V is for Vanity Case

Here's something completely different. I was in TKMaxx the other day, still looking for the broken astronaut - I don't think that's going to happen! And I discovered they had some aftershave gel, a rarity these days, common as muck fifteen years ago, but bloody-hard to find these days (possible subject of a future rant), and while grabbing that, saw these;

 

Now, my first thoughts were, why on earth would young-men today, feel the need for a set of tools such as these? In the age of hot & cold running water, exfoliating facial scrubs and textured cloths, sponges, loofahs, pumice-stones and Japanese scrubbers, why would you subject yourself to medieval instruments, last seen in Edwardian bathrooms? My second thought (I'm not interested in the answer to the first), was five-quid for ten useful sculpting/fine-modelling tools?!! Take my phuquing money!

 

Ideal for sculpting Plasticine or modelling materials such as air-drying clay or Milliput, fine etching, particularly in plastics, and getting old paint out of tight folds and undercuts in otherwise stripped figures, and at a pound a tool, a bargain, I thought!

 

To which I've added these, mostly inherited from a bathroom which did have it's origins in the Edwardian era (my Mother's), although I suspect the two twisty ones (silver, or silver-plate) may be pipe-cleaning tools, subsequently used as tooth-picks? Below them are a strange, small, bladed-tool and a more conventional nail file, cleaner and quick-shaper, in ivory - I think? With a steel insert.

 

The former may be a surgeons bone knife? A once very sharp blade and now equally blunt chisel-end, but both thick, heavy blades, on a short, possibly stainless-steel, but substantial handle, suggest the finishing of bone, after amputation? While, on the subject of bone, I feel if the nail-file was bone it wouldn't hold that curved point, or the fine scoop for pushing back quicks, in the way the finer material presented by ivory can?

 

Anyway, they will be going in with the modelling tools, for what's left of my natural term! I wonder who else has unconventional modelling tools?

T is for Terrible Tool-Use

It will kill us in the end, we haven't got the self-control, but this isn't about reality, rather, the fantasy of bringing cut pumpkins to life with little faces, by gouging their eyes out and removing their innards!

Having had some success getting three figures from that set of Halloween cutlery a few Halloweens ago, when I saw these I knew the potential was there. They are not specifically figures, but they are anthropomorphic piles of grinning pumpkins, which will make amusing fantasy figures.

Tesco had them in orange, Home Bargains went with purple and Morrisons had them in all three colours, the boxes suitably illustrated to reveal the contents, but the other two may have had the other colours in different stores/batches?

 

Asda had a double set, with an added ghostly pin-wheel (for decorating the rind?), but having found all three colours over a week or two, I wasn't shelling out three-quid for something which will be available in boxes of kitchenalia at car-boot sales for the next 50-years.

The flesh-cutter would need to be heated and pulled-out with pliers and the 'base' probably cleaned-up, but the spoon should be a simple saw-cut and a soft-sanding; all good fun!

F is for Found Objects - Four of . . . More

Back to the general detritus of lives lived, and where those remnants combine with the interests of the Blog or my collecting habits! Remembering that we've also seen the tub of Christmassy cake-decoration pieces, and the stash of things Mum 'borrowed' for her silversmithing. There was more cake-decorating stuff in the garage, but they were subsumed into the collection a few years ago, when I sorted the garage out.

 

On the left; a Tri-Ang clockwork key-winder, I think it's the same as late Hornby and probably some tail-end Mettoy or Minic toys, earlier, pre-war toys tended to have more original designs, sometimes quite ornate, often individually toy-specific winders.

On the right; a plastic Meccano spanner, probably held-on to became it also fit some of the plastic nuts on the loo-tank/cistern, and Mum felt plastic-on-plastic would do less harm to nuts and threads!

 

We saw the stone 'Shroom, when I Blogged the Giant space and Aliens back in 2021, it will be a false-coloured one, like some of the more garish stone eggs you see, porous rock is dyed under pressure, oven-dried and worked/polished to produce stuff like this surprised being!

 

And we saw the mini-pencils/pencil-tops in the previous post, which leaves two craft style felt animals, built-up on wooden-dowel sections, they were probably Heals or Habitat items, very 1970's in styling, but so moth-eaten when I found them, they went to the fire-gods shortly after this shot! A monkey and a cat . . . I think, it might have been a demented panda!

 

At the front are a Shell-petrol keyring, a pair of magnetic pigs who still have the kissing-power and a small ceramic horse, which will be a 20th century copy of earlier pieces I think, nothing 'Ming', but nice, and often done in Ivory, there's a nice set of eight ivorene premium horses in the oriental style from the mentioned-the-other-day Jacquet.

A vintage Christmas gift box (funny how so much of this stuff harks back to Christmases past, every post so far has had Christmas references), sadly stained, with a slice of crimbo-cake I suspect; the staining has that translucence of sugar or alcohol, and the browning of molasses!

But containing old cracker gifts/prizes/novelties, being a ball-puzzle, mini Yo-yo, key/magnifying glass (never understood the combination, but there was always one in a  cheap set of crackers), pirate's eye-patch and something I've already forgotten, it was either a whistle or a periscope?

And note Santa is riding a rocket. So quite a 'Sputnik-fever', 1950's vibe on the wrapping paper!

I had, in the past, supplied my Mother with empty Kinder-eggs, which she would put a few pieces of fine gravel in, to provide endless hours of fun to kittens and younger, or young-at-heart cats, and as they got lost under furniture, more capsules would be procured from moi!

 

Clearly, at some point, a non-empty one was sent to feline playgroup. Mum used to work as a volunteer at the Barnardo's charity shop here in Fleet (before it closed, and they were all laid-off their unpaid roles!), and she may have got this one from there, I don't think it's necessarily Kinder either, one of the Turkish or Italian minor-brands?

Balls! The Wham-O again I think, an antique, glass, codswallop bottle-stop in front of it, and something I've forgotten in the interim, but which is the smallest size of gum-ball capsule container from the look of it?

 

An eclectic mix here with two tortoises, one a PVC tub/tube/blister/header-bag type with full paint, the other a polyethylene glow-in-the-dark novelty with keychain loop, probably from a Christmas cracker?

 

A piece of non-Lego, a felt-tip pen lid, a pearlescent bead, a very small battleship's turret and a Native American, who could be the remains of my 1980 collection (we moved here in October 43 years ago!), or an errant piece of show-plunder from more recent years?

 

One half of the pyramid puzzle from crackers, we looked at these a few years ago, and there was already a bag of oddments, so this will join them, and I think I've said before, I intend in a year or two, to run that whole mini-season of novelty posts again, but with everything now in the collection, storage, then and since, in each category, and any extra-subjects after Christmas; it will be fun to compare them, day by day.

 

This used to be in each car's 'emergency kit' when we were kids. It's an unmarked generic, probably British rather than Hong Kong, but you never know, it's a lovely memory-thing to find, we used to love fiddling with it when we were kids.

Back then there were two standard promotional items from the tyre manufactures, small model-tyres like this with a compass, sometimes as a key ring, and larger replicas as ashtrays, with either a glass or tin-plate insert as the 'wheel', they would be marked up with Goodyear, Michelin, Pirelli etc . . . sometimes, even depicting a specific tyre type, or new range.

This is obviously a mid-century, rear, tractor tyre, so may have come from an agricultural equipment firm, and with farmers on both sides of the family back then, could have come to us via either?

N is for Nostalgia Hit "Yeah! Hit it!"

There will - over the next few years - be more general nostalgia here at Small Scale World, as I'm finding all manner of stuff both in my late Mother's estate and in the combining of the stuff here and the stuff in the garage (which was in storage), and one of the first things to turn-up has been this old toffee hammer!

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the patented [not], not sharp, Sharp's Toffee toffee-thwacker!

I saw another one online the other day, but can't remember the branding now; it may have been Blue Bird, or some Australian brand on Worthpoint? Strangely the commonest in junk shops seems to be the Walker's hammer, not the crisp-people (chips to heathens!) but another Walker's altogether I think!

They are not rare, indeed you can still get them on Amazon, but it's nice when an old friend turns-up, and why don't you seem to see sheets of hard toffee anymore? Did you have a toffee hammer, what branding did it carry?

R is for the Real Thing

According to the labels put on it by the seller (some +40-odd years ago), or the collector (I think it was an auction lot) this is a mid-Bronze Age hammer-head. In an axe-like format it was probably used for rough-working wood, for posts, door-frames, cart-parts? That sort of thing; also for post-holes, breaking ground, ditching, digging roots out . . . and chopping dead-wood for firewood? The blunt end would be for banging-in posts or 'nails'; handmade bronze pins, killing livestock and making new hammers!

Other than that I know nothing about it and wouldn't pretend to; when I mentioned it to an archeologist friend of mine (in its absence) I thought it was 'cave man' (i.e. Palaeolithic or Stone Age) and she got quite excited saying "....there's only a few known" but I guess, later metal-age ones are commoner?

Anyway, as part of the occasional ('very occasional' these days, but I hope to have more non-toy stuff go up in the future) 'Other Collectables' thread (which was a separate Blog back at the start of my web-logging), I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, the interesting thing is the double tapered hole which would produce a pinch-point, allowing another hammering-tool or a block of wood, to force it on to a slightly larger-diameter shaft and to then pack the ends with waxed or pitched-rope maybe, before the/any wedges and cross-tying?

I don't know what kind of stone it is either, but you can see it's a fine-grained material, and appears to be a sedimentary rock similar to slate or shale, however from the chip off the 'blade' end you can see the granular look and stepped-edge of something more like a fine granite? It's also bloody heavy!

3D is for Pen

Ten years ago I was chatting with a German toy collector as we walked into town for a meal one evening, turning from toys, to talk of non-toy stuff - as you do - we got to discussing the then newsworthiness of the Too Much Stuff hypothesis, which had recently been proposed by some talking-head at the UN, EU, Times or somewhere equally worthy.

During which discussion we both agreed that we too; had too much stuff, and mishearing his pronunciation of a well known German discount store, I was eager to agree with him about the cheap but efficient (usually German) power tools I had been buying, we then enthusiastically regaled each-other with our tales of mini-drill purchase, big-drills, drill-stands, powered-drivers, garden tools, paint-strippers and etcetera, only to realise we were both talking of our identical trips to collect either the Lidl 'forthcoming items' catalogue, or stuff from it!

Being a faithless whore, I also patronise Aldi, but I prefer Lidl! And it was to Lidl I repaired a week ago to grab this little gadget . . .

. . . advertised in the previous week's flyer, I wonder if my German colleague also trotted-down to his 'local' for a 'fix'? And - yes; I also got four packs of stollen-bites!

Having seen similar things in News, Views Etc . . . the other day, only slightly cheaper and aimed at kids, you may understand why I chose to invest in something a couple of quid more expensive but aimed at adults . . . I needn't have bothered, and if you are thinking of a 3D pen, my advice is try the cheapest kid's one you can find - as a sort of 'tech-primer'.

This is the object of my attention, and there were only five left by 3pm on issue-day, you have to be quick with Lidl's offers, or stay at home! But you usually only have to wait about six-months for it to reappear and it's often less-subscribed on the subsequent releases.

Although sold by Lidl it is in fact a Karsten product and the support sites are Karsten's not Lidl's. The first thing I can tell you is that so far I have been unable to reproduce anything remotely resembling the blue pyramid on the cover.

"Ergonomically designed" it definitely is, a 3D printer it definitely 'aint! What this is; is exactly what it looks like - a reduced-scale hot glue-gun! The fact that you load it with a rigid, continuous, polymer filament rather than soft, rubbery, synthetic wax-based sticks is the only difference and that's one of detail, not technology.

There is a second difference which is technological, the feed is automatic rather than trigger- or thumb-based, but you still have to operate a button to activate the feed - so for all practicable purposes is it a glue-gun . . . with a fine nozzle.

You get three 10m x 0.6mm filaments (an 'industry standard' size - there's a few of these pen-designs around now) of Poly-lactic acid polymer (PLA); a relatively new plastic which is certified 100% bio-degradable and even compostable - so don't make anything with it you might be planning on leaving to your children! You can however get ABS (Acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene) filaments which will last in the environment for thousands of years, so an ethical choice there?!

I found the filament feed to be problematic from the off; the instructions are adamant that you mustn't force it (manually push it in or pull it out), but leave the auto-feed to do it . . . from brand-new it failed to successfully achieve both, several times within a half hour or so (and needed manual 'help'). It's also important to cut the filament flat (at 90° to the cable length) in order for it to feed correctly.

Also like a glue-gun the nozzle cools with use and the thing stops occasionally to get a mental grip on itself, and if it gets too hot (cooks-off) it starts spitting and leaving bubbles in the substrate. To alleviate the later, it switches-off automatically if you don't use it for two minutes, and like a glue-gun you will need a bit of scrap for over-dribble, for cleaning the nozzle, for colour-changes, flushing &etc..

Once it has stopped it takes up to 80 second to reheat before you are green-lighted to go again, while stopping the feed doesn't stop stuff oozing out, ruining your work if you're not careful. The fact that the 'off-button' and the reverse-feed button are one and the same is also bloody annoying.

The pen is described as a '3D' (for three-dimensional) pen with a 'print-head', but as you can see from my introductory efforts; it is neither a pen nor a printer; what this is, is a deposition modeller, or material-deposition device and nothing else. A glorified, hot, icing-piper - splodging stuff roughly where you want it - indeed; a practised pastry-chef might well get better results than the average user and would certainly get better results than me!

It oozes, briefly molten plastic under relatively low pressure (in comparison with injection-moulding pressures), with little accurate control, in order to make novelties - which you will see from the Faceplant page and linked Youtube videos - are variations of the things previous generations have made from raffia, matchsticks, beads, empty lavatory-rolls, tooth-picks, straws, cotton-reels, tissue paper, scissors & glue et al.

The reason I am being so negative about this pen is that I don't want people being too disappointed by it; or one of the similar animals out there prowling for a bite of your 'hard earned' shekels.

I thought it might be useful for converting figures or filling gaps in models, but the plastic is pretty unworkable once set - having the properties of nylon or polypropylene, or indeed its stable-mate filament; ABS, the polymer of choice for electric kettle manufacture, vehicle interiors and engine-bay-furniture type stuff!

It cools too quickly to join cut-n-shut figures, and while it would fill gaps, trimming would be laborious and it may not take or hold model paints (older spirit enamels or newer aqueous and PVA types) well? I haven't tried painting my efforts yet, but I suspect paint would easily scrape of small pieces, or flake from larger constructions.

In the upper image you can see my attempt at the lower image; my initials/moniker! And when I tried to remove the diagonal between the two uprights of the 'H' [using the new, sharp enough for bone, blade I had replaced in my Swan Morton No.3 handle, after the 'proper' glue-gun glue removal exercise and steel-fracture, suffered working on the lip-balm bear project the other day (keep up!)] it all fell to pieces, because if you don’t stab the joints into each other, they don't actually stick together as one bead of substrate has cooled too much and the other is cooling as soon as it leaves the pen.

This means that even if you use one of the templates provided to make, say; the butterfly, it will be shedding bits about the house for ever after, especially as it's bio-degradable and will only ever become less stable!

It will be useful for building up scenery (but that will prove costly in filament), likewise it may have applications working with wire-armatures, or using its own crude armatures* and I'm sure if I get a brown and green filament I will produce passable trees, but it's all a bit of a faff for a simple thing dressed-up as future-tech-today. And the trees would be passable with Lego, not as war-games terrain, they would still need paint and flocking.

* There are more expensive, more pen-like models out there (like the original TV-advertised one a few years ago) and they may be better suited to producing uprights or horizontals, but I tried, at all three feed-speeds and various human-arm speeds, and couldn't produce a measured upright of constant thickness to the point I wished it to finish, thin filaments of 'stretched-sprue' being the result of attempting a sudden, pull-away finish, with lumpy, collapsing stumps being the result of attempting to halt at the desired point.

While all horizontals sag unless they are held-up until they cool, something which requires a third hand while the nozzle dribbles, forgotten, out of the corner of the mind's eye!

Where it may have some use, is in restoration/mending of old hollow-casts? He adds after reading Scott's article on Mexicans the other day, getting heads back on, or fixing arms, the ooze being more easily cut, filed-away and/or sanded from a metal substrate . . . worth a try! But I don't think you could use it to say - rebuild horses legs?

Links

The above-shown YouTube video

Their Faceplant page

There are other videos you can navigate too from the above and in one of them someone builds a box (with a different brand of pen) but you can detect the editor's film-cuts at the end of each stroke, so you are never shown the full process.

I will persevere with practising and report back again and if anyone else has experience of these types of 'tools', I know lots of people are interested in the practicalities, and applications. It may be useful for hidden mends in restoration for instance; pink filament might have an application in the restorative surgery of Action Man or Barbie joints?

Get the dark-green filament and you could have a decent stab at making The Creature from the Black-Lagoon, brown - a Bigfoot, white - a Yeti! Or orange for a REAL swamp-monster, but there's no way you can accurately model that hairpiece with this pen!

But - seriously; it's a lot of faff for something you may get out once in a blue moon? Like a lot of the tools I've bought from Lidl over the years! Digital micrometer, soldering iron, wheeled car jack, jack stands, watchmaker's screwdrivers . . . all useful stuff . . . occasionally!