B is for Blow-Moulded Blow-Ups

Another one of the Rico Firenze relief 'posters', also marked up to Master Mount in the USA, this one was lacking the header-card, but is possibly the more interesting of the two, dealing with Reptiles & Amphibians.

 

Snakes, Lizards & Frogs!

 

Lizard.

 

Frog.

 

 

Snake-heads, no gangs!

 

O-Level biology!

Yes, the girls cooked a bit of eye-muscle on a Bunsen-burner and ate it! 

 

Digestive tract.

 

 Hearts.

 

The lighting at Sandown Park is not that conducive to photography, sometimes, it's bright enough, but I think it resonates at a different speed to pocket camera's shutter's and with shooting them through their polythene bags, they've all had to be contrasted and enlightened in Picasa to get them closer to what's actually in the bag, which is very colourful!

 

Many thanks again, to Adrian Little for these. 

T is for That's a Relief!

Does anyone else remember these, I have vague memories of them, in school science labs, hospital waiting rooms or corridors, dentists surgeries, that sort of thing, but I also remember them being cracked, dusty, sun-faded or discoloured, so they must have been popular in the 1960's perhaps, most of my memories being after 1970, when I was six?

 

Rico Firenze of Italy, but an English Language version, and a thin, polystyrene vac-formed moulding, I assume from the contour-following location lines, that the coloured artwork was added before the shaping of the sheet?

 

Dog!

 

Deer.

 

Heart and the Digestive System of a carnivore.

 

Digestive System of a ruminant, and the Lungs

The reverse of the card/sheet.

Imported into the US by the Master Mount Corp., of Flushing, New York.

 

And while I may have given the impression in my opening paragraph, that I remember them everywhere, or all over the place, I don't, but I do remember the odd one here and there, and probably in small frames, did they come here from the US, or dierect from Italy, or did we produce our own, were there more than one maker? I would have loved something like this at Christmas, you could look at it again and again!

 

Thanks to Adrian Little for letting me photograph this old treasure, and rare survivor.

J is for Jungle Shooting Match

Berwick Games attic find! Very redolent of its time, hunting big-game is just not something you'd make a game off now! This was absolutely filthy and nearly went in the recycling; the roofing-felt in the attic is a fluffy variety about 130-years old, and for some time has been collapsing under its own weight having dried to the consistency of cold-war Eastern-Bloc fag-packet cardboard, covering everything in the attic in a black snow.

But, as you can see it cleaned-up OK and was in better nick than I expected, so it's gone to storage for now, and I will chuck it on feeBay at some point in the future. I can well remember this, we had hours of fun on wet winter's days, lying on our bellies and sniping*(1) some of the rarest animals on earth!*(2)

 

The animals were (are!) only vac-formed polystyrene sheet, and it wasn't long before we literally blew one apart, so Mum, who was nothing if not ingenious, made them all backing cards from corrugated-cardboard, and here they are 50-odd years later, almost as good as new . . . Except the gorilla!

 

Not so the cork-firing pistols, one has absented itself entirely (decades ago), and the other is broken across the barrel, but I will try to fix it up at some point, maybe get a post out of that exercise? Quite a James Bond looking thing, I think?

 

Same mechanism as most toy artillery, pull back to the catch, and then fire, the plunger is near flush with the end of the barrel, propelling the cork with enough force to pop the animals out of their little die-cut card catch, and blow the feet off the gorilla! The animal then shoots up with an over-dramatic death throw, due to its elastic thread!

Two pea-shooter tubes were supplied to stand it up on a flat surface, but it's easier to prop it against a wall or piece of furniture. And I think this is a rare survivor, as I haven't seen one on evilBay yet, despite looking quite often, hoping for replacement parts?

 

*

(1) Kids; it's not good to shoot things!

(2) No animals were harmed in the making of this post!

P è per Pirati dall'Italia!

So to Canè (Canine = 'dog') and their set; 1474 Pirates! I've wanted these for a while, and needed them on the card to get the 'ship' (read blob of vac-form!), so when I saw one going cheap (They're not that rare, but prices have risen a bit in recent years) I grabbed it with ITLAPD in mind.

Annoyingly, the set only has five poses which is a bit dim of them? Also - given the previous post - orange is worse that yellow to photograph . . . against just about any other colour!

The vac-formed ship replaces a simpler trench which the other sets in this line got, and is manufactured in the same way as Atlantic's, - maybe the same source - with the decoration screen printed onto the sheet before forming, so it gets further distorted (having been distorted as a design trying to anticipate the final shape), especially if it's slightly miss-registered!

The five new chaps, they are copies of the old Fontanini sculpts, almost certainly with permission and have a lot of the signature elements of sculptor Elio Simonetti who worked for Canè while at Fontanini.

We've seen the others before, the pale-blue variation of 'peg-leg' is manufactured from a soft eraser-rubber like material, and the 'Captain' above him is actually a musketeer; the foppish-chap on the other end of the row would also make a good musketeer!

So when you read "–PIRATES is only set that had 5 poses ,been one a “woman”?(pose with hands in heaps and not facial hair ) " you know you've come to the font of all shite! Shite which was translated from the facts in the book being plagiarised!! How many hands? How many heaps? Are they heaps of shite? They're not facial hair! Hahahahahaha! Actually the musketeers only have five poses too, but that makes for ten contemporary figures!

The ship! For imaginative play with younger owners it has some value, but really it's a leery-painted, blobby, simplified model of a wreak!

Yes; I took far too many photographs!

I also crewed it with the still-unknown, but probably cereal premium, might be Quaker, 1:76th scale pirates and they look quite at home!

I - obviously - took them off the card; as I say they aren't that rare, and as it was an earlier one with staples it was very easy, but I then had to clean five or six decades of grime of the card, which I did with a pre-prepared 'wipe', which can be seen on the right after it had done its job!

Which gave me a half-decent card to scan.

Right - that all took longer than necessary; I'd taken far too many photographs . . . I may not get all three remaining posts out, but one can be held back as it was supposed to lead in to a 'mini-season' the next day on another subject altogether, which I definitely haven't got time for at the moment, but there will be two quick posts before midnight, once I've fixed a pizza!

B is for Best Toy Ever? . . . Again!

This should be the fourth or fifth time I've appended the 'Best Toy Ever' tag to a post here, and hopefully loyal readers have remembered that after the 2nd or 3rd time, I just decided it was something that couldn't be attributed to any single toy, but which could be used from time to time on stand-out items of particular production-worth or great play-value; here's another one!

Speaking of Adrian Little (as I was at the end of the last post), this was shot on his stall at Sandown Park's toy fair, back in September. The contents are somewhat mixed, incomplete or added-to, but the overall 'thing' is a beautiful plaything, that should have brought joy to an owner back in the day.

I say 'should' as someone obviously looked after this to the point where not much play can have occurred, but the items are too clean to have been on display either, which is a little sad - that such a lovely toy was probably not played with?

The packaging has an undeniable circus theme on the top flap/cover, but the rest of it is more farm or countryside themed, artwork wise, and obviously was a standard, dual-purpose factory box, with set specific inserts.

Likewise the internal sheet of press-out scenic accessories are more rural in nature, but a back-drop, box liner, is - again - undeniably circus in subject matter. Clearly a bit of a curate's egg, cobbled together from what was in the factory or with the printer's, enhanced to tie-it in with the contents.

The cages are manufactured from soft wire rod, they will have been set out on a wooden jig and spot-soldered by hand before painting, and there were more than I photographed, allowing for a decent animal 'holding area' to be constructed for the circus.

The safety-tunnel into the ring is likewise produced, probably being trimmed and bent to shape after the soldering and before the gates were slipped into place. We had a go at something similar at Uni' years ago, while being shown the workshop facilities. I made a shelter/gantry for a bus-stop!

A rather fine elephant, I don't know if it's a baby from the 70mm range, a scaled down adult from the same range, or a 40mm line-specific sculpt?

And you thought a 'Bear Dance' was something Native Americans did!

This must be one of the last things manufactured by Hausser under the Elastolin moniker, using composition animals, especially in this smaller 40mm scale, and with both wood and metal accessories?

A whole pride of Lions to train, there were no tubs for them to stand on, or hoops to jump through, leading one to suspect there was more to collect in the wider range, or that a larger collection had already been broken-up prior to Adrian obtaining his sample?

This mysterious aspect of the 'set' is mirrored in the two figures which are of different scales and styles and the only two present, a keeper and a clown? No ringmaster, no animal trainers? No other performers?

I'm not sure if the clown is sharing his moment in the lime-light with a monkey or a mountain-lion/cougar . . . or even a hyena!

A pair of tigers, a zebra and a camel, all things you might find at an old school circus, but in the case of the later two, more likely to be in the day-time 'zoo' than in the night-time performances, and all things you'd equally expect in a proper zoo. The circus ring is the only plastic component, being a trimmed vac-form, with a drop-in 'gate' section, also vac-formed.

The lack of a tent or marquee is another pointer to this being a part-set, and one wonders if the box (part farm-linked) was actually included in a larger set, for which the other liner has gone AWOL, the contents of the sample can fit in the box but only by ignoring the slots and packing everything loose. I suspect there was once much-more to the whole set, yet it is still a really lovely thing - Best Toy Ever ['till the next one] - Cheers Adrian!

B is for Bellona Bell Tents

This is a long-planned follow-up to someone else's post, and really only to confirm my comments there, at the time (2015) and to look more closely at a comparison between the two versions of Bellona product and try to work out how they are related from a technical point of view.

The inner pair is undecorated, latex rubber; the outer pair is from the later vac-formed polystyrene-sheet which also contained a set of pup-tents (so crude I threw them away I think, or were they on another sheet?) and a more medieval-looking marquee or staff tent. I opened the 'doorways' with a sharp knife!

Holding the slight squeeze out of them, by counter-squeezing; when I obtained these about eleven-years ago (one of Andy Harfield's shows down in Kent I think) they were pretty-much pristine, and remained-so when they went into storage in 2011

However they have suffered slightly from the conditions in the shipping container, getting slight blemishes of shiny perished latex where they were touching each-other and the holding bag (that squeezed them out of shape slightly), yet otherwise they are still flexible and will need to be painted in the near future to protect them further, finding a paint for latex, or that is latex safe might need to be a consideration?

The more interesting thing about these latex items is that while they conform to the later vac-forms in both shape and catalogue codes, they are otherwise very different items, however, the one clearly lead to the other.

Above - not the best image (I've stopped-it right down), but the best I could do (try tipping your screen back slightly, or dipping your head, to see the vac-form's marks clearer), you can see how the three lines and the arrowed dink/blemish are carried on to the underside of the vac-form, from the surface of the latex moulding

The vac form has - like all these large sheet vac-forms - the better detail on the underside, as it is pulled onto the mould by suction, but that detail matches the finer detail on the surface of the smaller latex mould, as if it had been removed from the vac-form.

But it's not as clear as someone taking latex moulds from Bellona vac-forms and passing them off as Bellona (the cynical- or suspicions-thinking behind my original comment on Clive's post), because there is extra detail on the rubber versions; with these tents it's the air-flap 'barb' at the apex of the bell, and the overhang between bell and skirt-sides.

Likewise on the cottages over at Clive's blog, you can see the dormer windows on the rubber versions have an overhang to the roof which were smoothed back on the vac-forms. These features had to be removed from the tool/moulding to allow for the release of the vac-form, after cooling; a similar problem for the tooling engineers to that of 'undercuts' on dynamically posed figures.

How the one became the other is only to be guessed at, but must have involved taking a more substantial moulding from the tent's tool, to get a solid lump resembling the hollow latex product, removing all the overhangs, joining them together with the other tents on a level 'sheet', taking another, negative mould of that, and producing the metal final-tool as a third [positive] from the second [negative]?  .. . . . . ...  . . I think!

As an aside; there is a 12-panel 1930-50's British army bell-tent in the attic, my brother and I would spend a few weeks in it each summer, as kids. I keep meaning to get it out and set it up to see if the moths have been kind to it . . . or not.

It's interesting in being fully reversible, white on one side for winter-warfare and a non-standard camouflage on the other. By non-standard I mean it's not a WWII Micky-mouse black/grey cloud on green, nor sweeping swathes of contrasting colours, not a Denison smock type, nor a 1970's DPM, and will I suspect (I'm sure there are various labels on it and its canvas carry-all) date from either the inter-war period or the Korea era?

But it is a dead ringer for Bellona's little beauty, even to the air-flaps creating a spear's-head at the top if it's breezy!

--------------------------------------------

Here's one I made earlier!

As a Brucey-bonus, I knocked this up from a piece of cartridge-paper years ago, then added some slivers of weathered plywood for poles and coloured-it-in with art-markers. I think the 'eyes' were Tippex and another - green - marker!

If I did it again I'd run the poles all the way down and make them from something stronger as they have mostly broken-off and the smoke-hole now looks like Hannibal Lectors' mask! I'd probably also wet the paper after shaping to produce some sag between the poles; colouring-in after it had dried?

I took the pattern from something commercial like Fiddler's Green or Usbourn, or even a cut-out freebee in White Dwarf? It's basically a cone with the tip cut-off and it's a bit too geometric!

V is for Very Vast Vac-formed Village!

I had an eMail the other week from Graham Smith who'd found the Selcol page on the A-Z Blogs asking me what I knew about these (below); I had to point out that I knew no more than was on that page, which was . . . nothing! By the time you read this though, these will have been added!

Selcol, large scale village

Graham writes;

"I am interested in model villages and have seen your "Small Scale World" website. I have some SELCOL buildings made from white plastic which have to be painted and they lose the paint very easily, as you can see from the attached photos. I wondered if you have seen any others (I have a Market Hall which seems to be a different scale) and also if these buildings were based on those in or near Braintree near their factory which you mentioned."

Now, having established I know nothing about the buildings as Selcol per se, it has to be pointed out I am no expert on Braintree or its environs either - I had a school-friend who lived in Brentwood!

Given that we will sort most of it out to some extent in the next few minutes; can anyone from the Braintree area or with knowledge of these buildings (or indeed; Selcol's wider production) help; particularly with that last question?

I asked around at the Sandown Park show with no luck but to draw an interesting selection of blank faces and have asked a couple of other experts to no avail, yet, as with all these things, dozens of people must have been involved in the design, production and marketing of the buildings, and - at least - hundreds involved in the purchase and use thereof, back in the day?

A close-up of one of the little (not that little!) thatched-cottages; they seem to be blow moulded, or rotary-moulded (the larger hole?) polyethylene, hence the failure of paint to adhere, and to have been filled with expanded polystyrene-foam, for rigidity.

The subsequent/resulting plug is clearly marked Selcol, so the one fact which is known is that they are Selcol! Now, there's a possibility that they were originally beach-toys, sold unpainted to place round your sand-castle, but I think that's clutching at straws, and that they were designed for garden railways, being scaled somewhere between O-gauge (building dimensions) and G (figures in the next shot).

A couple of the people I've spoken to on the subject have drawn the obvious parallel with the Spot-On village from Tri-Ang/Mettoy, but that was 1:42/48'ish, against the 1:35/32'ish of these, and I can imagine the PoplarPlastics bus drawing up to this rotunda/market cross/corn exchange to pick-up the [not so] little people and take them into the nearby city!

You can see - from the damaged sections - the polystyrene foam inside, and Graham's railway viaduct in the background! He runs O gauge trains including Triang, Big Big, and Timpo rolling stock and has been doing so for 46 years!

Any information on these, such as when they were advertised, any other buildings in the range or whether they represent real subjects - from Braintree or anywhere else; would be much appreciated by Mr. Smith - and other Garden Rail, or Model Village fans - I'm sure.

As an aside, does anyone know if John Ruddle's buildings have been featured in any works other than the one shot shown in an old modelling magazine? Graham; being a fan of such things, is keen to see them, and having been lucky enough to 'have the tour' myself, I know they are worth a look - being taken from Victorian Edinburgh to Kabul, via Khartoum and back via Calcutta, in a walk round a modest suburban lawn is a real treat!

F is for Frangible French Fancies and Feebly Fragile Fellows

The reason I've so much in Picasa is because I shoot a lot of stuff without much thought, and then either don't know what to do with it, get a sort of writers-block, or just wait for something else to come along, this post is one of the latter, in that something else came along, but it was one of the former in that I didn't know how to deal with it!

It's a ridged vac-form; but polystyrene rather than celluloid and French; rather than Japanese. Or - at least - those present at the time of the photographing were pretty-much agreed it was 'probably' French, and that included a couple of the Dutch antique toy dealers, so they knew their onions!

For a while it looked like we might get a manufacturer's name, no-one could come-up with one (another reason they sat in Picasa for a while - I was waiting for the following show to see if anyone had anything further to add!), while the designs are a bit space-age for actual cars I think (but happily stand to be corrected; I'm no expert or follower of 1940's (?) cars).

There was only the two designs (on show - I'm sure the range was larger), the above racer and these long, sleek sports coupes, again; more space-age than actual I feel, the sort of thing you'd expect in a Dick Tracy or Mask cartoon! Although . . . the sports-car might be a known 'concept car' from the 1930/40's; with the blue-racer being a rendition of a real vehicle?

Wooden wheels attached to steel-wire axles; it's impossible to see how the axles are attached to the belly-pan due to the flush fairings, but presumably some kind of half-tube is glued over the little trench in the delicate tray, indeed - both body and tray/belly-pan are less than a millimetre thick.

Colours are understated but nice, and one wonders how they ever survived in this state, someone must have loved them enough to keep them un-played-with in a sturdy box, or maybe they were old shop-stock forgotten in a shed or garage?

The same sense of wonderment accompanied these, which were on Mercator Trading's stall at the last Sandown Park (the cars were on the same stand back in September) and may still be available from the website?

They are all different, also 'probably French' and full blow-moulds. They are all slightly different and seem to depict pre- or early-WWI French troops from before the move to Khaki, so could be well-over a hundred years old? I suspect only 'depicting' and probably from the inter-war or even immediate post-WWII periods, but still, how have they survived . . . and near-mint?

I know I shouldn't give the ammunition to my envious haters, but I'll have a guess at a mix of Alpine troops and Chasseurs? Rare as rocking-horse shit anyway! They were about five or six-inches tall (I didn't measure them), glued to 'plasticard' bases and unlike the string arrangements of similar Japanese-made figures they have plug-in arms like cheap dolls or the arms those Action Man clones used to have (except the officer who is a simpler, single-piece sculpt), again; they seem also to be polystyrene rather than the celluloid you'd expect of some Japanese equivalents.

27-07-2018 The Figures are now ID'd as Unis from the 1920s and copies of SFBJ metal sculpts - tags added

3 is for 3-D Contours

This has been imported from 'Boring Blog' (which I will close down) and may have images or other text added in the future.

3-D Contours
This seems to be a trade-name only. Apparently produced a series of scenic/terrain pieces and entrenchments. They/he also provided a painting service. There is notheing else known at this time.

V is for Vac-forms, Part 1 - Airfix & Atlantic

Vac-forms (for; Vacuum-Formed) have been an integral part of the modeling and war-gaming scene since quite early in it's inception, and for AFV modelers, dioramists and war-gamers they have produced a wide variety of items to enhance a scene or provide authentic (or not so authentic) background to the gaming table.

From the Sublime (2 foot by 3 foot play bases from Bellona) to the ridiculous (horrid little plinths from er...Bellona!), this is my take on them, it's a three-part'er, so keep scrolling when you get to the end of this post!

Airfix, and their partner in the US (MPC) produced quite a number of vac-forms over the years, and indeed are doing so again. This is from the Battlefront play-set El Alamien, Allied Attack Force, and is presented - for your ridicule - as painted by my younger self, some 30 odd years ago! In front of which you can see two plaster-of-paris moulds I took of the revetments, in order I should protect a few more AFV's from the German Paratroop Officer (who was always 'last man standing'!), the funny thing about taking mouldings from Vac-forms is; they end up with better detail, as vac-forms are 'pulled' onto a former (by vacuum - of course!) so end up with the finer detail of the master on the underside, consequently taking a negative cast provides better mouldings with less rounding/smoothing-off of detail.

More Airfix, more plaster casts, more ridicule to be poured on my teenage colour schemes! The beauty of these plaster moulds was that as/when they got chipped (or miscast) I just brushed in a bit more mud or dirt, and when they broke, I could either glue them or make them into a smaller defence work, hence the little one-man thing on the left-hand end. These are all taken from the storage sheds and Sand-bagged post in the Forward Command Post (CP) set.

Top right are actually Bellona, who are dealt with in the next post down. Note how the original painted sandbag guard-post is shot-to-bits with cracks, the Airfix vac-forms were among the thinnest in the business. Basing - as in the pile of stores from Bellona makes for a much more rigid plaything.

About fifteen years ago I tried to cast the Cantina from the AMT/MPC/Airfix Star Wars vac-formed play-set base (made far more substantially than the earlier stuff), but thought I'd be clever by using wall-plaster mixed with PVA/wood-glue and water at a 1:1 ratio, six months later it was still damp, and I managed to destroy both the moulding and the base, separating one from the other! Still, if you don't try, you don't learn...Airfix purists would hate to know what I've done to boxes over the years teaching myself how to renovate them, Ha-hah!

Atlantic were also a prolific maker of 'value-added' bases, and painted theirs to boot! If you call that 'painting'? These are from the medium-sized sets of Wild West, and were designed to fit together as they are photographed. Inside the fold-out cover of the box, there is an illustration suggesting a 1E and 1F to come, as far as I know, they have never seen the light of day?

Variations of 1A, note how the upper one has had a better defined paint job than the lower one, these look - upon a quick glance - to have been airbrushed, but closer inspection reveals they have been done with sponge in the traditional way, Messerschmitt fuselage uppers - oh I remember it well, grey finger-nails for a week!...with a duck-egg blue undercoat...the fingers as well as the fuselage!!!

The bases are very smooth however, so there must be some sort of protective coating applied after painting, in a semi-silk finish. Given the number of vac-forms Atlantic indulged in, and given that the colours don't run into each other, i.e.; Were allowed to dry between stages, it's no wonder they went bust, their labor-costs must have been horrendous, even if they were paying peanuts to the poorer workers in the South.

One of the smaller play-sets from the 'modern' sets, there were umpteen of these in all sizes, I'm showing this one as it was meant to be cut into even smaller vac-formlettes! as can be seen in the arrowed flier. Note also how the vac-forms in the flier are a darn-sight better painted than the ones that left the factory...disappointment being another good reason for eventual bankruptcy!