T is for Two - K's and A.B.S.

Mostly Jon's Attwood's blurb and imagery tonight, so I'll load the images and then divide his potted history between them (with my italics), as a potted history, more than something more specific, I have a K's three-wheeled wagon in HO injection-moulded plastic, which makes a great Boer War 'gun wagon', which I keep meaning to Blog one day!

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Firstly, a pic of ABS packaging, as far as I know packaging is the only way of telling these from the K's versions, I suspect that they may have been cast by Mr Swain for K's anyway.

Then a few K's (I think) loose castings and a page from their catalogue showing their range.

N. & K.C. Keyser ltd. is an iconic company in model railway history, they are generally credited with producing the first whitemetal loco kit (a GWR 0-4-2 t in 1957).

 

N. Keyser, often known as Pop was a German immigrant who had a tobacconist shop in Uxbridge Road, London. His son Ken made scratchbuilt model locos, which were displayed in their shop window from 1946.

Ken saw a jewellers centrifugal casting machine and was quick to exploit it's potential for making small components for his locos, these component packs were sold from the family shop by mail order, and quickly were picked up by model railway retailers such as W. & H. (Walkers and Holtzpfaffel) and Hamblings. He soon moved on to wagon kits and in '57 the aforementioned loco. Apparently Bob Wills (Wills' kits) was at an advanced stage in introducing his loco kit, but K's just beat him to release the kit at the Model Railway club show. K's kits were a complete package with wheels, motor wiring and all included, Wills (and most other railway kit manufacturers since) expected the modeller to source these bits separately.

As the range grew the company moved to a purpose built factory near Willesden Junction station, where they remained for 12 years Pop Keyser passed away in 1966, leaving the company in the hands of Ken and his two sons, Melvyn and Graham. Further expansion saw them move to Banbury, where they started producing injection moulded plastic parts and kits, and subcontracting some of the metal production to outside agents. The first plastic releases I am aware of were wheel centres in 1970. Although manufacturing in many scales, they sold off their entire TT scale (3mm ft) range in 1977, to ABS. After 1983 many of their products appeared under different brand names, though I don't know if these were sold or subcontracted.

 

Ken died in 1989, and most of the range was sold to HMC Group, marketed under Autocom and Nu-cast brands.

I don't know what the early packaging was like, but in their heyday K's castings were shrink-wrapped onto a backing card, sometimes so tightly that it bent the models, not really an issue with the soft whitemetal castings, but it did sometimes bend the shafts on the motors, a problem exacerbated by the effects of heat and light on the packaging. Eventually the motors were put in a cardboard tube section before wrapping, and some of the smaller components in a plastic box to prevent the problem.

 

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In addition to Jon's images, I scanned this from one of the earlier catalogues, and it would appear that a certain amount of artistic licence has been employed in the rendering of the figures! Many thanks to Jon for all that!

W is for World Dolls/World Dancers Part 1

Right, sorry for the delay, but personal stuff has kept me away for the last few days. Having learned to do the second part first in order that they run in sequence I should have done this the same night as the Commonwealth/Van Brode post, but hey, better late than never. Tonight's post concerns the World Dancers/World dolls known to those in the States from the adverts in comics which ran from the 50's through to the late 70's/early 80's? To Europeans from the margarine give-aways, and to the citizens of the UK from, er...I don't know what!!

The first to make an appearance were the 'Tanzerinnen' or; Female Dancers. A set of ten different figures given away as premiums with K's, Schipka and Voss (not Fri-Homa as stated on the US Comics Website [link to right], nor is there any evidence that they were among the sets manufactured by Siku), these figures (above) are not from those sets which tend to have different bases and greater detail, but have been separated from the US comic set to give an idea of the European sets. A further word on origin; While Siku did produce a lot of the premium flats in Germany in the 1950/60's, there were many other companies in Germany, France and the Low Countries producing these, selling the product, selling/leasing the moulds and the designs and copying each other's work. Moulds (both originals and copies) ended up in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil, Singapore and Macao/Macau. Not forgetting that the early plastic flat history includes the WHW winter/war relief sets, and running plastic through 'Nuremberg Flat' moulds!

They next turn up with the US comic 100 World Dolls set, with the addition of 20 new poses, missing from the above photograph are a clown and Santa Clause on a sleigh. The US issue additions are a less quality sculpt, being much chunkier. Over the years they were sold by a number of (apparently) different companies, which are all on the US comics website.

During their lifetime the figures have turned up elsewhere, and here we see a few, on the left are two factory-painted examples, the Chinaman had an umbrella glued into his hands, both figures have the remains of card/paper and glue on their bases, and probably came in little tourist gift-shop type vignettes (these two were found separately, several years apart). Then the two on the top row - centre and right are different colours, hard plastic and may have been premiums or Christmas Cracker novelties. Centre of the bottom row shows a figure who's release pin has become stuck mid-way through the moulding process, leaving a rod of plastic sticking out of his back. Finally a soft plastic Cracker gift. [And I covered some other copies of this set under 'B is for more Betterwear' in November '08]

  This is the real mystery, containing 7 of the ten dancers, and 13 of the twenty US dolls. You might think "Well the others are just lost in the mists of time?" but the group 'as found' contains exactly two of each of the figures present, making a total of 40, those two neat numbers add-up to more than a slight coincidence, so I think it's a complete 'sample'. The question is what? There are undocumented rumours that these may have been issued in UK breakfast cereal or biscuits, while the possibility remains that they could be the unsold (complete) contents of a shop-stock box as supplied to a bakers or cake-decorators? They are in a pinkish plastic. Indeed, the pink flesh colouring of this set and the subject matter of all the sets are the main links with the sets discussed in part 2 - Below.