Marklin, Bing, Karl Bub?
Your guess is as good as mine (unless you know for certain!), compatible with
the smaller 40mm composition that both Elastolin
and Lineol made a few of, it still
works, but the key is long gone, although the Mecanno keys fit I think? And while it needs a new flint, it looks
like a Zippo flint will fit, so maybe one day I'll do a video of it
rushing-about; spitting flame!
It manages to look quite American in its
lines, presumably as they would have been the bigger customer; I imagine it
escorting gold to Fort Knox for Wells Fargo! I'm guessing it's from the 1950's
but may be from inter-war period tooling?
This has more the look of a
locally-produced 'revolutionaries' vehicle, of which the 1920's and 1930's were
littered, world-wide. Take a prestige car (with a big engine = heavy chassis),
or commercial truck and cover it with steel plates down the local blacksmith's
or bus depot's workshops; every town and most villages had one or the other -
if not both!
I don't think it's Sun
Rubber or Auburn? My book on them
is hidden at the moment, not in the attic or the garage, but a couple of feet
away . . . behind more books, a pile of Sammelerkatalog and a teetering heap
of crazy-clowns who didn't combine as neatly as I had hoped they would and are
now waiting a new, larger container! I'll tag it to both but try to remember to
come back and correct it if I ever find out.
Markings on the tin-plate car consist of
the DRGM
registration mark and a 'Foreign' mark (which appears to have been sniped
through the 'o'!). DRGM stands for Deutsches Reich Gebrauchs Muster and indicates that a unique feature has been registered with
the relevant authority. It has no connection to the Nazi era (beyond
overlapping) as Reich is an older term for State. The Foreign was an indicator
of an import - I think to BOTH - the US or UK.
Side
by side they make quite a team! I think the German tin one is a bit too tatty
for serious tin-plate collectors, who like their stuff rust-free, mine's seen
quite a bit of action in a damp climate . . . Indochina? The counties which . .
. err . . . aren't in Ulster any more (lucky them!)?
Likewise,
the rubber one is a bit dry and cracked and the tyres look flat at certain
angles, but it's just that they are a bit small, and slightly perished, which has
led to the shrinkage and radial cracks.
