coloured flecks which are magnified into a washed out swirly-greenery effect.

One of the lots I bought way-back was an end-of-line, so I talked the shop-assistant into letting me keep the tub, as a result most of them are kept in the tub, but I always cut a few free - as samples - for future posts like this one!

You can see how much the magnification-effect is, when you release one, they are actually very small, but equally at home with Airfix soldiers and their ilk; here shown with Atlantic buffalo. Atlantic did two sets of these, one set slightly smoother (illustrated) than the other, add the bouncy-ball one and a couple of Priser's and you've got a fine heard with few duplicates!

You can also see the layering involved in getting the various elements in place. The skydivers I mentioned above are palced in their pairs, or diamonds or circles around what would be the 'Tropic of Capricorn', while below them (at the 'Tropic of Cancer') is a small disc with an aerial photograph of a landscape 'far below'. Others have both a whole-coloured and clear halves. While the soldiers and footballers are a disappointment freed of the ball, as they have no base!