R is for a Return to Premier's Pocket Rockets

Well, it's been four months and I can honestly say Windows 11 is the worst version since Vista, or even Windows 98. I used to enjoy 'computing', now it's become a necessary chore! Anyhoo's I mentioned the other day we’d return to these in a future post, this is the future, or it was until you read it, so let's go!

This is how they arrived, and it was not a pretty sight, thick layer/s of stab-and-hope (with a 'craft' brush) paint, which would have looked quite fetching if done properly! The gloss black and matt red are OK, in that they are quite flat coats, but the yellow is as thick as cheese and cracked like a lakebed in a drought?

While this is mid-way through the thorough cleaning I gave them, at this point they have just been rinsed after washing, after an hour or so in TFR (Traffic Film Remover - concentrated ammonia), after an overnight dip in 50% bleach. The red is clinging to the contact-line with the yellow, while the yellow isn't budging, one iota!

I repeated the process over the next 24-odd hours, and maybe got them a bit cleaner, but that yellow 'aint going nowhere, and while because it's definitely a different type of paint, I was wondering if it might be factory-applied, the fact is I can't find other examples, and the red is still clinging to the contact-line so may go under it, which means, I guess, the painter used some powerful, pre-health & safety era, probably lead-based shit they found in their dad's tractor shed . . . 1950's Claas-yellow Rustoleum anyone?

I do have another hard plastic one somewhere in blue and a couple of polyethylene jobbies, I think, but since Ed Berg went through them all, I know I have a ways to go, so these will stay like this for a while, and at some point I'll have to give them a new coat with an airbrush or aerosol, just to neaten them up a bit! At least the wheels are there on the bigger one.

Ed gave them a nomenclature which makes sense, so I'll adopt it, and he calls the little-one a 3" Wide Body - version 1 while the larger model is a 5" Dart - version 6, I think? And they are all described here with links to the individual posts.

C is for Combex's Cruising Crayon Carving Craft!

Picked this up the other day, little rocket pencil sharpener, although, it's not that little; it's nearly ten-inches of pulp-cover, Space Age, interstellar loveliness, from Combex, that [not] very well known ex-comb maker! Geddit! Lots of useful stuff here.

To give a sense of the size, it's here posed with some Giant clones and a couple of Keshi eraser types I happened to have to hand. Clearly this was more of a desktop novelty than a pencil-case thing, and I'm a bit gutted I never found one in my Christmas stocking, because clearly it belonged there!

 

The whole ship is hollow, so you can literally disintegrate most of the contents of your pencil-case, in one sitting, should you be minded to! And the seven-vent engine-bay is removable to empty the contents. Maybe, it was sold AS a pencil-case, possibly even having some pencils secreted within, it could easily take five or six . . . anyone know? Yes it was, see comments/Graces Guide page (link below) - 1954! It's 69!

 

There are two launching 'rails' moulded on the underside, so it was a horizontal launcher, a popular launch method in early fiction, whether fired as projectiles or using some magnetic-levitation device, or sequential-explosion (multi-chamber) accelerator. There is interesting stuff being done to deliver small payloads with a giant revolving sling-shot arm, at the moment.

Posed with what I think might be early (very clean/sharp mouldings), factory-painted (more in a later post), Premier space-ship escorts, I think the far one is what Ed Berg has dubbed a 5" Dart - version 6, and the near one is a 3" Wide Body - version 1?

 

Obviously, with the rails on the underside, giving an 'up' and 'down', I never really thought to photograph the red side! So black-top and red-bottom/wings, and it's pretty awesome!

P is for Premier Plastics' Polymer Pretenders

Students of these Premier Plastics Flash Gordon space-ships might want to get this page (Ed Berg's Premier-Plastics knock-offs' article) up on a separate tab, to toggle between the two and ID them, but I didn't measure them, so....Doh!

Photographed on Mercator Trading's table back in the autumn, these are probably all copies although the yellow one is 'clean' and hard styrene and may be an original dime-store item from Premier? Well...photographed on the floor, an old Britains box lid and my jumper to be precise!

Although I didn't measure them I'd say the two blue ones are both over 3 inches (so the fat one isn't the one you're still looking for Ed!), and they are both soft ethylene. The yellow one is shorter and as I've said; hard plastic.

Close-ups...that's it really; there's not a lot else to say about them, they're single-lump mouldings, dime-store/pocket money, probably knock-offs and Ed Berg's covered them in 21 sequenced articles if you follow the above link and click on 'Space Ships'.