S is for Shark Transporter!

Because you need to transport your sharks, of course! I've been umming-and-areing on this, for most of the summer, whilst waiting fruitlessly for weeks, to see the helicopter set arrive in local stores, which it did, briefly, over a month after being announced, only to sell-out before I could get a second one, to average out the poses*. But, I kept seeing this, is the same line of '2-for-£20' sets, and I kept not investing, but equally, kept forgetting to take a shelfie!

 

B&M website, Shark Transporter corporate shot!

 

Getting very pissed-off with this quite expensive, especially when compared with the old cheapo' Fuji Finepix and Nikon Coopix's I've been using since the start of the Blog, Olympus OM System camera. Too big to shoot in my bedsit, I couldn't get the flash to trigger, under any setting!

 

The case is already in the recycling system!

 

One item of road transport, and in the end I forced the fixed 'tank' off, to get a half-descent shot of the baby shark being transported, although, when I say 'baby', it fills a lorry, it's just smaller than the loose ones in the set!

 

Two deep-sea submersable exploration types.

 

A pair of more conventional tourist/sightseeing submarines.

 

A couple of surface vessels, including a quite chunky hovercraft.

 

It's not Stingray, it doesn't want to look like Stingray, it's never seen Stingray, it has no idea what Stingray's fins look like, or the configuration of Stingray's rear-engine vent, it's not called Stingray, doesn't want to be called Stingray, and look - it has a blunt-nose! It's the bootleg Stingray!

 

Four vinyl-like sharks, from the left a Hammerhead, Basking, Swordfish and Great White . . . in scale with the one on the truck, these are about 30-feet long!

 

The reason I gave-in and bought it, apart from getting a Blog-post based on actual 'stuff', was in part for the five animals, but also because everything here's plastic, so the vehicles will go very well with the Bruder and Kinder types, in future overviews.

 

This Dinosaur Transporter, is also in the line, and has four of the smaller-size dinosaurs, I think this has been shelfied here before, as a future 'mixed-lot' animal ID aid, and we've seen and shelfied similar dino-trucks from/in B&M, Smyths and TKMaxx.

 

* The fact that the only decent set of small soldiers seen in any of the big stores this year, sold out so quickly, is possibly a message the stores have failed to recognise. More toy soldiers please!

Y is for Yes, Well, That Was a Bit of a Wash-Out!

Wait all year for ILAPD and get hammered by a cold! Let me explain; Pirate Day was not supposed to happen as it did, but that I managed three posts was probably a minor miracle, because by Tuesday I was having some bloody odd dreams while snoozing for the best part of two days!

On the Saturday (17th), we'd had the Sandown Park Toy Fair, at which Adrian (he's not here to defend himself!) gave me the cold he'd brought back from Portugal a day or two earlier, and it didn't hang around, it hit me like a bus on Sunday afternoon, and while I muddled-through on the 20-image 'intro' post, it took me all night!

I then slept 'till lunchtime, and managed to get the two quick ones out, hoping to work on the other two posts that afternoon/evening, but the body refused and I lost most of the rest of the week, while having a parallel mini-adventure with the car, and discovering HMRC are claiming to have lost more paperwork, despite my having the signature from the Post Office!

I had half a mind to do a NITLAPD (Not Talk like a Pirate . . . ) day to catch-up, but to be honest, they can wait, one of them's already been held-over for a year, another-year won't hurt! There's still plenty in the queue, including the stuff left from RTM, and other things mentioned in passing, about 20 'Seen Elsewhere' folders, several new 'H is for's, the rest of the old ones and all sorts of other stuff . . . I'm going to try and get the Sandown report out later this evening.

So, in the end I just had a lazy week! But, what I would say, is, whatever Adrian and I had, it's probably this Australian cold they've been on  about on the Radio, and it's OK, in that it's a head cold that clears-up quite quickly, but it's pretty debilitating the first few days, and it's fluey-enough to make your bones and muscles ache, so best avoided if you get some warning.

And . . . nice things to look forward to for next year! I suppose we need a picture here?

F is for Follow-up - Kinder and Hovercraft!

T is for Two - H is for Hong Kong Hovercraft

We haven't had as many hovercraft as we should have done, given their box was in the attic this last 11 years, so I'll have to redress that when I get to final [alive] resting place, but I can make a start here with two bog-standard rack-toy brands, one in Picasa for a while, the other sourced off feebleBay a week or so ago.

Woolbro's Hovercraft with Friction, is more of a whacky Intergalactic US Space Marines space-car, although with the body entirely filled with two large turbines, of limited use beyound getting two humans from A-to-B in a uncomfortably noisy fashion!

I actually have the Jane's Surface Skimmers and Hovercraft tome (and a tome it is, good for bodybuilding) and it is amazing to see how quickly Hovercraft went from British post-war excentricity in the 1950's to hundreds of designs all over the world by the 1970's (I think I have the '72 edition), and some of them do look a bit like this I think, but the forward perambulation isn't clear and the book's currently buried!

Carpet wheels aren't part of a real hovercraft which would have a hollow-belly to fill with pressurised air! Branded to an MMF and numbered 812, mine is obviously missing an ariel, but I will look out for another, better one as it also has that yellowish staining on the starboard side.

Learning something every day; although it sounds like the sort of thing Mum would have told us as kids, I learnt the other day that before 1844 it was Larboard and Starboard, but the Roayl Navy changed what was an obviously confusing (under fire/in a storm) convention, in that year.

The other reason to look out for another one is that the box on this one is shot to bits. The Woolbro stamp looks like the kind of overprint a few of their earlier sets carry, so there may be a generic version of this out there somewhere?

On safer ground with the SRN6 (Saunders-Roe, Naval, Type Six), this is another regular rack-toy star; Clifford Toys, and would seem to be a copy of the Matchbox die-cast, in military colours (which Matchbox also did). The Royal Marines used these for years, and the Griffon's they use now are quite similar in design.

I have the die-cast black & white civil one in the under-visited box, and this copy must be a slight scale-up; because, although small; it wouldn’t fit in the standard 1-75 range's box? It's also all plastic and like the Woolbro/MMF one, mostly polystyrene.

T is for Two - Novelty Vehicular Thingies!

Just a quickie, but as I was sorting stuff to put back into storage I was shooting all sorts of old friends and things I'd forgotten I had, and batch throwing them on Picasa against the possibility of being stuck somewhere in the near future, possibly for months, house-hunting, while everything is in the said storage; these are two of the things I'd totally forgotten being the owner of, and, while 'only' novelties, they are both quite cool from a toy soldier perspective!

We get used to seeing the Award, Grace or Star branded wagons - copied from European originals, typically Timpo or Britains - on feebleBay from time to time, but how about a money-box!

Imported by a D.A.S. of London in an otherwise un-branded/generic packaging. I think this is (or was) quite recent, from the CE mark; 1980's or 90's maybe, I also suspect it was a charity-shop purchase, but can't actually remember where it came from or when, one of those last Birmingham shows, 2011?

She looks a tad Britains in origin, he . . . Elastolin medieval? The whole wagon (with figures) is in hard polystyrene with 'propylene wheels and horses and an 'ethylene plug to release the savings, hopefully to buy another wagon!

It would benefit from a 'paint down' from the current scheme of psychedelic puke! Obviously, painted or not, it's wholly compatible with 50-60mm war gaming or figure collections which is why it's in mine!

While this is more geared toward H0 or 00-compatible war-gaming collections, for which a coat of grey or olive-green would be the minimum requirement! No branding at all beyond the CF stock code prefix, it's a fun thing with two forms of power/locomotion.

Verging on 'shelf' or 'big-box' toy rather than rack-toy, it would have been rack toy budgeted I suspect and it's possibly a bit earlier than the wagon above - late 1970's? It may - of course - have been an overpriced element of the Hoverspeed gift-shop/duty-free exercise? I well remember the piles of Airfix ferry models at the Purser's window of the Enterprise Spirit class ferries we used to get - now a much sought-after kit!

A pair of batteries in the body drive a vibrating mechanism ("Oh Matron!") which causes the brushes to move the hovercraft (Saunders-Roe SR-N4 Mountbatten Class) across smooth or flat surfaces, while a secondary single battery-motor of a pretty standard slot-on design (dozens of toys came with them when I was a kid) will drive it round the local pond, boating lake or bath!

That's it, a couple of boxed-items, box-ticked!

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 5 - Bigger boys!

Looking at some of the larger vessels, we have something a bit special from Germany; an S-boat and some nice Celluloid bits form Japan, both nations - at the time of likely production - on the 'other side'!

This is one of the ten things I should try to save from a fire, at first appearance it looks like a Hong Kong item, and if it had come in a bag of dusty bits I'd probably be telling you; "It's almost certainly an HK item", but it 'ain't...it's German, and it's actually 'almost certainly' from the era of the Third Reich.

The box is the same type of box the German wooden tractors, the plaster railway figures from Berger we looked at a month or so ago and German Christmas-baubles come in, the paper wrap is more reminiscent of the earlier half of the 20th Century and the spring-loaded firing mechanism is very 'European' in execution.

The clincher is that something - almost certainly an Eagle - has been painted-out on both sides of the wheelhouse...for export? or to comply with the Allied de-Nazification program?

So why does it look HK? Because back in the early days all cheap plastics looked the same, and the Germans in the immediate post-war period through to my childhood in the 1960's/early '70's were second only to Hong Kong/Japan in the production of plastic toys and novelties.

The paper wrap with the torpedoes in (and out!) and a close up of the finger-operated firing mechanism. I can't work out if the torpedoes are plastic or wooden, if they are wooden it would be more proof of the likelihood of the origin, but I think they are plastic, it's just hard to tell and I'm not going to start scraping the paint off!

The S-boat (Marked S-71, with a '71'painted below the engraved version) is about 125mm long, the Japanese blow-moulded celluloid gun-boat next to it is a tad smaller at 100mm. This Website reports S-71 as being lost; "Hit by artillery in battle with British units in the Channel" in 1943 and was a real vessel, another reason to doubt it's HK origins.

 Next to them is another Celluloid vessel, this appears to have dome sort of mechanism in the base, but I can't work out what it is, even with a jeweller's 'eye' and a torch. It may be only a weight, but seems to have brass and white-metal components? And I owe thanks to Pam Taylor (Kleeware collector supreme!) of Wales for the tall-ship which is 6cm long.

[Added 24th November 2013...I saw another one the other day, the mechanism is a rusted-up spring return form a novelty tape-measure!]

Other larger odds and sods (we'll look at the bulk of the bigger vessels and landing craft on other days in a year or two, this is enough bobbing about on the briney for me for a while!); The top image shows two liners marked 'GERMANY' (9.5cm) and will most likely be Manurba or Jean, and also 'look' like Hong Kong product. They have an polyethylene upper deck and a polystyrene hull. The other liner is a whistle (7.5cm) and probably an early British product in a flecked-styrene polymer.

I don't know how the hovercraft got in this lot - well I do; they were 'to hand'! The one on the left is the one currently in Poundland from Funtastic, the other was a common rack-toy in the 1980's and I've seen them painted on some of the Blogs I link to here in the last couple of years, and they came-up quite well. They are a vauge HO-guage type size/scale thing...

The small sailing vessel (3cm) is a Christmas cracker toy, the yellow tug (65mm) is a recent (1970's?) baby's bath toy, the other two tugs (55mm) are the 1950/60's equivalents.