B is for Box-ticking Bountiful Bags from the Boot!

I picked these up at the last BP toy fair at Sandown Park  . . .

 

. . . Dulcop bagged Wild West sets from Italy, and I think this might be how Plastic Warrior magazine imported them, way back when, but I could be wrong about that, they may have got them all loose, hence the melty ones Brian Carrick gave the Blog a few years ago?

 

The tall slim one is the Indians, with totem-pole and wigwam, the cowboys (to the right) get a tent and the short bag is American Civil War, with a small selection of cavalry from both sides.

 

The ACW set, I think it's two mounted from each of the Union 'Blues' and Confederate 'Grays', a pretty basic set compared to the other two? I have a cross-section of the loose figures, which we looked at here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2015/09/d-is-for-dulcop.html 

 

Not clear what's in the tent, but I think it's four foot and two mounted (same as the ACW), but it might be three mounted and five or six foot? You also get a camp-fire to cook your beans on, outside your tent!

 

While with the Indians you get a full set of foot figures, I think, six, eight? A mounted figure, the same camp-fire and a totem pole. There's also something which looks like it might be the sticks for the Tipi, and there's a sort of weapon-stand thing, which is plug-in decoration for the Tipi, other accessories may be hidden under the figures/inside the Tipi, which could be a selection from a stretched skin, carpet, sack, cactus, tree with vulture,  &etc.

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!

A is for Aaaaahahahaaa, aahh, haa, haaar!

Which may be the sighing-yell from The Good The Bad and The Ugly, I'm not sure if I got all those 'a's in the right place?!! Just a quick follow-up on the Argentine Tarzan post of the other day (two posts down the page), and to welcome the Blog's newest fan, Mr. Incognito? Those who know; know, hee-hee-hee!

 

Friend of the Blog Gisby pointed out a marked similarity between the Marx Indian with knife and the various Argentine iterations of Tarzan we looked at the other day, and I thought I had one here for a comparison shot, but I only had the MPC copy (far left here), so the one on the right is from Worthpoint, and while it may not be obvious, there is, in other shots, from other angles, a clear resemblance between them, the Argentinians having raised the arms, while MPC move a leg slightly.

 

I'd also forgotten how big the pink Argie is, next to the painted one which goes on the elephant, I would say the lead one is 54mm, the painted one was about 60/70mm (same as the WoW-style painted Marx one here from Worthpoint) while the pink one is nearer 90/100mm (so that Jaguar probably does go with him?), and the MPC clone is closer to 50mm - all by eye, mind, I didn't measure any of them!

This chap's come in recently, the Blue Box kneeling, we saw them (there's a standing one too) here at Small Scale World, years ago, but the paint on this one is marginally better than my best example, so will become the new No.1, when they are all reunited in the new house . . . which is closer now this one's on the market! He needs a careful clean with a cotton-bud!

Mr & Mrs Gorilla visit Tarzan for tea! Also a recent purchase, I have all the Dulcop figures in storage with some of the animals, so the Tarzan is a duplicate, but I needed both gorillas - Lord of the Jungle, King of the Apes!

C is for Canoes - 12 - Triples

Welp, I'm already at Sandown Park for a day of toy mania, but for those of you who aren't with me, or already wending your way to Esher or its environs, here's a few of the 'three-handers' available for your generic Native American tribe!

The re-issue of the Cherilea canoe is getting harder to find itself, but for those whose budget can't stretch to the original which we saw here (shot on Adrian's stall, at Sandown ironically - and equally ironically; I don't have either model yet!), it's a nice model, if a little hard to keep level, yet probably too heavy to float well?

Here it is off on a raid with a Dulcop-Timpo combination on the left, Dulcop providing the boat, while a Dulcop-Hong Kong combi' on the right have the crew coming from Italy! The Cherilea is in five parts, with each crew-member having a plug-in station on the deck insert.

 

Also from Brian, is this shot of the later (?) MPC offering, another triple-crewed vessel, this one has three of their own 60mm  'ring-hand' figures who had holes in their bases which slid over a stud in the deck of the boat.

 

While this (which won't enlarge much, I'm afraid) is from a Toy House/World Toy House leaflet and is probably a Hong Kong copy of MPC's other trio-boat, with piracies of Tim Mee's 60mm figures. It would fit with the wagon recently seen on Ed's Blog, and seen a while ago here. MPC also did a two-hander in the Jungle range.

C is for Canoes - 11 - Dulcop

In the continuing checking of stuff for these posts, I found the blue one from the introductory post (which was in the Hong Kong folder) was actually the Dulcop one from Italy, so I've corrected there, and we'll have a quick look here!

Quite a nice model, but still - design-wise - the sort of thing you find for hire in aluminium or fibre-glass reinforced resin at the lake/riverside today! I think these are the correct figures too, and unpainted like this, they'll be from the later production which included the stuff contracted/imported by our own Plastic Warrior Magazine, but I don't know if they carried this piece.

 

Re-crewed with Timpo's chaps, no knife out this time, but I don't think axe-fishing is a particularly successful technique! As this is a brief post, Brian's river/lake surface is worth a moment's study, I don't know what the surface is, painted wood, Vinyl/PVC or some other sheet material, but I thought Tom's varnished floor-tile was also quite good the other day.

C is for Canoes - 1 - Introduction

Voyagers Canoe - image origin unknown

 

So, this has been building for sometime now, and I can't remember if Brian Berke started it or answered a call, but back in the Autumn of 2020 he sent me a shed-load of stuff on Western canoes, which got me digging out and shooting mine.

 

Then something happened and it all went on hold, then Mum passed away, then time, then I posted something else, then I ran out of time again, then I lost my Mojo, then my Brother, then HMRC, then HMCTS, then I posted something else, yada, yada, and, and, and . . . they're here now!

 

This is Brian's 'sizer', we'll be looking at all these and more over a series of, err, about 22 posts? Which with real life and other stuff will get us pretty much to RTM, given I will alternate with other posts, so you don't get Canoe'd out!

Also, because it was a while ago that the notes were taken, Brian may have to correct the odd detail as we go! So, from left running down the column, then the right, we have;

• Don't know! Big, polystyrene.
  
• Hong Kong copy of Britains trapper/2nd type
• Dulcop
• MPC
• Timpo 2-berth
• Hong Kong 
  
• Hong Kong Knick Knack 1-berth 

-

• Post Giant 25mm figures with 6-berth canoe
• Not sure, I think it's the Cherilea/Dorset re-issue?
• Star Toys copy of Timpo 2-berth
• Tim Mee
  
• Hong Kong loosely based on Herald/Briains 1st type
• Hong Kong Knick Knack 3-berth

My storage sample, it has since received all the ones here and gone back to storage (as have the Totem poles been reunited and shipped off again, so we'll look at them again in a year or two!) We did manage to look at the rafts a while ago - they were supposed to be the opener to this season!

The pale one on its side is similar to Brian's dark one, two from the bottom in the right-hand column of his photo, see also below. It's a basic line-up, to which I haven't added that many, a few HK ones and the copy raft seen previously.
 

One of my Sizers;

• Supreme copy of Britains trapper/2nd type
• Copy of Supreme, even down to decoration!
• Hong Kong  copy of Britains trapper/2nd type
• Hong Kong loosely based on Herald/Briains 1st type
• Hong Kong rack-toy rubbish (Rado, Hing Fat, a lesser brand?)

You can see how that pale one is more like a theme-park canoe, with smooth [aluminium] sides, and the trashy one is very loosely based on the Britains trapper/2nd type

Another, from the left and working up to the right;

• Beeju
• Junk one
  
• 'Theme park' one
  
• Herald/Briains 1st type
• Hong Kong copy of Britains trapper/2nd type
• Timpo 4-berth

Two of Brian's with his idyllic little island, which will reappear through these posts and serves as a further sizer/scale guide, here a Hong Kong copy of the Britains 2nd type which I'll be calling the 'Trapper' as I think that's when it first appeared, however by the end it was the only version still in production . . . during the Deetail years. Behind it, the pink Hong Kong one, it's actually quite dinky, but more of a hollowed log . . . for Amazonian Indians!

 

Here we see the 3-berth 'knick-knack', the previous two and a Timpo 2-berth, the Timpo look like they might be on dodgy ground here, he's drawn his knife and the other three boats are rather bearing-down on them!

 

Brian's blue one [is Dulcop] loosely based on Britains 1st version, but with a bowed hull, it has the stars on the prow (or stern here!), a detail Timpo also sort of copied, so the first post will be the Britains family as many of the others come-off them, although there were many metal, wood, US plastic and probably a few Hong Kong novelty ones (like the Knick Knacks) which predate the Herald, but we are looking predominantly at the plastics, and it's a starting point!

Ah, yes . . . if you're really lucky, you might find someone in the Deep South selling their exclusive Terricata canoes! Say it like you heard it dude (or dudess?), Google is obviously for 'woke' pussies! Somebody give them fifty-bucks, they've probably got a jacked pick-up truck to feed!

H is for How They Come In - November Sandown Park - General Purchases

So, we're back to the 12th of November last, to look at my plunder pile from that final BP Fairs show of the season (round here, I think they had a later one at the NEC Birmingham), which was better than the previous couple I think? It's marginal, and some sellers always have better days than others, but the buzz seemed to be back to pre-Covid levels, if not pre-Brwreakshit levels!

A fun bag for pennies; these are probably all Dulcop Charlie Kit figures, but could equally be copied piracies from Hong Kong, the Soviet Union, Hungary or elsewhere as they all had a pop, and might be Kinder specific production, rather than the mini-boxed Charlie originals?

Clockwise from top-left; The workbench might go with one of the Charlies? I hadn't considered it before, I have one with half the vice in the odd accessories zone, it's been there for years but I never really gave it much thought but there were a few other bits in the Charlie bag and this might have been one of them? Next to it is a winding mechanism . . . from a  Kinder toy?

Three hollow-cast figures I nabbed from Mercator Trading's cheapie-tray, two sailors and a highlander, makers to-come when I've checked them against Joplin's book and re-Blog them in something more thematic!

A large Easter chick in two-part glued polystyrene, a Roche Fees premium lamb and a Ripley from Alien, who I thought might be 3D printed when I saw her in a rummage tray, but who seems to be more commercial? If she'd been resin and grey or white I might have hazarded the guess of Reaper Miniatures, but in this rotten-lettuce green polymer she remains a question-mark for now, but a really nice figure around that 28/30mm size.

Finally a bunch of animals including a Kellogg's Rhino, and a Merit bear, except I recently noticed Merit seem to have provided their circus/Noah animals to a Coco-Pops cereal premium line (also Kellogg's) toward the end of their existence, which may explain some of the colour variations?

From the left; Cofalu/x French Foreign Legion above ann Auburn Rubber farm maid, late mono-coloured Comansi G.I. and a open-bottomed crate from a large-box or rack-toy play set, I suspect.

Two late Hong Kong'y versions of Waddington's Little Bighorn cavalry officer, with below a selection of die-cast 'mocherette' figures (one Kinder), an AHI sourced Japanese copy of an SAE crusader, a war games grenadier and finally, the laying figure seems to be a civilian sailor, possibly a copy of a plastic kit figure, but just what you need for a Craftline balsa-kit!

To the right we have two of the Jean Napoleonics, I recently learnt were imported into the UK back in the day, in this unpainted state by Plastic Warrior magazine, both above a pair of the Starlux farm we looked at the other day! I have seven of the eight Jean's in the stash somewhere, but I can never remember which one I haven't got, so there are various odds kicking about now, in the hope that one of them is the missing one!

Two aluminium bears, being early- and late-version Wendal's; Wendal removed the bases from a lot of their production (where technical properties allowed) to reduce the amount of material and therefore the unit-cost. Along with a Commonwealth horn-blower ('Miss Switzerland') who once had full paint!

I also picked this up, it's a colour facsimile rather than an original, but it'll look good on the wall of the planed work-space in what should be my final stop in this world! Already mounted, once it's trimmed and framed it'll look better than this slightly curved state! Of note is that both sets of Deetail Germans are present, but the Japanese have been dropped.

S is for [Mostly] Seen Elsewhere - Combat Types

So, a quick round-up of WWII'ey or Modernish stuff most of which I've posted elsewhere in the last twelve months or so, but a couple of which are here for the first time.

A couple more Polish figures, I've actually scored three lots, which we will look at in other posts, but this pair were my first two of the 'Four Tankers & a Dog', Polish TV/Movie related set from PZG, so they were posted with pride a while ago!

Flying West we find this chap (pink) as a Portuguese cereal premium, now, I thought I'd posted these here, but I can't find them, neither can I find any group shots in Picasa, or from the Faceplant Group where I posted this shot, so I don't know what happened to them, but there are more to come (four I think?), currently in storage . . . un-photographed?

Heading South on the same continent finds us in Italy where these could be Jumbo, but are more likely to be Dulcop given the lack of paint. I have Jumbo (or Jumbotoys) marked Wild West with paint, these - unpainted - are just marked Italy and were, I suspect, used by both brand-marks.

Staying in Italy, and we're back with Co-Ma (Coma, CO'MA), for their smaller Alpini, also available in a 60mm'ish size and various bright colours (white and red in my case), and a vary diminutive '20mm' closer to HO, these are a smallish 50mm and more realistic in polymer shade.

Returning home to the UK and we have the shooting targets from Kleeware/Ideal, courtesy of Chris Smith, we've seen them before, and on that occasion I also showed the Ideal catalogue image, but now I've found the Kleeware one . . .

. . . which has not been seen elsewhere, so is a 'blog exclusive'! I mean; it's just a scan and I seem to recal it's been seen in Plastic Warrior magazine, but it closes the circle on these, since their first appearance here!

Also not seen before, I shot the full Britains Deetail 'Battle Group' while they were on their way to the storage unit, we saw most of them when I cleaned them up a decade ago, but there are a few additions, and they nicely fill a 4-litre Really Useful Box. I've left the painted Afrika Korps officer with them, but he's a bit shy!

These two only came-in the other day; a quick feeBay snaffle, you may remember (it's on the Airfix Blog) that my existing bazooka man was cobbled together from a kit of parts and a lot of 'superglue', these two are nice, clean and still flexible, so complete. And here compared with the HO-OO figure.

These are just for fun, I don't have a brand, brand-mark or set name yet, probably late 1980's, Hong Kong 'army men', I just love the colours! The same outfit seems to have been responsible for the 25mm clones, where you find the Japanese are commonest, in the same whacky colours.

Found! They were in a different folder!

Portuguese cereal premiums! The radio operator is a smoother/cleaner finished sculpt - so two issues? And maybe Japanese . . . or generic post war 'army men'?

 

Apparently they are by/for Farinha Amparo, a flour-miller?