P is for Partially Seen Elsewhere - Acédo African Scene

I posted my small sample of these elsewhere, the same day, I think, but I shot a better sample on Mercator Trading's stall at the show (last London show of last year?), so we can have a better look at this French production now.

Acédo, the plastics 'arm'  of Domage et Cie (Domage and Co.), the company also behind Aludo (aluminium production), are responsible for this little set-up! Obviously made in polymerised cellulose acetate, and apparently depicting a peaceful, or civilian take on African life in a rural village, sans modernism!

 

I wondered about the trees and huts, as they looked a bit homemade (huts) and converted from something like Playmobil (trees), but a quick Google that evening revealed similar huts and some similar, but very different-shaped trees, so I think the pieces were made as flat sections, or bare boughs, and then assembled, with heat, glue and hand-held pyro-gravure work - to hide the joins. Portable hairdryers were invented in the 1920's, and can be set 'too hot' (for scalps!), so all very doable.

 

The running boy and drummer being not warlike, although the full set does include a warrior with spear and shield and a white hunter in pale safari-suit, the warrior is sort of waving his spear & shield as if 'beating' the game toward the hunter.

Close-up of my previously seen sample, other colours of loin-cloth turn-up including dark blue and white, but I don't know what other animals might be considered part of the set, a rhino, hippo, ostrich and more monkeys were in the 'zoo' sets, so there was a species-bank to pick from!

 

Usually found decorated, and the only one seen, on the day, I don't know if it's a late production thing, unpainted, or if it has been stripped, due to poor wear of the original decoration?

T is for Two - Machine Gunners

As I may have intimated, I acquired a few machine-gunners the other day, and while most of them will just be filtered into the collection for future use, there were one or two which are worth a closer look as stand-alone figures.

This is the Belgian firm of JSB, you may remember I had a very poor figure from them which I seemed to save with a thick coat of plumber's sealant a few years ago (he was still fine and stable last time I looked), he was also a pretty realistic figure, not something which can be claimed for this chap, who's channeling American 'dimestore' sculpts from the likes of Barkley or Manoil; single-highhandedly engaging aircraft (or cliff-top dwellers) with a 40mm pom-pom!

His barrel was very bent (further up, like a priapic flaking flak gun!), but I mannaged to bend it the other way with the hot-water system, although I was very careful and had several incremental goes, as I do't know what polymer this is, some phenol, formaldehyde or cellulose-based material I suspect? Proper toy soldier!

As is this fellow, a seven-part assembly of blow-moulded and vac-formed polystyrene (or celluloid, but I think the former in this case) sheet from Japan, he has moving arms and may have had a moving head once; it's now glued, fixed to the front. I don't recognise the logo-mark, which seems to be a single China-Japan-Korea compatible ideograph character ' 金 ' ?

But what a fantastic survivor of 1950's novelty tat. And; out of six successful bids (and one bidding war) to get most of them (one lot was lost to someone else), not to mention some mail-fail, probably my favourite out of the whole lot!

N is for National . . . Tree Week!

Yes loyal readers, it's National Tree Week - if you live in the UK (if you live elsewhere it's probably National Something-else Week?) - and the various parties currently competing for power in our General Election spent the weekend arguing over who was planning on planting the most trees! I think the highest bid was 40-million, by Boris, but you know that's a lie!

The National Tree Week people what us to plant 1-million between us, which should be doable, there's about 68-million of us so one in every sixty-eight citizens need to plant a tree in the next twelve months?

As covering the whole of the British Isles in trees wouldn't undo what's been lost in the Amazon this year, it's all rather academical, but you should plant trees because they're nice!

Anyway . . . by way of a bit of gratuitous band-wagoning; here are some trees!

Lego flats! But Lego from the 'acceptable age', that is the age before that pesky Small Scale World bloke reminded us all they are rip-off, corporate, plagiarist pirates, and before they apparently set out to cover the whole planet (including its oceans) in four-centimetres of plastic bricks!

The early set (upper shot) were stand-alone trees with small, flat-bottomed bases, and six designs produced seven trees by the expediency of painting-in flower-candelabra in red on some but not all of the horse-chestnuts. The later set (lower shot) had bases which griped the studs on baseboards, or the studs on spaceships - Lego is pretty flexible that way!

A couple of the latter set's trees were redesigned, and 'big round tree' was one of them, as was the hedge - they were given more lumps!

There is a minor variation on shade with the firs, but it's not as marked as with some of the other trees, while Samsonite had a franchise in the USA for a while and produced the middle tree in the upper shot, it's the standard tree, given two slats which lock-on to the studs and may have led to the second full-version coming to life? They treated the hedge (below) in the same way.

I ought to be able to tell you who made the two vague copies (lower left) as I have them on the dongles somewhere, but I'm buggered if I can find them, they came with a large boxed play-set of erzgebirge type stuff if memory serves, and while these are a little different from the Lego sculpt; the same name may be responsible for a couple more down the page.

The modern ones are actually quite cartoony, but equally more Lego'y! the early designs had sharp edges and although softish polyethylene and pretty innocuous, they were nevertheless redesigned with rounded extremities.

The small fir was the first to receive the kinder tips, and - as far as I know - there are no hard-edged versions, however when the two full sized trees were re-done, a second version of the little one appeared, also (as per the two full-sized trees) slightly taller than its predecessor.A forth design is a Lombardy Poplar, but I may not have one, or it is somewhere else!

The Lombardy poplar was softened in the clip-on tranche with the loss of the 'sand-tex' finish. It is also the most pirated of all the Lego trees, but all the piracies are in other tubs, in another crate out in the garage so we'll have to look at them properly another day! China firms are still using various sub-generation of this tree today, and one or two have been cobbled together below - final image.

On the right; touring in France, before they cut them all down to save the lives of drunk drivers . . . I would have put concrete blocks round their bases, after a decade you'd have had a leaner population with no drink drivers and you could remove the blocks!

The horse chestnut; in the upper shot are the basic versions with the two modern 'big-round tree', below are more variations of the early flat-base version. However, the two to the bottom left may not be Lego at all, and may - in point of fact - be either the same maker as the firs above, or another maker all together?

Both are finer, busier sculpts, but both are the same colours as the known Lego trees? A true HK copy is in the final image below.

The boring ones! Although the hedges are very useful for war-games scenery as you can build quick lines of natural obstacle from them, and in 1:330 type mirco-armour gaming each make a nice stand of trees or a coppice.

Note; the far right birch is also by another maker, possibly the same maker as the two look-alikes (firs and chestnuts) above? And there's a related hedge from Wing Luen below.

Between the flats and the full-on polyethylene lumps, there was a short-lived pair (I think it was only ever the two shapes . . . did they do a hedge; they may have done the hedge too?) where plastic granules in green were attached to formers or 'armatures' in brown polymer.

These were from the cellulose years, so acetone is the best solvent, useful, as they are hard to find, and when found have usually lost some of their granules which will be found scudding about in the bottom of their container.

But note that the conifer has large granules, while the 'deciduous' has smaller granules, I have a part-fir in small granules so assume both/all three came in either format. I'd imagine the parental swallowing-fear of granules which came lose, or could be prised-off, often in multiple-granule lumps, hastened their short life?

Mega Bloks came to my attention with a range of large (8/12-inches) dinosaur 'big-box' models (long before Lego did dinosaurs), which came in lovely shades of purple, brown, dark mauve, khaki and various greens (long before Lego offered such colours) and the shrub in front/to the left here, came in those sets.

The Lego grass tussock also has some age now, and is here to compare, as a red one (or other colours); it's sea-weed, or - I think - it was used as an alien planet's shit at one point? There's loads of greenery in Lego's inventory now, but there's nothing exciting about modern Lego, except . . . walk a mile anywhere in the UK and you'll find some in the environment!

I cobbled this together from scraps after the above was pretty much done, from the left we have the modern iteration of the poplar, it's Lego DNA all but gone; a generic which may or may not be the same as the Wing Wha screen-capcha next to it; a Hong Kong copy of the chestnut, a Wing Luen hedge which seems to be half Lego and half Gem? Finally a comparison shot with the relatively common Jean-Big-Manurba-Dom-Heinerle-Leyla-whoever, marked W.Germany on its base.

F is for From the Sublime to the Ridiculous!

Just a quickie in case I don't get anything else up in time for Monday!

The figure in the center is that crappy China-via-Russia-to-Germany thing I bought at Plastic Warrior's show back in May (hey, I'm nothing if not an esoteric completist!), either side of him is a probably Japanese-made (from one of those scallop-shell, mini-diorama, touristy things) South Asian warrior of the contemporaneous era (depicted), but ten times nicer!

He's also interesting in being a solid, rather than the usual hollow vac-form or blow-mould, despite being the same celluloid or cellulose acetate.

As to the red one; when I said back in June/July "We won't see them again here very soon or very often!" I clearly lied! Issued/packed by Smart Toys Creative of Yiwu, China, imported into Russia by Trading House Mirika.

That's it, something for Monday morning!

DUK is for "APION" Amfibies Jeep!

This is an odd one; sometimes I just don't understand how the hobby works. What we have here is a never seen before, may never see again, South African toy of a military vehicle in 'around' a 54/60mm compatible scale, yet having shot it at length back in the early spring, [not] watched them not-sell on evilBay, watched them not sell at the Plastic Warrior show and bought an orphan - at the end of the show, I wonder how that happened?

Most 'large-scale' collectors, or at least the more generic or ephemeral collectors, the completist or competitive collectors or the curious (which is all bar the subject-specific collectors, i.e. most of them) would happily have a bright red Tudor Rose Land-Rover or bright yellow Pyro or Banner 'dimestore' Jeep in their collections, yet no one wanted these?

Yet, I also half-understand, as despite sliding the first image between the two introductory paragraphs, and sticking another above this continuation of my opening point, I am going to struggle to find enough blurb for the post, as there's hardly anything to say about them, but having taken a load of images when I first saw them and some more of my example (red one) I now have five collages to write up! Now obviously, the next paragraph can be all about the Box . . .

Which comes in at least two colour-ways, both are three-colour processes, but different colours, litho'd, not dot-matrix, so green/orange are reproduced by overlaying. Each box also has two panels and one end with the the written details in Afrikans and the other three faces in English . . . like the contemporaneous stamps!

This leaves maker and the vehicle to describe; but you've already seen it as I spread the images through the text! It's an amphibious Jeep in leery colours, reasonably accurate for an infant toy, and in a phenolic resin which is starting to distort - in the case of the yellow; particularly so. Opposite colours are placed as 'small parts'; red on the yellow vehicle and vise-versa.

Final image leaves us with the maker . . . African Plastic Industries (Pty) Limited trading as Apion and the price . . . three shillings and ninep'nce, for something this large, which has probably been sent half-way round the world on a tramp steamer, places them in the nineteen-fifties I suspect, while there's nothing on Google!

Phew! Got there, can't understand why no one wanted them, can half-understand why they generated so little interest, but . . . humans are weird! Still they join the Haarlem and SA marked SAE in the collection, what next from that part of the world?

K is for Kiwis . . . and These Kiwis Flew!

A real red-letter day here at Small Scale World, and red figures . . . and a red box!

Mr. The Right Honourable the Lord Glenn, Sir 'Sibby' Sibbald of Poly-Mer, currently of the parish of Morrrdorrr, the Shire, Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains, Rivendell, Rohan and the Ridermark and the lands of Gondor, has only gorn and went and sent the Blog (for free, gratis, asking for nothing in return) a 'New To Hobby', mint as it can be after 65-70-years, New Zealand issue of the Airfix/Pierwood cellulose acetate figures . . .

. . . looking like the figures were shot yesterday in a factory in Camberley and rushed-over here, by courier, still-warm! Not an easy colour to photograph and the shots on the Airfix page are marginally better, or easier on the eye.

Normally when I post these they go straight on that Airfix page, with a link-back here, but due to the importance of these and my desire to do them justice, I'll post them over there  at the same time, with new pictures.

All eight poses, arranged - top left to bottom right - differently to the listing on Pierwood's card (to be seen in the Plastic Warrior magazine Early Airfix'Special') but sharing their adjusted figure-descriptions, as I was still waiting to locate the 18thC fusilier/pirate and both the pilot and the Japanese/infantryman, it's lovely enough to have them all in one shot, but the real treat today is the packaging.

The box; it has a small tear at one end I will fix eventually with a near invisible mend. It is a single colour litho-printed graphic with no brand or maker clues anywhere. However there were a bunch of plastics firms that came and went in the 1950's/60's in New Zealand, while the possibilities; least-likely first - are that

• Airfix supplied the product, bulk - for repacking
• These predate Pierwood with the tool moving on to Oz.
• Pierwood supplied the product
• These are post Pierwood with the tool sold/lent to NZ

If they are New Zealand-produced the further question raised is: was it an independent company or an Airfix subsidiary - they had many? While I would love it to be New Zealand manufacture, I fear - from the like-for-like figure titles - that it's the third option?

As we will see later in the week, there is a slim possibility (and it's very slim) that there's a link with Lincoln and/or Toltoys, but - from the dates - one more of inheritance than production, if any at all.

Tantalising hints of other colours (E is the 5th letter of the alphabet), although the '8' is probably referring to the figure-total and obviously the correct figures were in the 'Red' box. Does this mean the other boxes were coloured for their contents - Pierwood also did yellow, silver, bronze, white and blue; I think, although the NZ-sent figures from Norman Dunckley on the Airfix page may well be/probably are NZ figures, not the previously assumed Australian-made ones, and they have a fawnish-grey/tan!

Also the figure graphic on the long-side (same both sides) clearly show the 'Lemon Squeezer' of New Zealand troop's service dress, not the Australian slouch-hat with its pined-up side. I love that it's called a lemon-squeezer! The Americans have their 'Smokey Bear', we have the 'Boy Scout' . . . what do the Canadians call theirs?

There's only so much you can waffle-on, about one little set, and I'm wont to stop, but all good things come to an end . . . I can't thank Glenn enough for this kindness both on my own behalf (I get to see them every time I go in that Airfix box!) and for the Blog, which only benefits from getting such treasures in the tag-list for all of you to enjoy.

There are other treasures to come from Glenn's parcel, but this was very-much the 'icing on the cake'.

M is for Malleable Mouldings 54mm Marching Marines

Title says it all, which leave me with a problem vis-à-vis blurb!

You were going to get Phidal Peter Rabbit in this slot, he'll appear this afternoon if things go according to a non-existent plan known as the 'see-what-happens' schedule!

I shot these on Adrian's stand back in September and they're actually cropped-out of larger images of a zoo I hope to Blog over Christmas, so I'm pleased they are as decent, image-wise, as they are!

I don't know if these are Eriksson's-hand; ex-Comet/Authenticast (Gaeltacht Industries), or latter production, if anything they are superior sculpts, while he's rated, he is formulaic; these have a more realistic countenance, I feel? Although the join-line is quite 'hollow-cast' or poured-metal in execution so I'm really just generating blurb!!

They appear to be in four parts; hat, two arms and body with a additional base that Malleable Mouldings seem to have cut from sheet material, pretty rough sheet material at that; puddled or rolled-out cellulose-acetate!

I is for Itsy-bitsy Teeny-weeny, Little Gum-ball Capsule Thingies!

Just a quickie, I managed to get a handful of mostly vintage gum-ball prizes . . . humm . . . they're hardly prizes if you've paid a dime or a quarter for them are they . . . I managed to get a handful of mostly vintage, randomly-vended, gum-ball novelties! And you won't often find the phrase 'vintage' here, but these - with one exception - are from the 1940/50's, so deserve the term.

The 'animals' - the larger sub-group; I considered sorting them further into wild and domestic but that would have left me with a fish and/or two birds to deal with so I shot them all together, and it's a reasonable image! From left to right, top to bottom;

Parrot, squirrel, deer, monkey, pig, elephant, lamb, cat, cat. cat, rhinoceros, lion, fish, cockerel, cat.

I think -despite the appearance of celluloid (by base colour) and the fact that they are always called such on evilBay - that these are all polystyrene, with the exception of the black cat, which does seem to be an earlier phenolic plastic.

As far as Christmas crackers go; elephants and cats are still with us, but the rest have dropped by the way-side these days. I particularly like the parrot with its three-colour 'spirit paint' scheme, and the squirrel has had an all-over wash to hide the base colour. I think the thing to the left of the lion is supposed to be a rhino, but it might be the - presumably - now extinct porpoise-dog!

The 'people'; I often watch these on feebleBay and the sample here is mostly of typical or common types, I never buy on-line, the buy-it-now (BIN) prices are ridiculous, and while these were a bargain, they weren't cheap and required a quick haggle.

Two of them are very odd (on the far right) being stamped/die-cut from celluloid-sheet with a blob of molten / liquid / paste 'something - for a face, with two rods of celluloid set into it - for eyes - before it sets solid and are probably earlier production (1940's), I suspect there may also be an element of negative parody or racism about them both?

The opalescent girl is almost fully-round, the yellow/red clown is fully-round and I thought the ship was Noah's ark with a figure [or animal] at each end (hence the inclusion in the 'people' shot) but macro-photography suggests a Viking long ship - if I spent my limited means on my outstanding glasses prescription rather than old toys, I might find the study of the old toys easier, but I'd have no new toys to look at, just  a pair of shiny glasses, so I shall continue with the odd comedy-error of myopic nonsense and buy toys!

The rest . . . all four of them! The ray-gun is relatively modern and quite common on feeBay, the sword/dagger (and possibly the coral) are earlier plastic maybe, the pen (being mightier than the sword, or Trupundbrexit gobshites) is highlighted in two colours, with a turquoise wash and a gold nib . . . and that's it, a quick overview/visit to vintage gum-ball thingies!

A is for Armstrong Whitworth, not Northrop, apparently!

This post will - unbeknown to you (if only I could keep my gob shut) - be accompanied by frantic Googling to check facts, and will probably have been last-minute-edited at the time of posting!

Returning to what used to be so 'rare' it's existence wasn't known, and is now becoming a bit of a perennial - this being the second or third we've seen now?!

However, previous investigation suggested it might be a Northrop experimental; one of two if memory serves, both of which were well within the early war (World War Two to the youngsters) date I have pinned on the original first run of the Palitoy aircraft range from which this model comes.

In fact (the bit which will have been frantically Googled in the last few minutes!), I was told by a chap at Sandown Park this weekend that it was an ArmstrongWhitworth design the AW 52, something which hadn't even featured in previous research, and as the [just found] link [hopefully] shows - that is the case, with the strange pipes coming of the trailing edges which never quite matched the vanes of the Northrop designs.

Like the other examples we have seen (and unlike the rest of the Palitoy range) the aircraft type is not listed among the markings, which are otherwise just as 'vocal' as the other models we've looked at with - from the left, looking from below;

Palitoy Regd.

Non Flam.

CAS

____

CAS

Made In England

The CAS being almost certainly British Cascelloid Limited, the parent company's name; the retail trademark Palitoy being a play on the founder's name, a Mr. A. E. Pallett. Celastoid being the 1920's trademark of rival British Celanese Limited's cellulose-acetate, aircraft modeling parts.

Because stuff sometimes hangs around in Picasa for a while, until I work out what to do with it, or wait for a suitable post to slip it into; this has been hanging around since the last Sandown show in September (Mercator Trading to thank for both) and now's clearly the post to slip it into.

Around 1:50th scale, this bears all the hallmarks of the aircraft range (without the 'CAS') but is part of a small range dated by vehicle collectors to 1948, this could mean the aircraft models too; date from later than suits my previous pontification, although I think this model (with a replacement wheel) has more in common with what I consider later (flat colour) issues of the 'planes (such as this flying wing) rather than the flecked/recycled/waste-plastic ones, but clearly more digging needs to be done!

Previouslyon Small Scale World (this post will reappear at the top of the results page - scroll down!)

F is for French Figures I - Styrene & Cellulose Acetate

Add over another year to the dates below! I'd almost got these ready for publishing when Blogger decided to empty one of the folders and replace it with the contents of the one I was editing a few minutes earlier...I lost hart and sat looking at them for over another year! Anyway; here they all are....finally!

===============================================================

I took the first of the images for these about five years ago, three years ago I had a bigger photo-session and announced they would be forthcoming, two years ago I got round to 'collaging them up' in Picasa - by which time a few more had come in - and announced that they were on the waiting list, uploaded them at the library in Newbury about 14 months ago and apart from adding another collage of latecomers, they've sat in Edit ever since!

I don't now what the problem was...like writer's block or something! Anyway, this and the three posts going-in below (on the blog 'Homepage') are the long-seeped results. It's no more than an overview of what little I know about French soldiers and French manufactured figures of 'combat' or 'khaki Infantry' from the WWII-Modern period.

This post looks at the earlier figures, the second looks at later soft plastic production, the third has some Czech rubber and polypropylene re-issues and the forth is a few Starlux. There are throughout the four as many question-marks than as facts, and input will be appreciated.

Three from Clariet and one from Jim, the more interesting is the separate helmet on the shirt-sleeved pointing chap, mirrored in the production of Minimodels over here. I particularly like the sailor, he goes well with the output of Starlux, but is doing something useful (slotting the enemy) not standing around with a swab or ceremonial axe!

These nearly all need ID'ing, I recognise some old Aluminium poses (and a couple of these are also in soft plastic as Vilco on the next post down), the silver one here is in a styrene polymer. I'd say the dark-blue sailor is from a die-cast or plastic toy vehicle or vessel of some kind.

The forth one along from the left seems to be Cyrnos, but the chap to his left isn't, so they are probably re-paints and the Tirailleur (mid-blue, far left) is definitely a Cyrnos figure

I think the riders are all Starlux (though I'm not 100% sure) but I'm not so happy that the horses are, there's only the two horses and ones missing its tail, so a poor sample, but the riders are lovely.

The pale blue chap is Beffoid, while the officer in the middle of the lower bunch is marked Quiralux, so going on both base-paint and plastic colours, I assume most of the rest are? The last two on the lower row are probably home re-paints; there were a lot in the collection they came from?

These are half-and-half a mystery to me; top middle and right looks like an ex-aluminium figure, so Quiralux or Cofalux?

The centre shot are all Cyrnos sailors, 3 repainted as Nazis by the same guy who ruined the soft plastic chaps in the other post. Stripping paint from hard plastics (especially if they are earlier cellulose-based compounds) is so problematical it's best to leave them.

I think these are all Cyrnos as well (not sure about the baseless MG gunner? He's painted to match the 'possibly' Quiralux above) and a bit chunkier. These are mostly damaged, but still evocative figures with that 1950's charm that can't be faked. I have Sam of Sam's Minis World to thank for some of these too.