P is for Perfect Plastic!

I don't, as a rule, 'rate' Timpo, Britains, Airfix, Marx, MPC, Starlux or Elastolin, nor the tranche of smaller companies immediately at their heels, simply because they were huge, popular and ran for a while, churning out millions of figures, from, often, ever-changing line-ups.

 

This is not to say I don't enjoy them, or appreciate them, just that it's box-ticking stuff which is all over the internet, in all the books, and the first things to be waded-through on Blogs or forums! Tables often groan under the weight of them at shows!

 

But, I do have a soft spot for the smaller-scale output of Elastolin, Merten and Starlux, so it's always nice to add a few to the master 'samples', and I bought this little lot at Sandown Park the other week, all Elastolin, and all 'clean', with no damage, little or no play-wear, and the correct weapons.

 

Romans

 

Huns versus Rus!

 

 Normans / Anglo-Saxons

 

Medieval

The sculpting of the plastics was a high-point of toy soldier production, although the price of Elastolin was always at a point where the use of the word 'toy' was a moot point! I do have a reasonable sample, indeed, a Journalist, sent to my home many years ago, went through it, and talked me out of one of the better Normans! But they are regularly added to, and one day they'll probably be used to illustrate the A-Z blog-entry, when I get round to it?

News, Views Etc . . . U is for Update - Giant or What?

Quick look at the Giant Mongol Cannon has gone-up over on that Blog.

H is for Hong Kong Mongol Hoard...or Herd of Huns

This set is 100% Giant, yet 100% not Giant! We know it's Giant because every single foot figure is marked Made In Hong Kong Giant (P), yet we know it's not Giant, because Giant were never that generous with their figures! Obviously there is the secondary evidence of no 'Giant Plastics Corp. NY' anywhere on the packaging and/or the presence of the retail price in s/d (two-shillings and eleven'punce).

This was the UK (and elsewhere?...it's quite common as these sets go) version of Giant's Mongols, probably let out of the back of the same factory supplying Giant, and consists of about 15 each of red and yellow foot 'Huns' and the same of silver and black [final 'type'] knights, with 6-7 each of the same force's riders.

Loose examples, I don't have all the mounted knights here, but you get the picture and when I get the rest out of storage we can come back to them and look at the forts and stuff. The missing yellow one turned-up and is below!

The knights tended to reuse the bulk of the pose (lifted from old British 54mm figure poses - Crescent and Britains Swoppets) which I've tried to highlight in the silver row - although the pose second from the right is the same as the pose fifth from the right.

I should add that when I did these in One Inch Warrior magazine all those short years ago...I photographed them with siege equipment which was actually from the Marx medieval/Viking fort sets!

Not sure what I was playing at in the top image...trouble with photographing 'off the hoof' without taking notes, but I think the top row are standard, while the under-row show a colour variant (obviously!) and a couple of 'usable' miss-moulds?

Middle shots compares the Giant-marked figures to the real piracies...small HO-sized blobs with unmarked bases.

The final image (a bit washed-out by flash as these images often are - red and yellow...always!) shows darker versions of some of the figures. In the case of the - missing above - yellow one it seems to be down to batch, while the red ones have some black flecks in them and I suspect the plastic was cooked-off.

When I was (briefly) a plastic extrusion operator, I used to get the problem of a brown, darkening line appearing in my extrusions, I'd have to speed the conveyor up a bit (which normally thinned the extrusion to gash quality) and run it as waste until the head cooled down and the mark disappeared. If the mark didn't disappear, I'd have to strip the thing down and clean an - often quite small - burnt speck off the injector head. That's cooking-off...a nightmare!