News, Views etc . . . Herald Toys & Models

Two messages from Barney this weekend, both went to junk-mail for some reason, but are still only a day or two old;

"Yesterday [Thursday 14th May] the site was down for most of the day due to a technical issue (the storage was full). This has now been fixed by osCommerce who provide support for the site. Going forward a whole system upgrade may be required as the php version is antiquated and in need of an overhaul. Once done it should improve your user experience and security of the site."

and;

"We have just added to the website the last of our Trojan Farm Series animals, a standing Bull (copy of a Timpo hollow-cast model) from the Bradford collection of early plastic farm animals. Identified by their slightly odd pinprick marks, these Trojan farm models are extremely hard to find and our understanding of this range is very much in its infancy. Most were copies of Timpo, Tim-Mee and other makers."

So pop-over and see what's still available! 

F is for Follow Up - Soviet-era Napoleonic Russian Cavalry

Moskovskiy zavod plastmassovykh igrushek  (МЗПИ  - MZPI)

T is for Trek, No Star!

Another quick box-ticking of a board game, mentioned in passing a few times but it passed under my nose on it's way from the garage to a shipping container the other day so I fired-off a few shots, well; enough for a .gif (not spelled Jif!), and dug out some older shots which have been seen elsewhere, but not here before.

It is what it is; a competitive collecting of stuff for a final race type mechanism, but the 'stuff ' is of real use to war-gamers, being a large number of jeeps, pack mules and stores crates, so - bargain!

Playing pieces are 30mm flat explorers looking through telescopes, in a 'European Margarine Premium' style, made of a hard/brittle polystyrene, with provision for six players.

Jeeps are good-enough for 20/25mm war gaming, the pack animals are brilliant, but sadly only the one pose, so need to be mixed in with Atlantic (three variations?) and Pegasus (one or two?) or even cast-metal beasts of burden. Strangely, while the player-pieces are so brittle, the rest is manufactured in soft polyethylene?

The stores are so brightly-bright and yellowy-yellow you can't tell which way up they are or read the 'STORES' stamped on the tops, but painted or heavy-washed/weathered they would make useful vehicle loads or objective-markers in gaming.

With some conversions (Airfix ANZAC's married to commando legs) as a scaler, that’s yer' very actual Spear's board game; Trek, done and dusted!

S is for Shout Out

Just a quick shout-out to Dave Keen's PSR and in particular his latest figure-set review . . . Strelets*R started life at the end of the 1990's along with several other eastern European brandings, producing interesting or esoteric figure sets we'd all dreamed of, but in often quite crude, 'metal figure' or a 'home-made from Plasticine' chubby kind of styling,  But these days their output can be far more professional and as good as anything from Airfix, Esci or Revell/Italeri/Zvezda, and this set is a perfect example of that, I particularly like the horses . . .

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/review.aspx?id=2799

And Dave's reviews are always a well-researched, fair-minded, interesting read!

T is for They Keep Turning-up For Duty!

Those who have followed the blog since the start will know I like any excuse to return to LB's space sets and derivatives, and while LB is still contentious as a title, time will tell, and those still using LP will have to come-round in the end.

Funniest was someone still using IDL till well after last May (2020) who then quietly switched to LP and within two months was lecturing Erwin on Faceplant as to why it was LP as if he hadn't spent the 20-odd years since LP was coined, continuing with IDL!

He's trying to hang it on the Lik Be Plastics' hook, but it's Lik Be Plastics and Metal, so would be - under any rule of nomenclature - LPM, LBPM, LP&M or even LBP&M, it's none of them it's LB for Lik Be. Only for Erwin - a few months later - to lecture someone else on LP as if he'd known it all along! They are awful, that PSTSM-lot are awful!

Anyhoos, four lots of LB recruits have come in the last 12-or-so months . . .

. . . including a new Moon Exploration bagged set (from the Antipodes - I think he's still listing one), four more chromium-finished chaps and two pop-ups . . . we've seen the erasers already but they can be the fourth! Bag is LB marked and - along with the four loose figures - contents all have the usual LB base-mark, the others are derivative/pirates.

I'm not opening these yet, but a few shots to show that you get all eight astronauts in plain white and all six robots in 'atomic-green', all in soft polyethylene and all carrying the full base mark, but of interest is that the robots have all have their conversion to hangers for key-chains and the like, as have the pink ones in the blister-carded set seen here previously, so the key-ring iteration (see Wotan Bill's posts on Moonbase) was definitely an interim phase.

The four loose ones were in a mixed lot with some other stuff which I was more interested in (even though I couldn't now tell you what that was/they were as it's all been sorted away in the chaos here at the moment), the lot only added one figure-pose  to the chrome sample (upper row), but I stripped the paint off the other three to add to my 'plastic variants' sample, and the lower row is that sample, now.

Because these are coated with a powder (probably aluminium or a zink-aluminium alloy?), when you strip them (which takes about four seconds on immersion in concentrated ammonia - TFR [Traffic Film Remover] or Silver-dip), they leave the varnish/glue coating with which they were covered before coating; it  doesn't show so much on the dark figures but which is obvious on the paler ones.

I know people bang-on about 'vacuum-coating' but that's a different process found on more expensive toys from big-brands and which peels in sharp-flakes, this is more akin to flocking, but with a substrate which is naturally polished (as granules or molecules) and settles in a shiny coat, to the human-eye. I've said before - you can get a similar product ready-mixed in cans as an aerosol.

Upper row are the new additions, lower row are some of the variants of the same pose. Except, the new ones are actually replacing my older samples as they were worn, through handling, while the incomers were pretty mint, so it was all change of the old guard! Although the full sample is larger as I've kept a few each of the chromium ones and the brushed-aluminium-looking ones over the years.

If you think I'm cheating by counting the erasers as the fourth addition when they've already been seen here before, you can count the middle guy here as the fourth-addition instead, but he was actually in the 'Unknown Space Men and Humanoid-Aliens' box, where he's been for years! He's missing his base-section.

The other two, a paler pink - came in with a mixed lot of identically-mounted rubber-jigglers (also marked HF) and a couple of Imperial Toys-marked similar rubber stuff, all-else of which we'll look at another day. Clearly they are 'after' the LB sculpts, both robots and spacemen, but how many were so copied I don't know. And you can see that without finding the more-obvious robot, the astronaut would have languished in the unknown's box for a while longer!

All three of these are hollowed, relief-sculpted semi-flats in polyethylene, and I doubt the HF is for Hing Fat . . . wacky novelties? Not really them; they have nailed their colours to a different mast, and anyway, I suspect these pre-exist Hing Fat's dates by a decade at least, however I don't have another candidate yet?

19th June 2021 - Correction! The other - darker pink - one had only been in the unknown box since December (possibly why I didn't remember having him!) and had come from Chris Smith as my mind was on Mum's illness over Christmas, so apologies to Chris, they all came in quite recently!

P is for Piss Poor Paperwork

I've added a minor metal maker Eugene Custer (I think) to the A-Z pages (much more on those pages when I'm settled in a new home - year or so), the accompanying image for which is pretty shite, but it is better . . . 

. . . than it was; image on the left! These all came from the James Chase Collection a decade and a half ago, he was big in Floridian port management and obviously had the use of an early photostat or photo-copier of some kind, which prints like MacDonald's recipts, changing colour near heat and eventually fading to nothing! Anyway, I've managed to get it back partially with heavy contrast, certainly enough to ID the heavy, square bases . . . and as we work through the A-Z entries there will be more of them! It's a page from an old Polk's catalogue, circa 1950'ish?

B is for #Bish# *Bosh* !?Bash?! - Bat'tastic Boxed Man-Bat Mobiles!

Having been pleased to get the Jokermobile a while ago loose in a charity shop, look what I found in storage!

Can't imagine where I got them as it's not really 'a bit of me' if you know what I mean, but they must have been cheap in some job-lot or something? Sometimes when you bid on a  lot you've seen on the table because you like what's in it, you find when you go to pay there's a couple more boxes which were under the table, so it may be one of those, or just that they were dirt cheap and had figures?

Anyway, the TV original and a 1980's Batmobile and a better Jokermobile, which - as I suspected - was missing something at the back; the rear window-glass, so I'll have to look for a bashed one which happens to have that missing piece. That's it, just a quickie, bit of a mystery and already back in storage!

ITC is for the Ideal Toy Company but . . .

. . . ICT is for the Ideal Cannon Truck! Except these are Kleeware!

Lucky score on evilBay the other day, and off a friend so all the sweeter to get some cash to a mate! They needed a bit of hot-water treatment and while I was at it they all got a scrub as they were made of that plastic late Bergen soldiers are made of and were filthy with leachate as if they had been weathered with oxide-orange powder and then oiled!

Now quite the parade but only a half-company, they nevertheless tick a box in the collection and one here I guess! Imported by Kleeware from Ideal (there's nothing between them bar the packaging - I was bidding on the searchlight truck recently, but not seriously - too big!) and presented as targets in a shooting game . . . Chris Smith reminded me they were in Plastic Warrior a while ago, so it really is only box-ticking on this one!

The middle one has a permanent headache, due to having had his helmet split through with a big axe . . . or something! And the jacket is more Nazi tank-commander than cannon-fodder?

Kline's store catalogue from 1968 USA has the whole caboodle for five dollars, which - back in the day - was less than two quid, a lot less! Full company is six figures, six cannon-balls, a huge 'Big Bertha' cannon and the truck which is used for other toys with body-changes or trailers, the canopy hasn't been included in the shot, I think the PW one had it present?

"I'll 'av yer'rover yer' top'evy wazzock!" 

Obviously one-sided relief flats with a reinforcing bar at right-angles to the figures, and around 120mm, manufactured in the previously mentioned soft polyethylene.

Added 14-12-21 - The same set in its British catalogue guise, to all extents and purposes the same set as the US one, but with the canvas-tilt visible, which wasn't included in the Kline's image. As there is nothing to tell when these turn-up on evilBay, it would appear to be shipped product rather than mould-share, which would have been expensive for one party or both, depending on how they agreed to share the tariff bill! Also with the Kleeware catalogue ten-years older than Kline's, one wonders in which direction that traffic was?

TM is for Tactical Missile, Technical Manual, Threat Manager, Trade Mark, Trench Mortar . . .

. . . or Toy Major! In this case it's also for Ackerman, Hornby Hobbies and Dollar Tree, among others, I'm sure!

Bit of a toe-treading on this one, as EY posted these the other day (Mini Carry Case Playsets), but in my defence I had already photographed the six (or five-and-a-half; one's been opened) sealed sets as I sorted them out to storage, but was waiting for the lose stuff to turn-up and a couple of Hornby AFV's I knew I had in the TBS pile to tell the whole story.

Agency on these was the aforementioned Toy Major, with further branding to end user Ackerman here in the UK, in the US the packaging remained generic but the sets were an exclusively Dollar Tree thing? Modern combat, medieval-fantasy and a prehistoric mash-up - Homo's and Dino's together - were the three choices.

The US sets also have limited quantities per case in a little bag, the UK sets (retailing at two-quid in the late-nineties/early-noughties) got a larger sample in separate blister with more play value, which still fit easily-enough in the case; the crinkly-bag was the logistical constraint with the US issues!

Artwork is shared, but photoshopped about a bit to fit the different packaging options, so it was all a question of which format you ordered back in Hong Kong from the TM agents!

Some of the lose stuff, they don't seem too uncommon here, with the odd few in several of the donations from Chris, Peter and Trevor over the years, while I suspect the palm-trees (included in every set) also got a cake-decorating/crafting issue, possibly still extant on Alibaba or something similar, in bulk?

They are quite small, but fill out a war game's scenic jungle well enough and can make good thick secondary jungle in the larger scales. I donn't know why I wrote Toy Masters on the tree-tub, they are a retail toy-chain here in the UK, so I might have bought some of them there?

You can see the constraint placed on content-count by the little bag very well here, with only six monsters ('Dragons') and six figures, each split equally between two colours, you aren't going to get everything in a set, with the British issue that is less of a lottery, although you may still drop one or two poses in one or the other colour-way?

The 'cave men' are copies of late Tim Mee/Processed Plastic's larger figures, although the stone-axe man has been converted to a dagger-man!, the prehistoric hominids are also the exception proving the rule of the others in having only one colour iteration.

The knights are copied from the Supreme 2nd (of three) types, as seen here at Small Scale World before, from several brands and in several sizes, and - this time - you get six poses in silver or black. They fight each other and/or a bunch of whacky creatures which are barely dragons, and not that monstrous, indeed; the unicorn is more of a unicornet and a bit of a sweetie!

Dinosaurs have a five count; relatively crude Dimetrodon, Diplodocus, Stegasaurus, T-Rex'y meat-eater and Triceratops, although its bi-cera's are so small it almost qualifies as a proto-cera'! You can see that despite a tub-full, I've yet to get a loose 'Dipy' in yellow, so all set-contents are clearly random.

As you may have noticed the animals come in/as two paired colourways - green-yellow (which appears commoner) and a mauve'ish purple-orange combo'.

Less than an hour later - there is a fourth caveman pose with club, I thought he was an artwork/pre-publicity thing, but there is one in my sealed set, you can just make out his back! So EY's right and I just don't have  a lose one.

The combat infantry are rather nice, six poses in tan or olive-drab fatigues, reminiscent of similar figures from Revell, Silvercorn/LP or Galoob's 'Micro machines', and original sculpts of some quality. Also reminiscent of Tim Mee/PP's GI's in colour offering, but unsurprising as they - Toy Major - are responsible for a set of Tim Mee knock-offs in the 54mm range.

They are clearly in that time period between the current era and the back-end of the Cold War (sort of 1971-91'ish), vague 'fritz' helmets on a couple can be painted-out, so they will still go well in a Vietnam setting.

None of the sets are currently listed on Toy Major's site, but they are still carrying the larger GI's and one of the many 50mm iterations of Supreme's knights.

The combat figures were also issued in a theHornby train set 'Battle Zone' back in the noughties, and while I thought the cave-men might have been in its sister set; the Jurrassic Park knock-off 'Dino Safari', they weren't . . . the set got a handful of PVC Chinasaurs, but is linked through the AFV's.

Probably a Hornby Hobbies thing, rather than Toy Major, so a tenuous link, but it ties all the loose-ends together, we have seen them before here I think, more than once, but that's how the cookie crumbles sometime.

An M1 Abrams tank lookie-likey with running-gear and hull shape closer to the variable geometry of the predeceased MBT70 program's prototypes (they could drop their noses to enhance the 'hull-down' low-profile aspect) and a rather nice Hummer, which can be found in both sand and drab to match the troops. The Hummer has a removable tilt with very delicate locating-studs which tend to be found snapped-off.

And that heading . . . it also means or has meant in the past - Tape Mark, Target Material, Tasking Memorandum, Task Memory, TeaM (as Tm. or tm), Team Materials, Team Member, Technical Maintenance, Technical Management, TeleMetering, TeleMetry, Temperature Meter, Temperature Monitor, Terrain Masking, Test Manager, "Thanks Man" (or "Mate"), Theater Missile, ['Landsat'] Thematic Mapper, Tone Modulation, [to receive] TeleMetry, TradeMark, Training Manual, Transmission Matrix, Transverse Magnetic [field], 'TROPO' Modem, Type Model, and Too Many [bloody abbreviations!].

M is for Matchboxes and Some Die Cast . . .

. . . but no Matchbox's!

Just a quickie, I really don't have time at the moment, maybe in the summer there'll be more time to sit-about blathering on the Internet! But not right now.

I mentioned the other day/in another post that I was collecting the Shackman novelty matchboxes, this was a bit of highfalutin hyperbole, as I only have the one, don't know how many there might be or what the other subjects are (I hope it's the rest of the band!), but I do occasionally search for them on that there interwebby-thingy.

But I happened, in all the sorting, moving and scrabbling about which occupies my time at the moment, to find the one I had been thinking of when I mentioned them the other day (on the left with the guardsman label), and another, simpler, novelty matchbox (behind, rocking a sort of faux Ship versus Bryant & May look) which is also a pencil sharpener (the original subject at hand), so quickly fired off a few shots for this post!

From another angle it's more obvious they ain't gonna' be lighting a fire in a hurry, although they can quickly produce the best kindling for a boy-scout's carbonisation badge! And they both have blue (or blue'ish) drawers, which a lot of matchboxes had back in the paper-lined days . . . when we were young! Who remembers making a small-component cabinet from matchboxes and masking tape, sellotape or glue!

But the Shackman box also contains the surprise of a small - 40mm - mocherette (or what I call a 'mosherette' for reasons I will explain - eventually!), being what I believe is a die-cast rendering of the plastic mini 'swoppet' guards we've seen here before in WHC (Cornelius)/Success branding and as generics, so I hope the rest will turn-up, or a further variation of legs/torso combinations - here seen in one piece.

He's in the same antiqued-bronze look of other similar figures of the time from Peltro, Westair and other extra-to or pre-Kinder issuers of these figures, and may have similar age.

As the label mimics the collectable labels some real match brands would issue (both sides of the Iron Curtain interestingly) and given that the figure is the same pose as the one illustrated on that label, it's reasonable to assume there may be more in a 'set'. Are they in one of O'Brian's books?

C is for Call Answered

Chris Smith eMailed me a week or two ago a with a link to an eBay lot which I bought there and then, even before thanking him . . . it answered a question posed here a couple of times I think; the 'like late / Toyway-Timpo' highlanders, and revealed new poses!

Credited to a Scottish International Gift, Scotland and clearly a touristy gift-item, it's a pretty standard window-box with a tombstone-card at the back that could be pierced for wire-hook peg-board hanging, but something which isn't done in the factory. A potted history of the bagpipes is provided on the rear of the extended card, along with a code NO. 6000, which as a round number is almost certainly a stand-alone, with no similar items in the (or 'a') line?

I can't remember which new pose/s we encountered last time we looked at them here; was it the bass drummer or the pipe/band major? No matter, you get one of each, with two-each of the commoner side-drummers and pipers, which - of course - is why they are commoner, or turn-up more often, loose!

I took them out on one of those warm days a while ago and marched them round the empty bird-bath past the weeping cherry!

The next day - I should add that paint and material wise they are very similar to both the late Timpo/Toyway factory-painted Highlanders and the Hong Kong Salvation Army band set, only the bases being the obvious visual difference, this is not to say there is any connection, painted PVC was big in the late 1970's through the bulk of the 1980's.

"You told me I couldn't eat them
so I'm not even going to see them!"

Many thanks to Chris for spotting these and facilitating my sharing them with the rest of you! Funny thing is I think I recognise the box, so JB probably had a set when I was helping him, and if I'd paid more attention to large-scale when I was a small scale collector I would have had the answer all along!

The next day - I may of course be confusing the box with the painted sets of Ecsi 1:35th scale figures which I think were issued under the A-Toys branding, I also think they were in silver/grey boxes?

T is for Two - Webbs Rack Toys

Previously these pirates (1st set below) have been attributed to Dollar General in the US, I now seem to have a UK brand-mark, while the knights are 2nd or 3rd generation copies of the original 1970's Britains Deetail copies out of Hong Kong, now marked 'China' (like the pirates) and being hawked by the same rack-toy name - Webbs.

Packaging is about as generic as it comes on the front, but there is a consumer info panel and what looks like a phantom branding (but is actually S Webb and Son of Menai Bridge, Gwynedd) printed on the otherwise plain back, and the WST048 set's blister is 'space-filled' with spurious shite!

The spurious shite includes an injection-moulded copy of the old Noah's ark props and a rock wall, but the boat and cannon are useful and make up for the village-pond-with-coral-reef play mat!

There is another pose (swordsman, seen in black plastic in the rack-toy round-up, last ITLAPD), but of interest to the blog is a new pose here, the lady. She looks like she might be being made to walk the plank as a victim of wicked pirates, but is in fact holding a pistol in the small of her back with the clear intention of giving someone a third eye or a hole in the heart - generous girl! And don't worry - plenty in the bag for ITLAPD this year!

The seller is offering these in threes should you be tempted; and with the knights each assortment differs, but each blister (set WST051) gets two identical riders, so you need multiples to complete the set.

No filler and lots of separate weapons make these very useful purchases, although the play mat is "...far out there man" . . . with Frisian cows, stud-fencing, nicely-trimmed hedges and dry-stone walls sharing space with a pterodactyl, veggie'saur, giraffe and lion, while a Napoleonic grenade appears to be stuck half-way up the cliff . . . or is the pterodactyl bombing the mud-river with rocks??!!!!

That's them - they're still out & about there somewhere!