N is for November's Sandown Park - Vehicles

As always, I picked-up a fair few vehicles a month ago (where does it go, this time which is already so limited to us!), and a pretty eclectic bunch at that, but Sandown Park was originally a train and die-cast show! Anyway, let's look at 'em!

A bit pricey, at a tenner; I like mine around the five-quid mark, but it does have one of the MPC-copy astronauts, which are harder to find. I may already have one, but unlike my MPC sample (Golden Astronauts), I can never remember which Spacex ones I have and which ones I need, so there's a tendency to just buy them! Not that the MPC situation is any better, I know I have all bar one, but can never remember which one, so don't buy!

 

Couldn't resist this Hot Wheels model, it's the basic 110 'Defender' as we took delivery of, back in '86/87, ahead of the rest of the British Army, because the Berlin Brigade had a separate procurement / purchasing system! Although most of ours were soft-tops, and the CO got a windowed 'Safari' hard-top 'limo' with foot-steps and roof-rack!

 

Nice - probably copies of a Western novelty - all plastic, Hong Kong made, road rollers, two in one colour, the other - bagged - in another and many thanks to Adrian Little, who found these and put them to one side for me. They'll make a nice line-up with the Blue Box, Blue Bow and others, alongside the Montaplex ones!

 

Eldon, no, Elmont, a mistake I always make! An early British maker of road transport models in plastic, rival to Wells-Brimtoy, with similar fly-wheel, push-and-go motors, they are manufactured in an early, soapy plastic, similar to the French cart in Chris's last parcel, but less stable and prone to warping.

 

It's in a hell of a state, but . . . I have a red one with . . . green (?) cable drums, which is so badly deformed, I will cannibalise it to get this one ship-shape. This has a slight shrinkage dip in the cab-roof, which will need hot water, a wooden wedge and some super-glue to straighten again (for a decade or two?), but my existing one has warping through the cab, body and cable drums, so there was method in the madness, and it was barely any money!

 

A lovely French motorcycle, possibly Cofalux, and probably a team-support vehicle from a Tour de France boxed set, alongside the Matchbox scrambler one, but not the common yellow plastic, number '8', this red, number '10', was from a gift-set.

 

Baby in a boat . . . it's a boat, with a baby!

 

Seen before, but another sample, cheap!

Kamley/Kwong Shing

 

Magneto, a German firm which actually produced a few of the dancers and ethnic dressed figures seen here before, and there's a post in the pipeline, but for now - missing its propulsion wand, this is a magnetic push-novelty, where negative magnetism is used to propel the car.

 

Zero-Hour / Code Zero plane, someone had glued the broken tail stabiliser back-on, but back-to-front, which I've fixed, but it made it dirt-cheap! These have passed their silly-money point now, and there was a lot of Zero Hour stuff around the halls, most of it very reasonable, compared to evilBay prices of only a few years ago!

 

I was getting stuff from the horses-mouth on this Bluebird line, a while ago, but then he started sending it to other Blogs, so it lost it's exclusivity, and I realised it was more about promoting his site, than supporting mine, or contributing to fandom, so I dropped out, and have stuff I'll probably never publish, and which subsequently appeared elsewhere, anyway. I'll promote your site if I chose to, or because it's the right thing to do, not because you ask me to, or it becomes conditional! 

 

I tried to pay Steve Vicker's for this unmarked 'British' generic novelty, on Saturday just-gone, as he'd given it to me at Sandown Park, and I felt he'd given it to me because I'd told him the vessel was a German premium and didn't belong in the box, but he wouldn't take money for it, so I filled my boots with French, Canadian and American plastic, to even things up a bit!

 

Technically, it IS a German premium, it still has Sanella on the hull, but it must be clearance or some kind of unused-stock sell-through, and once I'd found the little cellulose sheet (bottom left image), and read the instructions at home, it became obvious, from the faint traces of dark-brown glue (Evostick as was - evo' for evil!) on the sheet, that it was the correct ship.

 

The set of premiums (Manurba, Siku, someone like that) can be found unbranded, usually in brighter colours as later rack-toys (Tallon like), or with branding, like the Sanella here (a German margarine for baking, still going), in a number of configurations, but all on the same hull, there’s a liner, tramp steamer, small tanker and this . . . exploration vessel/mail packet?

 

It says "Gives hours of fun", but I suspect it was minutes of misery, trying to get it to work, against a very sensitive chemical reaction that's too easy to muck up, and where would you get small camphor tablets these days? The threat of banning moth-balls was enough for the industry to withdraw them, and while the EU never passed the rule, they've never returned, and most of the ones you might find on evilBay or Amazon are fakes . . . another missed 'Brwreakshit benefit"!

F is for Five! . . . Four! . . . Fire Main Engines! . . .

A while ago . . . February last; Bill 'Wotan' Bulloch, informed the members of an eMail group that a lot was on eBay "Too Good to Miss!", he was right and I didn't miss it, but with no other bids I rather stole it from someone, not that it was 'bargain-basement' but it often goes for twice what I paid, or more, so I was very happy.

I only need the cake-decoration boxed set and the space-station now! Although carded I've  a few gaps still in the Triang cards and still have one US Golden Astronaut card to find. We are talking Triang Spacex today, and Set 1172/16 Mobile Launching Pad, although this set was branded to Raphael Lipkin, not Triang! They were both part of 'Lines II' Triang by that time.

Looks good huh? Nice bit of cartoony psychedelia - with the electric colours and black background it's getting into back-light poster territory! And referencing the Apollo 8 launch, dates itself, or its sales-meeting conceptualisation to sometime in 1968, although the design wasn't registered until November 1969.

Instruction sheet has suffered a tad from atmospheric damp over the decades and got a bit crinkled, but if Putin is preparing the West bank of the Kerson Oblast for a nuclear strike, it may well be incinerated in the next few weeks - too close to Aldershot for comfort in a populist's Armageddon!

1. This is a constructional toy!

Five-stage rocket components; harking back to pulp space-ships rather than the NASA launch vehicles they should have been familiar with at the time. If a man is supposed to occupy the chromed spaceship at the tip, scale is about the same as an Apollo launcher though? And the Russians were using launch rockets with fluted engine-venturi arrangements.

The base of the 'MLP', properly a Missile Crawler Transporter Facility (now just called a crawler-transporter) is a simplified affair, but a stunning thing for what would have been a 1960's pocket-money price, OK, probably a "Save your pocket-money for a few weeks darling and we'll see - your Birthday's not that far off" price, but Raphael Lipkin weren't noted for top-end toys!

The gantry-tower comes in three sections (the top is photographed from both sides) which you won't be surprised to hear are called bottom, middle and top around here!

Added to the tower are a crane visible on the original (see end) and two service walkways scaled around N or Z-gauge compatible.

Start putting them all together and realise it's a perfect scenario for a .gif image, so go and make a .gif image . . .

. . . which goes like this! Forward and reverse; it's very hard to get these .gif's 'just right', I tried slowing it down by a few hundredths of a second, and it became too slow and jumpy, but as it is, it seems a little fast, however it's quite mesmeric, so you can lose a few minutes waiting to catch the exact moment the walkways disappear . . . they appear quite obviously, but disappear in the blink of a fast eye!

And a still image of the crane preparing a Swizzles Matlow sherbet-stuffed Spaceflleet 2000 supply-ship for launch! Although with that ring on the deck of the launch vehicle, it looks like it's about to suffer a drop-test . . . gotta' get the sherbet out somehow!

The outer liner of the box is a slip-off, which always carries with it the danger of losing small components, so it was extra luck that everything was in the box. Also a close-up of the little space-craft which sits atop the giant firework!

End panel of the inner box, not terribly exciting, but it's one of those posts where I'm showing/covering everything, or trying to, if you want more though, Paul Vreed's got it all here!

The real McCoy courtesy of Wikipedia! The crane is quite good, but look at that plethora of service gantries and walkways! Sorry Mike; it was't Bill, it was me, cheer Bill for telling us!

S is for Spacex (LB part 1)

Starting at the end, or ending at the start...if you've been following them! The most collected, but to a certain extent also the most common, the 25mm range, although they're not all the same size, nothing so easy from the HK producers. Marketed by Triang in the UK, and in the US by Multiple Toy Makers as Golden Astronaut, but all (most?) made by Lik Be - LB.

From the top; Hard plastic gunmetal, soft plastic gunmetal, Hard plastic chrome silver, hard plastic chromed gold, hard plastic white. All carry the LB mark except the silvered chrome ones and the four at the bottom and these may be the ones by Hover (a HK for the US company producing similar Spacex stuff), Blue Box or similar. Those last four have been painted by the owner.

Note; The white ones and the top row are taller than the others by about 1.5 mm, while the unmarked ones are chunkier mouldings. Gold Chrome are Spacex, the others were mostly carded HK stuff and/or cake decorations, available via Culpitts and similar.

These are the extra figures available with Spacex and Golden Astronaut sets, the four to the left being based on MPC 5 inch figures, the two to the right being based on MPC 50mm figures. The silver one above the row is what happens when you leave them in the sun, not a deliberate silver chromed figure. While the one below the row may have had is chrome stripped, if not he's quite unusual, being made of that 1950's type (mixed granules) plastic? These were never marked, but were sold mixed with LB marked figures in the Spacex/GA ranges.

An incomplete collection of the Triang smaller vehicles, each had 1 figure, so with 50% being the common LB designs, you had to buy a lot to get all the MPC poses (which is why I only have 5 decent examples, and one who's been in the wars!).

Three others, loose, I could list them all, but you're far better off going to Project Moonbase. Presumably in the 21st Century (later, much later!) we will palletise all goods on hover pallets, doing away with the need for two long thin arms on fork-lifts/pallet trucks?

Since corrected to Lik Be / LB.

P is for Pirates (LB part 3)

Because all the HK guys were centred on the same region of the colony, when they did produce unique designs - not often but it did happen occasionally - they would immediately be copied by all their rivals, so dozens of piracy's exist; Blue Box suffer from a lot of copying, these LB figures, Corgi's late figure production and so on.

Here we have a white figure almost the same size as the 54mm originals, but with a hollowed out base, either side of him some unmarked silver figures around 45mm with similar but slightly heavier moldings in the same size but multi-coloured above.

The bottom row from left to right; quite accurate copies of the small scale figures, then a very heavy-set chap in silver, and an intermediate bunch to finish. All - again - unmarked, all around 25mm.

The figures in this 'Acrobatic Team' carded set are marked with a small 'HONG KONG' as are the 'planes, I particularly like these aircraft, as while being based on 1950/60's Cold War machines, they could - with a bit of paint - pass for 'Atmosphere Craft' of the Trigan Empire or some of their allies or enemies.

Now why has no one exploited that franchise!? The loose craft bottom right is a moulding failure, but with such symmetry to the missing wing-tips, he makes a whole new variant!

Silicone rubber sucker / window stick-ons of the robots

Some vehicles that have accompanied some of the lots the above figures came in, they may or may not be connected, wheels are very like some Blue Box wheels? The pilots are straight copies of the pilots from the Triang Spacex range.

Since corrected to Lik Be / LB.

L is for LB (part 4)

Another favorite of mine over the years has been the vast range of variants of the LB/Golden/Tri-ang Spacex figures, along with their Robots, and I'll be returning to them again, but for now here are a few of the larger ones.

A good range of different treatments in 54mm of all 8 poses of astronaut. From left to right we have two 'painted fronts' (as opposed to painted both sides/all over) in soft ethylene white plastic, followed by an unpainted one, then a couple of the late coloured ones, a very late hard nylon type plastic one with a chromium finish and two unpainted final versions. These last types can still be found languishing in the dustier corners of older bakers and cake decorating shops.

The later 'Painted fronts' have blue eyes, rather than the black of earlier versions.

The very first runs were painted on both sides, and here we find the earliest styrene issue, again all 8 poses, but showing the reverse, you can follow the issues by how much paint they have! Paper on the base points to them having been glued into Blue Box type window-boxed display sets.

More early issues, again painted on both sides but in ethylene, these early products even have the bases painted, the first thing to go! I have later red ones with no paint, but have yet to find a green one. The green one - of course - does away with the need to paint the base!

A carded set with the Robots in large scale, they're quite uncommon in the bigger size, usually turning up with the small scale figures. Note also (not that clear in the picture I know!) that the two Robots are both fitted with piercings, almost certainly this set was produced after the mold had been permanently converted to produce Key Ring charms. Also of note is the ubiquitous pirated Roco-minitanks Pz.IV chassis!


Another chassis but with different superstructure (the Lone*Star rocket launcher, another much pirated design!), three more - earlier - Robots and another with the key-ring piercing, unusually he's the only one in my collection of these in a PVC vinyl.

The relative rarity of the Robots in larger sizes probably stems from the visual appearance of them once the holes had been drilled, these HK producers would hawk their wares to all and sundry, and people wouldn't have put in orders for 'damaged' moldings.

Since corrected to Lik Be / LB.