I painted mine as close as possible to the one depicted on the box, however there are clearly - in photographs of the originals - various finishes, including a gloss chocolate-brown version and a reversed scheme with black car and silver mudguards.
The Nazi officials were a bit stiff, so I left them in the box! It should be shiny if you click on the photo's for the enlargement but it's a bit dusty!
One of the problems with these intermediate sized figures (he's 45mm), is that they often start out as key-rings but get the loop pulled off or cut-off, indeed in the early days I used to cut them off myself, I have a nice 25mm Knight - also rubber - which I vandalised in just such a manor, I've never found another 'good' one!
Factory-painted PVC or vinyl rubber with 'Levi's' on the face of the plinth and 'jeans' on the reverse.
Slightly big for the continental HO scale, and as far as I know a complete set of DB (Deutsche Bahn) Rail platform and train dispatch staff, along with a refreshment seller.
The container with slide-off lid is original, however I had to replace the foam with a new piece, which fortunately I managed to match both by density of 'bubbles'/texture and depth of material. When I found these the original foam (a sort of fleshy yellow colour) had both melted and crumbled and everything was a rather sticky mess, however the mixture had not adhered to either the figures or the box and a few minutes in the sink with a bit of Fairy Liquid did the job.
This is the same as the Pyro Plastics model of the same name; X-400 Space Explorer, and came in a boxed set with three other complex ships and two simple 'dime-store' vehicles. For collectors of Space stuff this is one of the 'Holy Grails' which means us generic small-scale collectors don't stand a chance! I had to let this go as part of a deal-split but got to keep a couple of the others, so - You win some you lose some!
The final photograph shows the lot as bought, I got to keep the long thin one, also Kleeware and the little pale-blue one, the two metallic blue ones are also Kleeware, from the same set, the pale-blue one may be Tudor Rose, and the red one was produced in various sizes/colours and window arrangements by various companies and this one may be Ajax?
This is a complete set straight off the sprue, the colour is correct and very lairy!! Later the colours were toned down slightly but the quality of painting remained slap-dash
Interestingly both Tri-ang and Playcraft ended up as part of the Dunby/Combex/Marx group, but the two ranges were never rationalised, Tri-ang survive to this day in some form as Hornby Railways, the Playcraft range was dropped years (decades) ago and the parent supplier Jouef finally went feet-up a few years ago.
S.N.C.F. stands for 'Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français' the French National Railway (when we were kids we were taught it meant 'Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer'?), and that is how they were sold to British boys building a British Rail layout!!!
I am pretty sure that I have some of the wagon kits in little white boxes somewhere, but I will deal with those when I unpack them!! I do remember that they have no horses (lots of very fine parts/strips/rods but no horses), so you had to buy the horses separately...good marketing tool/model but annoying for the buyer, you can list the wagon kits at a cheap price then bump the cost of the order back up with horse packs!!!!
Known as 'Highway Miniatures' these images are of set B-2. There is no sign of the harness, but as it's an old kit I don't want to open it and I suspect the harness in wrapped-up in the instruction sheet. The two horses are injection moulded polystyrene in halves, and only the one pose.
It is build straight from the box and other than number-plates is unmarked. Although smaller than the Hasegawa 12's it looks better, theirs were a bit too 'chunky' for my taste, although I did make one of the SPAAG's, but that was only because I bought it in AHM packaging by mistake!
I made various parts move, such as the gunners seat on the right hand side, the draw-bar and the gun-rest, by gluing little fillets of plastic over the part mounting rather than gluing the part as per the instructions. I also left the shield removable.
My Artillery tractors lined up, it's a poor photograph I'm afraid. The gun on the left is actually the Matchbox Pak.40, but it was such a simple model next to the others, I gave it a curved shield to make it look more like a Pak.38 with the 50cm barrel.
This is supposed to be a Sd.Kfz10, smaller of the workhorse family, I converted it from the Matchbox Sd.Kfz.11 which was as awful as the gun it accompanied! It was not the most successful of conversions and the bonnet is all wrong, but at the time I was looking to produce war-games vehicles and it 'looked' right. The Nebelwerfer is the Esci one with a canvas weather cover made from tissue, and a battery number painted after a photograph in - I think - Panzer Colours.
In order to escape from the problem of building an interior I couldn't find good images of, I carved a piece of balsa until it fitted snugly against the windscreen and body sides, overlaid Evergreen round section strips as a tilt frame and covered the whole thing in tissue. The flexible PVC windows were represented by squares of draughtsman's paper with the pull-down folds drawn in in faint pencil.
This is the late-war einheits cab/'pick-up' truck variant of the Sd.Kfz.11, based on the Esci kit, and in some respects as amateurish as the previous one, however, in my defence - I only had a fuzzy black & white photograph on the instruction sheet to guide me. There are now some very good pictures of this variant on the Internet. Cab is scratch-built from the bonnet back to represent the 'einheits' wooden cab.
The Esci Kfz.11 straight from the box, note how it can't pull it's own gun properly as the gun is configured for firing only! Compare with the previous image which includes the Fujimi gun, which is configured for travelling. Airfix also made a Pak.40, and the three are all well detailed and about the same size, unlike the Matchbox pixie-gun.
This is the Matchbox one, it's an early-war Ausf. B and I bought it completed at a Bring & Buy years ago, I gave it an over-paint of red-brown after a picture in an old AFV book somewhere to represent an urban scheme applied to a grey half-track in the East Circa '44/45, some crew figures in camouflage smocks and a 'bedding roll' or two complete it. Note the too-heavy/chunky tracks on this version, lets hope the Revell re-issue has better treads!!
The Esci 251 is an Ausführung C, the commonest variant, This is the ambulance version, built from the box. Esci made the best effort with what was - after all - one of the most numerous and versatile vehicles in the German inventory by the simple expedient of providing a good kit on the main sprue, and then in each box a 'version' sprue. Versions available were;
This is also a Matchbox 251 converted to a 251/1-II - Rocket launcher 'Stuka zu Fuß' [fuss] (Walking Stuka) with the Esci rocket-launchers installed, I tried to paint some crates as wooden , some as rusty reused metal as both were used. The Esci SPW was advertised as 1:72 while the Matchbox one was supposed to be 1:76 but in fact they are almost the same size.
This is a metal Ausf. D, I forget the maker, I suspect Skytrex? I didn't like it very much so it got a basic paint-job and er...that's it.
Comparison shot between the Esci (rear) and Matchbox (foreground) 251's, as you can see there is very little to choose size wise between the two. Late editions of the Esci vehicles had link-and-length track which made for an awesome model.
Toward satisfying my needs on both counts I produced these two in 1989 after getting out of the army, and realising I could spend my own money on whatever I wanted, and I wanted to go back to modelling!!! They represent a Sd. Kfz 222 Armoured Reconnaissance Vehicle and Sd. Kfz 221 Signals Vehicle. While not up to the standard of serious modellers (I entered them in the BMSS Aldershot competition in 1990 and they weren't placed!), they do show what you can do with a couple of cheap kits.
This is the 221, built on the Airfix 222 chassis. The main work was to fill the original turret hole and cut a new one before casting a new turret using the 'push' version of vac-forming, the grenade screens were from druggies pipe-mesh! I added a few tool lockers, cut and drilled the wheel-nut protection covers, scratch-built the 'bedstead' aerial and jerry-can holders, added a sand-channel/plate from the Matchbox LRDG Chevrolet and piled kit on every surface it 'looked right' on! The MG34 was from Armtec. Faults; Aerial is too heavy as are the frames for the grenade screens, and the body of a real 221 was slightly different from a 222.
This is the Fujimi 222 with scratch-built grenade screens and not alot else! The major fault with this one was that the screens ended up too big and less accurate than the little flat ones used on the 221. Again I piled stuff on every surface I thought it looked ok on, as they did (and still do) in real life. Then it was just a case of lots of painting, thin layers of base colour and dry-brushing with base colour plus white or grey.
The commonest are the 40/50mm copies of early British 54mm's or the little 'Swap-it' type figures in 20mm. Others are the Airfix piracies or multi-coloured musicians from Christmas-crackers and bubble-gum machines. Most of these will be covered again in the fullness of time, but for today I want to share the two less common types, first are these 30mm swap-it figures with movable heads and arms.
These were imported into the UK by W.H.Cornelius, and will be found with their 'Success' brand over-printed in red. Others are found without the WHC branding, which means other people carried them and therefore they may be found in other parts of the world with other Brands over-printed?
Loosely based on the Crescent range of 60mm ceremonials, you can make more poses than the Crescent originals (a set of six) by swapping heads and legs. They are also a larger version of the last set pictured;
These are much closer to the Crescent figures and are the same as the more common 20mm swap-it's but have the additional bonus of the pull-off head (the others only swivel at the waist), which can be a Life Guard's rather than a Guardsman's meaning you can (if you get both sets) make yet more additional poses.
This is the tin they come in, it has a tie-pull opening mechanism, which I will place on my Imageshack account as I can only load 5 images at a time on this blog due to the level of detail I'm shooting at.
Yellow poses are the foot Indians and Tee-pees, the foot figures average 40mm but some of the guys being shot would be closer to 50mm if they straitened-up!!! The Tee-pees are much smaller at about 1:120.
The Red 'Sprue' was all the mounted Indians, and some riderless horses running about. Again size varies slightly between the mounted horses, however two of the riderless beasts are considerably smaller, and one is quite large in comparison.
Blue is for the ill-fated mothers' sons of Mr Headstrong's command. Both foot and mounted, as with the Indians, a riderless horse is provided. Note the number of casualties...
The Play-mat with Custard's route to oblivion...Oh! instead of the deserved oblivion he received fame which lasts to this day...One-Nil to the Native Population? No; Lost One-to-Nine hundred and Ninety-nine, on home ground...Sorry.
The crew were converted from three Atlantic Gold Diggers and a Giant cowboy, basically I just cut their stetsons into kepi's and gave them a matching colour scheme, based them on plasticard with Humbrol filler and a bit of flock and placed them front centre in the line!
A close up of the gun, a blob of Araldite two-part epoxy keeps the wheels on yet moving, and a few splashes of gold make the whole thing look more workman-like...well it does when you are thirteen!!
