S is for Sandown Park - Bits & Bobs

Continuing with the Sandown plunder from September (next one's three weeks away, this Saturday!), and this would normally be the last post in the sequence, but I haven’t got the images ready on the other two, so, here's the odds and sods.

 

Martin Fahie had put these to one side for me, and they are all Hong Kong production, and all enhancing existing samples, some of which we have seen here already, and I have taken follow-up shots with some of the bits from the storage unit, so that'll be forthcoming in the near future.

 

Lido space werhickle! Missing one of it's two plug-ins, but takes my sample over the basic four, and allows for chopping and changing for future shots. What I think is the engine nacelle/venturi for the Dalek lander-'Mechanoid' from Cherilea, which is another useful spare in that sample, which you have watched grow, almost in real time.

 

And a pretty clean and undamaged Hilco Martian, and one of two poses most likely to be found damaged, again a collection which has grown from almost naught, with the Blog, to over a dozen with damaged examples. And I believe his helmet will be following shortly (three weeks!).

 

 

Three of the larger set (scale/size wise) Noddy in Toyland/Toytown figurines, made in Hong Kong, and in the style of some Marx production, but nothing is known of the maker, as far as I know, nor do I know how many are in the set (nor a total for the smaller set), but they are slowly growing as a sample!

 

Probably the best find of the show? We've seen the White Rabbit before, first as a single, phenolic or early styrene, with good detail, then as a mass produced lesser quality ethylene moulding, in the set of educational oddities, now I find these?

 

A stretched Alice, lays in front, awaiting glue, with from the left (best to open the image); White Rabbit,  Queen of Hearts (first book), Cheshire Cat, Hookah-smoking Caterpillar, one of the Kings, Mad Hatter, Playing Card Guard (near-flat, although they are all demi-ronde), Red Queen (second book) and the Mock Turtle. 

 

One might think board game pieces, but if the colours are a clue, it's not a game for three equal players, nor any even number of players, but are all the pieces here? They are old, and with characters like the Dormouse, Tweedle brothers, White Queen, and another King or two 'missing', they may be from a larger set, and while board game is still a best bet, they are quite small, no more than 20mm?

 

We've seen the pixie before, but in a darker red, this one is Ready Brek glowing! A puppy jumper - while it was OK to start collecting the LB copy jumpers, and the bug-eyed aliens were/are fun, it seems jumpers are to join white-button toys (two lots coming soon - Halloween!), as a peripheral sub-collection! And what I suspect is one of the few lose Corgi figurals previously missing from the stash, everybody's favourite villain - Dick Dastardly!

 

A couple of Euro-premiums from one or two different building sets.

 

Civilians; an unknown nurse (Atlantic like, but I don't think she's theirs, Charbens again?), Britains arctic explorer, a huge copy of the Corgi ice-cream seller, I guess Lucky or similar? Then the tramp/hobo from Hilco (? It's from the Johillco hollow-cast moulding), a mother and child, probably from a US model car kit, and a recent farm worker which I think we saw in Padgett Brothers/A-Z packaging, a few years ago? In front, a Britains cyclist.

 

The long arm of the law! Three Lines Tri-Ang Motorway, with a bugler (I think they only ever looked like that in kids' comics!), one Corgi Junior, two Hornby Dublo/Meccano and a pair of Merit/Model Scene, with the WPC snapped of at her shapely ankles - ouch!

 

Other railway/small scale figures included a Blue Box mechanic, several Merit, a metal Wardie/Masternodels railway staffer, the Hornby Hobbies Hong Kong sourced moped rider and two machines (shared with at least two other brands), the boy with horses from the Britains Miniset, and a seated Airfix passenger.

 

Odds! The cactus may be new on me, but it may just be home-paint bamboozling me! Common bit of fence and a couple of weapons from 3/4" action figures I guess. All in all, some nice bits, the Alice Looking Glass/Wonderland set is the definite highlight, anybody know anything else about it?

T is for Two - Diver Sets

I picked these two up from a friend of Isaac's, over the phone, I won't bore you with the details, but as soon as I saw them I knew I needed them, if the price was right, which it was, as they are one of those things which brings several threads of the whole Rack Toy oeuvre together, while half-ID'ing some bits.

 

We've seen this card before, and most of the contents, one suspects they all shared pegs in little independent newsagents and corner-shop/convenience stores for a few years, in the mid-late 1960's, and sold well enough, despite the poor quality of the contents, as there's still a lot of play value in a relatively cheap set, for the era?

 

The ships are really quite common, but here we have mid-quality copies of the Lone Star divers, instead of the Monogram figures we saw last time;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2016/08/m-is-for-monograms-men-made-much_10.html

 

Trucks have been associated in previous posts, but now I can find the correct mini-subs and rubber boats from the larger, unknown Hong Kong samples, and, possibly of more interest is the hard polystyrene plastic submarine, which I would never have assumed went with the soft plastic surface vessels.

 

Although, thinking about it, they have come together in mixed lots, or donations of the sort Chris Smith, and particularly Trevor Rudkin have given me over the years, confirming patterns that were already hidden in the background wallpaper!

 

Fewer total contents in this slightly smaller card, which is a new addition to the series, and which may also include some of these;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2010/01/b-is-for-beachead-hong-kong-style-part_01.html

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2010/01/b-is-for-beachead-hong-kong-style-part.html

 

They don't solve many questions, but they do thin-out the various other bags and tubs of unknowns, with the Lone Star clone divers now associated with the commonest of the 14-odd different copies of Monogram GI, the ships and Humber 1-ton mini-trucks brought together with the smaller vessels and submarine, and one version of equally common aeroplane type added to the whole.

 

These both need a careful opening, and re-threading with rubber-bands, at which time I'll dampen and iron the cards to stiffen them up, and restore them to something like how they looked sixty-odd years ago. A task which will be easier on the second set, it's pretty obvious what went where, there will be more guesswork involved in getting the upper set shipshape!

T is for Transports of Delight

I know I'm supposed to claim to be a toy soldier and/or model figure collector, but vehicles have always had a place, not least because of the Airfix 'readymades' when I was a small-scale collector, but just as scenics and then spaceships started to feature, alongside Dinosaurs (quite recent) and erasers or cracker/gum-ball novelties, so mini and micro-vehicles have taken a growing corner of the stash for their own.

 

The fact that collected brands like Manurba, Pyro/Kleeware or MPC gave-up micro-AFV's, or the little trio of gun/armoured car/carrier thing, which came with so many rack-toys, was the start, but once you're into novelties, vehicles feature quite often, and these have all been added to the pile this year!

Actually, the exception which proves the rule - this came in some time ago, if the bedspread is anything to go by, it's been in storage for well over a year now, I think! A soft polyethylene copy of the Matchbox Greyhound coach, possibly from an earlier 'styrene Blue Box one, but starting to get a bit truncated, almost a 'deform', and smaller than the original. This may have been a put-aside from Gareth Morgan or Chris Smith.

 

A die-cast Benbros Qualitoy Gypsy wagon, these were the sort of wagon the itinerant knife-sharpeners, tin-smiths and other crafters would take village to village, all gone now, but there were still one or two on the road when I was a kid. Now rich 'celebrities' have fake ones placed in their gardens! This also shows other ways vehicles sneak into the collection, firstly my side-interest in wagons, and secondly; small-scale horses!

 

Two pieces of slush-cast lead, probably British, and a die-cast fire-engine, probably American? These were saved for me/donated to the Blog by Adrian Little, a while ago I seem to recall, and help with ID'ing them would be gratefully received! They may all, also, be board-game playing pieces?

 

Picked up in the September Sandown Park show, we have four from one series and a racing-car from another, all polystyrene, and all Hong Kong product. We looked at all my 'moulded-on wheels' micro-stuff a year or so ago, but there's also tons of this working wheels stuff, a lot of it marked W Germany, but plenty of British and HK lots, so these will join their samples against a proper look at them all one day.

 

Two of them are marked Made In Hong Kong, while the other two have an additional stock or tool number, but wheels/axles tie them to each-other.

 

I'm loving this, I'm pretty sure I already have one, possibly in the same red, which may have been on the Blog already (another Chris Smith jobbie?), but I seem to remember it having damaged engine-nacelles, while on this new example they are all present and correct. I suspect this might be a slightly upmarket (but still budget-end) Christmas cracker inclusion?

 

 It's also a spinning-top, which looks as if it should also whistle or howl, through those slats in the bodywork, but I can't get a note out of it! Of interest is the three nipplettes arranged around the spin-nipple (all my own nomenclature!), which help to prevent it from tipping too soon, or wobbling, so, help keep it spinning!

 

The flying saucer (here seen after cleaning!) came with these and the items in the next image, all around the same size, but obviously from different sources, the plane here being a bubble-gum capsule, a small piece of generic pink gum, similar to that which came with the little tanks, being stuffed in the nose and wedged against the tapered body as the two were closed together.

The yacht could be another cracker prize, or a basic/budget bath toy, or even supplied with a piece of bubble-gum 'cargo'? It was a much produced/copied novelty from both W Germany and Hong Kong, back in the day, but this seems to be the best quality one (with realistic, relief-sculpted, racing markings on the marbled sails) in a growing sample of them (we've seen a few over the years, not least a whole card of Rado/Ri Toys ones!), and while unmarked, may be British?

The wheeled passenger-boat is all soft plastic, and probably the most modern thing in the post, maybe as late as the 1990's or 2000's, and could be cracker, gum-ball or rack-toy, while the HK copy of a Manurba mini-sub is one of several generations of piracy, previously seen on the blog as rack toys.

 

Once they've all joined their like-for-likes, we'll return to them here, hopefully with details to add, or just 'bigger-pictures' as far as numbers in sets, or polymer/paint colours go! I was going to add some Internet images to this post, but there's so many of them, they can be another - 'lazy' - post, another day! And thanks to all who save this stuff for me, in addition to those named above.

P is for Petrel's Plastic Parade

Looking at one of the wannabe Blue Box sets this time, and the first photograph is almost as poor as the double-decker 77xxx series Blue Box set from yesterday, however I did take shaded-shots of each window, so this will provide a little more in the way of visual information!

 

Badged to Petrel Toys, who we've seen before, sun faded on the face, and sold in 1968 (thanks to James Opie), I suspect from some of their other toys they might have been an importer/jobber or the phantom brand of a Hong Kong based shipper/agent/exporter, but more on that in a minute.

 

The set is clearly pretending to be a Blue Box -"C¦O¦M¦B¦AT"- set (that's my attempt at the explosion logo!), which were three and four-decked, but not split-window, which might (and it's a big 'might') have some significance as it's harder to sue if there is a difference in the 'appearance' of an otherwise common or industry wide packaging type?

The tank is a nasty little thing, there are several generations or iterations of it, it seems to be a copy of an equally simplified die-cast, itself several rungs below Zee/Zylmex on the quality ladder, and is best discarded loose, unless you need them for something like this Blog! While the figures are poor copies of late Blue Box GI's.

This is quite useful, and was re-issued a few years ago (I say that glibly, forgetting how fast time is going these days . . . it was reissued back in the 1990's!), lacking the silly blind/remote-controlled, bomber's turret of Marx, Blue Box, early Airfix and other toy landing craft of the time, it makes for a more realistic infantry/troop landing craft, with a coat of paint! The re-issues were a shiny-grey polypropylene.

I've cut the helicopter from this window so we can look at it below.

These seem to be poor copies of the bi-coloured vessels from Emson / 'Empire' (E), with the larger vessel behind being a copy of an old Pyro or Aurora 'box-scale' kit maybe? While the one in front is the old Tri-Ang Minic's being ripped-off again!

More of the figures and a couple of cheap Jeeps, they're not that bad for small-scale, but their lines are more Mahindra than Willy's if you know what I mean, a bit boxy at the front! And the wheel/axle sets look familiar from one of the many generations of the 1-Ton Hunber truck rack-toys.

Two helicopters which I'll return to in a mo', but suffice to say the silver one on the left looks mightily like the one in the Blue Box garage set!

This on the other hand is rather lovely and pretty unique! A proper submarine! It comes with two 1d/1¢ capsule-dispenser/Christmas cracker type, relief-flat crustaceans and, you can just see behind, his head poking-out, one of the Manurba Mini-Sub piracies!

The two similar helicopters (a more Soviet than NATO/US design) has two different plug-ins, one wearing skids, the other floats, but while that's interesting, the important bit . . . 

 

 . . . is that the Sikorsky H-34/Westland Wessex seems to be the actual Blue Box one, both in the Petrel set, and in these two unbranded generics (note the different plastic colour of each helicopter moulding), both of which have better-quality figures. Indeed, were it not for the paint, you'd mistake these for late Blue Box polyethylene versions, which they may be?

 

It's why I think Petrel are a phantom-brand or importer of some kind, their set's contents seem to be bought-in from more than one source, while the other two sets might be actual Tai Sang generics, manufactured for a contract (maybe with Cecil Colman, Codeg or someone like that; Cornelius?) or aiming at a price-point below the similar Blue Box sets.

And the fact that a 'Blue Box' helicopter ended-up in a rival product, aping their own, will be down to the fact they might not have known where the helicopters were going when they fulfilled the order for one of the middle-men, down at the docks, where Tong Wai-ki would have taken his suitcases of samples each morning, between trips to New York.

 

Branded Pyragric on the continent.

B is for Best Show on Earth! 9. Divers

Thinning-out a too-long civilians post, we find ourselves with some all-diver stuff!

In the centre we have the mini-sub from Hing Fat, with older bagged James Bond knock-offs (Thunderball - the original version) either side and a couple of the air-line uppy-downy bath toys behind.

 

We've seen (with much help from Brian Berke) various domestic and foreign versions of the smaller one, but the other is, as you can see, jai-huge! It has heavy-metal (lead?) feet, to which the body is melted on, presumably because the amount of plastic made the diver too buoyant even when filled with water?

 

The bags seem to contain sub-piaracies of the ones we looked at here, which had a handful of accessories missing from these bags, it may be that the moulding is the same, and price-cutting is responsible, but it's not clear without taking them out and comparing with something currently in storage, so a future post there!

 

Thanks to all for everything last month; Brian Carrick, Trevor Rudkin, Adrian Little, Andreas Dittmann, Gareth Morgan, Michael Mordant-Smith and Peter Evans.

H is for How They Come In - Chris - Transport Etc . . .

So many figures ended-up in this post I couldn't actually call it 'Vehicles' as I had intended, but another bunch of interesting or novel items of that ilk were included in Chris's recent parcel.

Starting with bath toys, for the most part. The Hong Kong copies of Manurba's mini-sub, one has been trimmed down somewhat to a self-propelled torpedo, with a smaller boat, which comes from a rack-toy set of about six or eight mouldings - I have them somewhere in the archive, and a few more loose, building for an 'overview' post.

I love the big blow-moulded diver, proper bath toy! Except they tended to fill with water from the little hole in the gate-mark, and you could then use them to squirt your brother at the other end of the bath, until the heat-seam split, and 'Froggie' the frogman went to landfill!

I was in a quandry as to what to do with these, as they obviously belong in the canoe posts, but needed to be H is for . . .'d first, but rather came together as I'd put the canoe season off for various reasons, of some merit, umpteen times, but ultimately, they will be tagged 'Canoes', between two similarly-tagged posts, so it's a minor worry!

I have no idea on the lower one, but match/toothpick/trinket holder is a strong possibility, while the upper one is wooden, so may have some age, or home-made'ness? But equally could be French, they seem to have stuck with wooden boats right through solid and hollow-cast lead figures, the aluminium period, the celluloids and phenolics, right-up unto plastic figures!

A Blue Box ambulance came with one of the larger figures, the ambulance still has the box-mounting intact, which is not exactly collectable, especially if you only want the vehicle for wargaming, which a lot of them were used for, back in the day. But I have two or three now, and it's getting fun to see if I'll ever have one each of them all, still attached like this?

 

The vehicle was meant to be broken/lifted off the clear plastic piece, but the glue meant they would tare away from the paper laminate of the box/tray and then people would usually break off the two tabs leaving the central piece glued to the underside of the vehicle/accessory!

 

Aircraft came in the form of two novelty-whistles - Brilliant! A small rack-toy helicopter, a - probably - knock-off Transformer type and a rather interesting X-15 X-Plane, which might be a load from a larger kit, weren't they launched 'in flight'? It could also be from a desk-top display thing, as the metallic blue paint-job looks like a professional coating . . . but it could just be a rack-toy! It's polystyrene.

 

And no, you can't really photograph lime-green against lime-green!

 

The smaller of the two whistles came in a lot Chris found in Hungary, so was accompanied by another 40mm flat (never get enough of those) and a really nice knock-off of a Western 'dime store' spaceman.

 

Another lovey bunch of oddities from Chris, so many thanks to him, and next-up will be the Wild West or civilians, depending on how tired I am tomorrow evening, but I must do canoes now for the morning, then try to catch some sleep before the early start for . . .

 

The Plastic Warrior Show . . . it's TOMORROW!

O is for Ocean Explorers

Not scoring points on this one (although they could've run with theses to add something to my follow-up, if they really felt the need to follow-me at all . . . as they did!), but rather; seeing what Hing Fat have to 'Show & Tell' on the subject of my original early-May posts, and there's a few interesting points to be made.

To be found on their Faceplant page, this would seem to be the later figures, the shooters not visible, but the newer cameraman is. Of more interest is the mix of sea creatures and marine plants, some of which look to be PVC or a PVC-equivalent and the large rock formation/lump!

Another Facebook shot; here we see a variation of the mini-sub with a fatter, flat-bottomed (?) design, which may be to take a sucker motor-unit (rather than the older slot-on or plug-in ones I remember from the '70's) or just ease movement on floors and carpets! Also of note is the piracy of the old Matchbox tank-landing craft and a 'fat-boy' mini-sub.

A smaller set in a carry-case from both sides; Ocean Explorer is the current branding, or at least seems to be the commonest current brand-mark for these diver sets.

No idea to contents, but both the Facebook images could be candidates for the contents of this tub? It's a similar tub currently being shipped by [the not-biggest] importer Stevens International as the Action Figure bucket we saw a while back.

Header-carded 'bottle-bag'; so-called because the automated packing machines drop the stuff into the open top like filling a bottle. This has the smaller older landing craft, which, like most Hing Fat production is copied, from Rado-Ri Toys, who - in their turn - took the basic design from Louis Marx! And possibly an older shot, I can't see the newer poses.

What looks to be a mock-up of a blister-card, sans blister!

This shot reveals one of Hing Fat's older (but recent in toy geology timescales) customers; Billy V, although they were only a brand-mark of someone else (Imex) and have been taken-over by . . . BMC? Note the branding then was Ocean Adventures, which may have been Billy V specific/requested, as the Ocean Explorers branding goes back to at least 2006 in Hing Fat literature? Not that they only have the one branding - see below.

The older landing craft, still in rack-toys and cheapie-buckets the world over and dating back to Marx playsets of the 1950's, not a bad pedigree for such an inaccurate version of a WWII equipment! As well as the Rado versions and various generic sub-piracies, Blue Box put the turret on their DUKW, and there's a larger battery-operated version kicking-around somewhere - I bet there's one on Moonbase?

Also a better shot of the little fat mini-sub, which does look like it should have been dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, with the mad major from Dr. Strangelove riding-it in "Yeeehaaw"! Note also, how they separate the 2 'standing' and 5 swimming poses.

Printed catalogue page from January 2015 (Toy Fair season!) shows all the then available formats being offered to customers, all branded to Sea Divers. I've seen the 'shopping basket' with both Pirates and Wild West, when I worked for a dealer back in the 2010's and, as it looked old then,  it must have been an option back as far as the 1990's, at least? Hing Fat were founded in 1978, I think.

The larger sets have the same marine-life added, but colours are different, with none of the sky-blue divers you get today, and lots of the 'international orange' which older, more experienced collectors will know as being particularly prone to turning brittle.