T is for Tente - Tank Transporter and Tail-ends

So, the last of the Tente stuff in the car-booty found by Peter Evans back in the Summer, and it's 'most of the rest', of what seems to have been a ten-kit set, although I've got bits of naval vessels in the same 'army' green, still not a colour offered, in any quantity, by Lego, so the full range may have gone to 12 or 15 boxes?

 

The tractor unit is vaguely based on the Kynos Aljaba 8×8, but that was an 8x8 (obviously) not a 6x6, so it's a very loose resemblance, some Soviet tractors look similar, but usually with a closed cab, as do/are the Faun SLT's of the Bundeswehr.

 

With the trailer, which is even more generic!

Always hard to photograph tank transporters (or large ship models), simply because of the horizontal dimensions! But these give you some idea. The previously seen Tanque, and the Ambulance, before I had found its loose bits and reattached them!

 

It came with its own (2nd model) tank, the bulk of which was missing from the car boot find, and which is closer to the ex-US Patton or Pershing M46/47 & M48/M60's that were common in the Spanish inventory for the bulk of the post-war/Cold War era. But most of the turret was in the bag, and with the barrel off the other, I could produce that, for a photograph!

 

Alternate suggestions mostly involve slight tweaks to the configuration, but the half-tracked transporter is spacey! While the tank becomes a chunky-monkey personnel carrier or wheeled tank.

 

The ephemera awaiting scanning, includes a half-track which was also missing, however, I think bits of it might have been in the less-than-colour-matched ambulance truck, we saw at the start of this sequence.

 

 Reverse of its instructions include a vague weapons-platform, and a cargo-truck.

 

Missing numbers are the Missile Helicopter, a quadruple SPAAG, based, clearly, on the Soviet-era ZSU-32-4, while, not illustrated anywhere here, was a large 8x8, wheeled APC, coded #0751, which was probably the weakest model in the range - body too big for the wheels, giving it a very open and top-heavy look.

 

All the important bits of the helicopter (cockpit, rotor, tail, skids) were also in the bag, with a handful of bricks which may have been helicopter, but may have been half-track, if you were to follow the instructions! Another bag of bits and a pair of the shorter tracks, and I will be able to complete both!

So, many thanks to Peter for spotting these, and saving them for the Blog, something a bit different!

T is for Tanque!

No messing-about with autoblinder-carro-panzer'whatsits, if the Brit's are calling them Tanks, we'll call them that too, but with our spelling - Tanque! We arrive at what is probably the penultimate Tente military post; I could squeeze two more out, but one would be pretty weak!

Not really resembling anything in service, but quite a mean looker, with a nice long tank-hunting barrel, although the turret is a bit boxy. The tracks and hull might be a bit Sheridan? This was one of two tanks in the series, the other came with a tank transporter, while this was boxed separately, as #0750.

 

Alternate suggestions on the back of the instruction sheet include a very chunky APC of the tank-hulled 'Kangaroo' type, and a front-engined SPG, which is closer to the British Abbot, than the American M109, but with the gun set back too far, and too high, practically-speaking?

C is for Cañón Autopropulsado

The next piece of semi-fictional military hardware in what the Spanish know as the Scorpion line, but without cultural knowledge of the little icon, the rest of us just tend to call the Tente military 'stuff'! Based loosely on an M109 US Self-propelled gun.

 

Another two suggestions, one a rather chunky-monkey in the vague shape of a Russian/Soviet SU-something-or-other, and the other an asymmetric, side-mounted SPG, looking like a mean space-tank hunter!

It took about 20 shots to get one with as little reflection as on this shot, so once I've got the scanner plugged in again, I'll get all this stuff scanned, although there's plenty online for these models.

A is for Ambulancia de Campaña

Continuing to mosey through the Tente car-boot sale find of Peter's, and we're with the 'Field Ambulance', Ref. 0755. One thing I have noticed with all this sample, is the variation in shade of brick colours, but that's probably down to the same-shaped bricks being swapped between kits, but it does, still point to poor quality control, that different kits/batches would be different colours?

 

The vehicle is in the style of a Steyr-Daimler-Puch Pinzgauer, a light utility/GS vehicle with off-road capacity but no war-fighting or front-line role, and I don't know (and can't find) a similar Spanish make of vehicles, nor is Spain listed as Pinzgauer users, but all the vehicles in the set are pretty fictional really!

 

Rather like the 'war', or undeclared fight between VHS and BetaMax (where Beta' was netter, but VHS 'won'), Tente is the superior system, with more flexibility in construction, brought about by the fact you can either hug the studs (like Kiddycraft's pirate, Lego), or lock on to the central holes in each stud.

 

Another couple of alternate builds on the back of the instructions, each model seems to get two suggestions, with two-step build photo's you have to work through. I seem to recall, at one point, Lego used to put similar illustrations on the outside of the box?

L is for Lanzamisiles

To be specific, the Tente military set - 0753 Camion Lanzamisiles, and I know, I try not to do army/death stuff in December, but the queue says otherwise, this year! And this is exactly the sort of stuff you might have found under the Christmas tree in the late 70's, or 80's, especially if old Aunt Maud didn't understand about the vagaries of Lego-compatibility!

 

When we fire brightly decorated missiles at each other! Such marking goes back to the German V-Programme (Vegeltung - retaliation, retribution, revenge, or reprisal - like Trump, the philosophy that it's always someone's else's fault, if it's not going the way it was supposed to, when you started it!), and painting the test rockets in such a fashion, was to be able to tell (from the video [film] footage) how they performed, where or why they spun, and/or exactly where or how they failed first. Target drones are similarly decorated for visibility.

 

Lanzamisiles is simply 'Launcher of Missiles', or missile-launcher, and the toy, once completed, does not fire the missile which is locked to the launch-bar with a row of the more-complicated-than-Kiddycraft studs! I think the truck may be a loose Pegaso 3000 series?

 

When these came out, Lego were still producing pretty box-like, civilian vehicles with few specialist or 'cool' parts, and even when the space sets first came out, we only got a few new parts, dishes and hand-tools mostly. Indeed, when the ariels were added to the Lego space sets, they were far simpler and more toy-like than the one Tente had been using for some time.

 

Spain remains non-nuclear, so this would have been a tactical, battlefield artillery missile, to deliver a high-explosive, heavy-punch, with - hopefully - more accuracy, or devastation than fire-and-forget artillery rounds or heavy mortars!

 

Some ideas for alternate models which could be made from the contents of the box, the whole point of construction sets for kids, something lost on the Kidults, who can spend $1000 on a Millennium Falcon, which takes ten days to build and never gets touched again, except in house moves, or when the partner attacks it with a broom-handle upon exiting the relationship!

 

"I took the sofa apart, but never found the second air-tank in the smugglers' alcove, it's just not the same now!"

T is for Tente's Tactical Toy Troops

We looked at one of these many years ago, at which point I thought it was the only one, a bit of a casual thought, an accessory for the vehicle kits, but, it turns out, that like the spacemen, there were two generations, and with three poses in each generation, more to know, and more to collect!

Older at the top, newer at the bottom - I think?

From the left - Officer/Driver? - Vehicle Commander - Trooper.

 

Officer/Drivers.

 

From behind.

 

Not least of which (things to know/collect), is that there are two colours, and while I still only have the one pose in the sand yellow we looked at back in 2011, I seem to now have all six in this khaki-drab. I don't know what plastic they use, but I'll Tag them ABS and Propylene, as it's that type of hard-wearing polymer?

 

The newer (as I believe it to be) Tente figures, have better detailing, are slightly smaller, and have wider crotch-areas, so I guess are less likely to break at the point of articulation. In both cases, though, there are no moving arms, as we saw with the astronauts. Thanks go to Peter Evans for finding these at a car-boot sale.

P is for Playplax Plastic Play Pieces by Patrick Rylands

This is one of those nostalgia hits for people of a certain age, as if you didn't have them yourselves, you knew someone who did! In our case we never had these, but various other friends did, and they tended to be kicking around, but didn't get that much play, as we were older, as friends, and these were leftovers from earlier childhood.

I can't remember the exact date of this Sunday-supplement cutting, or the title, but they were a batch from mostly 1969-74'ish. The toy had won it's designer a Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design in 1970, among a tranche of other toys he, the Patrick Rylands of the post's title, had designed for Trendon Toys. He would go on to work with Ambi Toys in Denmark, not in the Tags yet, but I think there is something in the files for the A-Z entries!

 

He was - and I believe remains - the youngest ever recipient of the award for which the citation, as published in the June edition of the Design Journal that year, reads;

 

"The Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design 1970 has been awarded to Patrick Rylands for a range of toys designed for Trendon Ltd. The judges were impressed by Mr Rylands's creative approach to the design of toys and by his sustained contribution to toy design in the development of this range. They particularly commended the abstract qualities of the toys, which encourage children to use their imagination and introduce them to ideas of structure, form, colour and balance.

The best known of Patrick Rylands's toys is Playplax and this illustrates all the features which the selection panel praised. Playplax consists of simple tubes and flat squares of transparent polystyrene slotted so that they can be constructed in a multitude of ways. Red, yellow, blue, green ond clear pieces are included in each set so that children learn about colour combinations while exploring the wide variety of constructions which can be achieved."

 

He had originally designed them in ceramics, which he read at University (Hull and the Royal Collage of Arts), before creating these for Trendon in ABS/Acrylic, which was quickly replaced with polystyrene. There's plenty more on the internet, under Patrick Rylands or PlayPlax!

My own memories of them are mixed, I did have a few plays, the friend's samples tended to have lots of broken and cracked pieces, it was, in fact, far too easy to break them, either by forcing, or just sliding them together or apart at slight angles, and equally - they cracked easily.

 

As you can see from this shot, they were also quite wobbly constructions, that needed a flat surface, and steady hands, if one was to produce anything lasting and/or memorable! And actually, they had a pretty limited spacial-geometry, the tubes being far better for constructing substantial things, than the plates, which tended to spread quickly in space, without producing much of practical application!

Colours varied over the years, or between sets, and the one thing you can say for them is that they were colourfully eye-catching, especially when new and shiny! One US licensor (or pirate?), added triangles at some point which you see on evilBay from time to time, but what would have really given the line 'legs' would have been square or triangular tubes, like the round ones, or . . . and why did nobody ever do it, small joining clips, which would have allowed for long, flat runs, or side-by-side mounting?

 

The stuff is apparently still made, by Portabello Games, in the original colours and the original factory, still polystyrene (still brittle!) but no further innovation since the 'flower' pieces were added, or, are they knock-offs?

Instruction sheets from the first two sets, I don't know when the flowers' hit, but it must have been quite late, as you don't often see them in feeBay lots? And they may be a piracy thing, but I do seem to remember some of our mates having them in the larger samples?

Where they come into their own however, is in futuristic settings, think: Logan's Run, Babarella, or some of the early alien city's in Dr. Who or Star Trek! Not to mention half the props in Blake's Seven! Here I've managed a garage for space car number five! But it is huge, and you still have a very low ceiling!

 

Slightly more success with a rocket tower, but the inspection platforms are breaking all the rules of Playplax, being half-set at an angle and not locked in! But not too shabby for what was basically an infant's hand/eye coordination, 'early learner' toy.

 

There were the inevitable knock-offs, here made for a US 'jobber' (The Toy house), in the British Crown Colony (should we call it the long-term lease, now?) of Hong Kong. Pluses were more colours or - at least - different shades, minus were that they sometimes had different dimensions which either made them looser, or more likely to jam and split/break the not so cheap UK production ones!

S is for Swings & Roundabouts

An odd one here, and definitely from that 'We buy this shite so you don't have to' department, which has brought you so much quality tat over the years, I literally bought these knowing I was likely to be disappointed, but as they were so cheap, willing to take the hit if I got a Blog post out of them . . . this is a Blog post, but I was a bit disappointed; so - swings and roundabouts!

How they arrived, five novelty pens of Egyptian gods, in a fetching gold sprayed hard-placky, probably a cheap 'styrene, but I'll chuck ABS in the tags to cover my arse! 

There were branded to Toyvian but came [unbranded] from an Amazon warehouse so technically a  'generic' in phantom branding, and the photo's on the listing showed five different gods, but then stated they would be sent as a "random pattern", so a classic flagging of likely shite'ness in the 'small print' there!

Has it happens, getting two Bastets (insert your own joke about Amazon here), or two anything's is not so bad if you want to pair them-up either side of a doorway or something, but just annoying when you know there are other sculpts, and in fact three of the sculpts from the listing are missing!

Not strictly rack-toys, but priced in the same pocket-money / novelty brackets. And with both Anubis (jackal) and Bastet (cat) missing from the sales ads', I really can't bitch as much as I already have - here and elsewhere! A Pharaoh and Ra make up the four different ones I got, but that only brings us to problem number two.

The Pharaoh was broken! How? How do you break one (sealed) out of five (sealed together) and not the others? Probably because it was broken in the automated assembly and bagging process of a Chinese factory thousands of miles, and many months away from the ultimate delivery to my door, is how!

So, if we take the duplicate and the broken one out of the equation, only one of the five illustrated survives, with two newcomers! Suddenly seven-quid something starts to look pricy . . . we buy this shite so you don't have to!

From the back. If I wanted to use them as pens, obviously the Pharaoh's innards could be transferred to one of the others to extend their life, after they and run out, but pens, or 'more pens' is the last thing I need and they were purchased as novelty statuettes with a view to war-gaming scenery and that's where, hopefully you can see their potential . . .

. . . as here, where Atlantic's Pharaoh 'Ramses' is waved through the starg... err . . . portal to his throne room! Swings and roundabouts, init? They are what they are, and with a sand wash and matt repaint might be useful to someone! They do free-stand, without extra work, after the barrel and gubins are removed, but you'd need to fill the hole at the top.