K is for Kitchenalia!

All sorts of stuff has come out of the woodwork, or the kitchen cabinets over the last three years, some I've photographed, some has gone to storage, some went to charity and some went in the bin. Here's three pieces of kitchenalia which may trigger the odd nostalgia button or two?

 

I can half-remember the birthday party where these were used, and they were 'dead posh' and modern, bring plastic rather than waxed-paper/card (how times have changed!), but it has left them brittle. They did have matching Magic Roundabout paper plates and napkins/serviettes, and I think the cake was Mum's rendition of Dougal dog!

 

Every 1970's kid appreciated a curly-wurly drinking straw, didn't they? I think they did, even if they didn't admit it! I seem to recall these were Christmas stocking presents one Christmas morning, and would have been christened with milk or tea . . . possibly milk with food-dye in it, as "It's Christmas"!

Kiddy cutlery, the cat was usually mine, the snoopy was my Brother's and I think we shared the Disney knifes, depending upon who grabbed which first! I should find some kid/s to pass them on to, but all my friends' kids have grown-up and gone to collage! Maybe a hospice for kids would be a thought?

T is for Toy Fair 2020 Reports - Amerang / Smart Fox

I really only shot these as the Toy Fair 2020 show came a couple of weeks after I'd Blogged the various construction systems on display at the local (Fleet not Woking!) library this Christmas just gone, and it was interesting to see more Meccano-likey! There was nothing else of note on Amerang's stand.

Dr. Who licensed stuff, no one had tied to build the Dalek, so it was a K9-unit and a TARDIS which were on display, it's a good way to get kids into construction engineering, and if the original Meccano had read the writing on the wall and got into Star Wars, after their army-set had come out, they might have had a very different trajectory to the one they subsequently did have?

I've already seen these in Waterstone's book shops (which are increasingly Waterstone's books, games & gifts shops!), and they represent (olong with the previous) the domination of licensing in the modern toy industry.

There are now trade-magazines and whole 'expo's or shows devoted to licensing rather that the toy makers or sellers, another good example is the Natural History Museum dinosaurs we saw from Toyway the other day, K&M's Wild Republic are also carrying NHM stuff, but different stuff from Toyway, the museum is now a brand, in its own right, with some desirability, and once you've approached them, got the licence and supplied their gift-shops, you're free to market them as widely as you like.

Here it's the Imperial War Museum being used to shift some pretty crude representations of the marques on the box, but, still better than late Meccano - in both meanings of a deliberately pun-line!

Did I say there was a Dalek in evidence? There was a Dalek in evidence!

G is for Gnomes G'down-under!

Also from Mr B, and also hanging around in Picasa, these were shot at a garden-center or tourist-trap gift shop, I can't remember which, in New Zealand while he was there a year or so ago.

Gnome-Gnapping! Who'd of though it? Two mechanical, near-nano robot alien froglingtons with their egg-shells still attached have grabbed an unsuspecting Gnome, in the middle of his break-fast and pushed-off with him over their wiry, metal-robot shoulders, and I used to want to move to New Zealand - it's clearly a madhouse of unrestrained crime and debauchery!

Meanwhile, and unbeknownst of their possible fate; a family of Gnomes wait for the staff to mow their grassy-clothes, gently growing in the warmth of the sun!

It's funny but you can see that passing potential customers pick the Gnomes up by their hats/heads as their flocking hasn't worn off, but the more people who pick-up the snail or hedge-pig the less likely they are to sell, as the tattier they get!

Do they have them (hedgehogs) in NZ - probably a pest of ground-nesters aren't they? They should collect them all up, and send them back here, ours are endangered! Also - that's one snail the Hedgehog isn't going to eat, it could smother him!

All larger items, included here to 'make' Ger'nome-day! Cheers Brian!

C is for Christmas Exhibition - 6 of . . . err . . . 5! - Tour Eiffel

While editing part three I noticed a reference to another model, and - upon returning to the library here in Fleet after Christmas - found that indeed there was a final model perched on top of the main cabinet, out of the way of the hands of smaller visitors!

It's Blackpool Tower I think, or maybe the Funktürm in Berlin . . . Ally-pally? One of those giant pylons anyway! From a Gloucestershire-based company - Apples to Pears - it's more Meccano-like stuff but with the aid of the modern IKEA furniture-construction tool; a hex-drive!

Joking apart, the Eiffel tower is extraordinary, as it's A) huge, compared to all its look-a-likes and B) was built on a whim with no end-use other than being looked at or enjoyed . . . and it's still there!

This one comes carefully packed in a small tin!

C is for Christmas Exhibition - 5 of 5 - Low Display Table

The exhibition extended to a side table, where some of the earlier systems get a second outing with ephemera for a more nostalgia-related display than the ready-to-play stuff in the upright cabinet . . .

. . . which looks like this! The two items which aren't further looked at in the next four images are firstly; the late green/red Meccano set (bottom centre), I know it's late as it has a yellow plastic tray insert to hold the components, but the earlier colour scheme with grey wheels. My brother and I had yellow vac-forms but blue/yellow plates and silver-anodised beams, so ours must have come just after this set.

Note also the aircraft engine, propeller and wing-struts (along with non-standard wheels?), all job-specific parts, but the piece I like most is the bolt-on RAF roundel!

The other item of note here is a catalogue of exhibits for an exhibition of construction toys at the Science Museum, issued by the Ministry of Education no less! I can't make out the date but it looks to be either 1945 or '55, and would be a wonder to view now . . . are the items still in their archive?

Trix catalogue and parts, as I mused a couple of posts ago; I think this is a licensed product re-branded to Trix (or from Trix?) and that a US company is also known for these triple-pierced beams? The cog and disc are very similar to Meccano parts, but the spanner has the added value of being included* into a model . . . so long as you have a second to tighten the nuts!

*I tried 'assembleable' but it seems to be a new-word too far!

Minibrix; we didn't have this system as kids but many of our friends did, I found it a bit boring, as (like Bayko, missing from this year's exhibition at Fleet Library, but seen in past displays) it can only make endless variations of a few basic building types - no cranes, no spaceships, a crude crocodile maybe, if you tried hard enough and had both a good imagination and good visio-spatial planning skills, but not realistically set up to model anything other than another 'box' with or without pitched roof!

In its defence it was made out of a very stable vulcanised rubber, like vehicle tyre-rubber (unlike that Italian stuff which has melted vast tracts of Toy Soldier history to sticky, furry lumps of nothing!), and while you sometimes find it with a perished surface (a sort of flaking hardened 'varnish' as a top layer), most is as useable now as it as when it was made 50 or 60 years ago.

Note the door; along with the windows, small points top and bottom of the element locate into dimples along the surface-edges of bars or bricks. And - like truck-tyres - it was bloody heavy!

We saw the ballast/mineral wagon in an earlier post, here's most of a passenger coach! The image seems to be of an auction lot and shows a whole set which also builds a windmill, a rail crane and section of track looking to be about G-gauge or 'Big' in plastic parlance!

Masterbuilder handbook and parts; again very similar to Meccano, but actually the 'rims' are better modelled than those of Binns Road's system, in separate scales they wouldn't look out of place on a Morris Minor or a Massey Ferguson!

The whole collection is still on exhibition now and to be seen in Fleet Library (North Hampshire - Berkshire - Surry triangle), and should - if previous years are to be a guide - continue 'till the end of January 2020.

C is for Christmas Exhibition - 4 of 5 - Frank Hornby's Meccano

I'm not sure who invented the first pierced-steel construction system, nor which side of the pond, or Channel, it first occurred on and how much the first influenced the subsequent lines of their rivals, but just as stone-age kids played with stones and bronze-age kids played with bronze figurines (well; they might have, if they were rich enough!), so it was only a matter of time before someone in the industrial age invented something which looked like Meccano, and I suspect several sets appeared independently, at around the same time, with similar properties, but here in the UK we tend to think (and be told) Frank Hornby was first?

Certainly, it was [arguably] the most successful, and despite a few hiccups . . . survives today, as a French-owned brand with a tenuous link back to French Hornby or French Dinky, and would survive for longer - if it went final tits-up tomorrow - through the many clones coming out of mile-long factories in Szechwan and Guangdong!

Ancient and modern . . . little and large!

Although several of the components are vintage, especially the boiler, it has been put together with the modern bolts, which contrary to my previous comment in the preceding post aren't cross-cut Phillip's, but small (3 or 4 mil') hex-drives.

The racing car is built to a vintage plan but seems to be mostly recent components, or at least components I recognise from my childhood Meccano - 1960/80's, while the 'plane would seem to be referencing Tin-Tin's, and thus is probably from a larger French set?

Some more shots of both.

Some more small pieces and a wounderful vintage aeroplane which has a many model-specific parts or 'shapes' as the Metalcraft Spirit of St. Louis in the previous post, something I have to confess I wasn't aware of.

We had tons of yellow/blue, our cousins inherited a multi-drawer cabinet of red/green heavy-gauge vintage, and while I knew there were the odd specialist part (the motorway-construction and army sets in the 1970's had a pre-formed lorry-cab I think?), this is quite a specific model, of a De Havilland Moth? Hawk, Puss . . . Tiger?

P is for Perplexed!

A great favourite of both Christmas crackers and gum-ball machines is the puzzle, coming in five basic forms; the  mini jig-saw (in card or thick paper), the 'Jig-Toy' dexterity puzzle (see top of page), and the following three themes...

Wire Lock Puzzles - Fun when you are younger, but as you get older you realise there are only two mechanisms, and they both involve bringing two junction/joints together into a four-way wire bundle and then either sliding or twisting! Still popular, they used to be issued in  bulk in both magic sets and more generally by toy companies like Merit, as boxed sets.

Chinese tangrams come in various formats, with the aim of making a square or oblong - with no gaps - from a series of triangles and parallelograms, they often came with a little sheet of other pictograms to be made from the shapes, the rule being you must use all the pieces.

The bulky ones in the centre have only one solution and are more modern/current, while the pyramid 9and related cannon-ball pile) are a simple puzzle, when very young it could take a while to get it without help. Indeed, trying to get the balls to make a pile for five minutes, only for a sibling to do it in 2-seconds flat was an invitation to murder becoming a viable lifestyle choice!

Mini ball-bearing dexterity puzzles are the fifth 'group' you often find in both Christmas crackers and gum-ball machines, some easy, some frustratingly hard, some impossible, usually due to the cheap nature of the materials and construction meaning something won't do what it's meant to!

P is for Parachute and Special Force Insignia