G is for God!

I forgot to mention . . . It's BP Fairs' Sandown Park Toy Pair today, so if you're at a loose-end, mosey-on down to Esher and see if you can grab yourself a bargain, he says; still half-asleep!

S is for Seen Elsewhere - Ephemera

As I posted some of this back in lockdown and as the lockdowns are all a couple of years ago, they might as well go here too! A rather eclectic collection, but the 'Seen Elsewhere' folder is one I have managed to migrate, find and get to grips with.

 

From the Hong Kong firm Star Toys' catalogue, their range of Timpo/Britains (and other makes?) wagon/coach clones. Amusing to see both Stage Coaches ripped-off, and Britains horses on Timpo bases.

This is from the retailer Josef Kober of Vienna's catalogue, from the mid 1970's. We see Timpo Indians attacking a Timpo cavalry/union-manned fort, while Elastolin cowboys get up to all sorts down in the town, including laying in wait for a Timpo stage! Wooden buildings exclusive to Kober.

I believe the shop only closed in the last few years, and when I posted it previously Gubányi István of Hungary recalled the shop was popular with Eastern European visitors during the Cold War, presumably due to Austria's NATO/Warpac neutrality.

This went on Brain Heiler's facebook group, where they like a bit of early evening, older kids, TV serial-related stuff, preferably Canadian, but this is British and another retailer (or actually; wholeseller)'s catalogue, Dekkertoys. I might even have a couple of those fake medal/badge 'Bling' items somewhere! Childhood Fun!

Not intending to park my tanks on Moonbase's lawn, it just happens there's a few white-button/wind-up, giant insects down the bottom of this collection of plastic kits from Bandai's 1975 catalogue, all of which have the clockwork 'walking action', I previously posted this on the STS Animal Forum over a year ago.

At the same time as I posted this image of the Marx prehistoric playset by Burbank Toys, presumably - by then - a Dunby-Combex sales vehicle (also marketing some Mattel), although originally formed in 1957. They also sold the last version of the Guns of Navarone playset, both in contents-photo' box-art, along with a third which I think was a Wild West set, with fort? It'll go on the A-Z listing in the end, with lots of other stuff!

N is for Not Phidal, Oh, No, no, no, no, no, or Not?

By which I mean I would happily put a small wager on these having come from the same factory and/or design team who work with or supply Phidal, but they are not sold as Phidal, but rather as total generics in blank packaging - some warehouse somewhere is shifting them to anyone who wants them, and there are several sellers on evilBay, and Amazon I think.

This is not to say they mightn't be clearance from Phidal, there were a lot of early sets about which I know little, as the style, painting and bases are all very reminiscent of some of the Phidal output we've seen here before, but they are unmarked and direct copies (pose wise) of a Disney Stores 'exclusive' set (which are marked), which suggests unlicensed knock-offs? A third near-identical set exists, with metallic painted figures.

How they arrive, six heat-sealed pockets in a rolling double-sheet which is then cut and stuffed in another vacuum-packed bag, causing the warped bases on what are otherwise quite substantial figurines; and a hideous carbon footprint, and they are a little larger than typical Phidals at around 65/75 mil.

When I say "unmarked" I mean they don't even have a '©Disney', which is a pretty good sign of some Chinese (they don't have 'China' either!) ner'do'wellness! But they are nice for what they are and will go OK (not necessarily perfectly, but 'OK') with the larger Marx and other more modern figures by Bully, Kaiodo, Schleich etc.

Those unmarked bases, just for completeness! As hinted at above, the packaging will likely leave one or two requiring some hot-water reshaping. And you may have noticed; the Cheshire Cat's a peculiar colour . . . that's never going to make a Bagpuss!

News, Views Etc . . . Herald Toys & Models

Barney's been busy this winter, another release from him reads . . .

"...this week we have an exciting collection of 'Swoppets' from Poole in Dorset, including some superb C15th Knights, some of which have come straight out of a boxed set and are in pristine condition. We also have some nice early Herald ceremonial figures from the Manhattan Collection, including a group of four very early Guardsmen, marching at the slope, all with the "British Made" Zang trademark to their bases..."

As always Barney's stuff is to be found here Herald Toys & Models

 

F is for Follow-up - AWI and Cake Dec's

When I originally posted these, in a rather irreverent article, I mused on the origins of the red versus blue versions of the Airfix Washington's Army figures, a while later I actually saw some blue ones, on a US sale page, so that part of the mystery was solved and my improbable tale of how the UK came to have a bunch of redcoats seems more plausible now!

But, anyhoos, the other two sets in the recent charity shop purchase were this pair . . .

 

. . . both in SSCO packing (I've seen them in others now), and showing one way the Americans got them, six infantry in one pack and the mounted officer (glued to his horse in this case) in the other, so while still outnumbered by my redcoat sample, they have a fighting chance now, and the three musicians of the previous post to chivvy them along!

 

Alternate angle/close-ups, they are the same figures, almost certainly from Lik Be (formerly 'LP' . . . or IDL!), they share the same base style and marks as both the redcoats available over here and the pair of astronauts which joined LB's diminutive chrome-painted robot/aliens - of which I picked up a few, mint, the other day in a charity shop!

 

I haven't got their matching-set here at the moment, so it's a comparison with the slightly larger, baseless set, but you'll get the idea from the previous posts on these, and we will do a round-up of all of them when I track-down the two missing figures for that chap the other day . . . other week . . . month! Another box ticked, more confirmation of previous thoughts!

And [written after editing the article] this isn't a return to business as normal here, despite the fact this was one of the next few in the queue. The MacBook Air went back for a full refund, it was a dated technicolour yawn of multiscreen busyness, and for the price, a complete disappointment - and I've always hankered after one; looked into it about 15 years ago and gave it more thought when first doing CAD back in 2012/13!

 

So with the HPieceofshit17 already on its way back to Amazon, I went back to a Lenovo, if my government is happy for me to buy Chinese shit full of spyware, who am I to argue? But Windows11 is also shit, and I still don't know where half the stuff I have got across is! It's a depressing nightmare, and with everything else going on, I don't know when normal service will resume, but I will try to get out a few easy or new-stuff posts going forward - a lot has come in!

I've actually managed to add some shots to the 'civilian' post of the canoe 'season', but apart from that and the Airfix post (additions to the Commandos) which was to go early too, the rest are still on one of the hard drives and after trying to 'migrate' the back-up, I'm in no hurry to load anything else on here until I know what the fuck I'm doing!

And I've just had problems loading these images, they wouldn't go where I was trying to place them, I tried formatting the page to normal, but they kept going in down the bottom, so in the end I gave up and moved all the text in sections . . . Pain! Still, it's not all negative, I'm back with Firefox; if everything else has changed you might as well bite the bullet and get used to new everything, and the current spellchecker for it is much better even than the Windows Office one!

News, Views Etc . . . Herald Toys & Models Updates

As I mentioned the other day, there were two releases from Barney in the queue, to which another has been added and as I've now taken everything off this piece of shit HP-17 in order to send it back for a refund (it's not right!), an image-free post is a useful one right now! Good news, I talked myself into a Mac' replying to EY the other day, so went and got one yesterday, so  . . . another weeks setting-up and getting used to a new system and I should be firing on all cylinders!

" . . . this week we have for sale a good group of Speedwell figures from the Robin Hood set, together with a smaller scale Speedwell mounted cowboy, moulded in two-pieces. Happy collecting as always, Barney - PS: Royal Mail have now resumed International services, so hopefully the cyber incident from 11 January has now been resolved and normal service resumed!"

" . . . from the Manhattan Collection we are very pleased to be able to offer two rare original Herald catalogues for 1957 and 1958, together with an original Herald New Lines leaflet for February 1956."

" . . . this weekend we have an interesting collection of Barrett & Sons Zoo Series models, mostly from the old Taylor & Barrett hollow-cast moulds, including a Polar Bear Family, Seated Lioness and Cub, together with a very rare Red Deer Stag and Hind matching pair. Some models we have never seen in plastic and are not depicted in the Plastic Warrior Taylor & Barrett Special. We also have a few B&S Farm animals, including a scarce tree, moulded in two parts."

As always Barney's stuff is to be found here Herald Toys & Models

H is for Heeeeerererereerssss Hughy!

I'm back, typing letters about three points fucking tall! You get the biggest screen you can and they reduce the graphics by 50%. I fucking hate Hewlett Packard and I fucking hate Microsoft and I fucking hate technology! Three fucking codes to my 'phone in the last half hour, just to get to stuff which has been mine for years!

Couldn't comment on anyone's Blog because the despicable duo wouldn't let me open the Excel spreadsheet I put all my passwords in, as the Lenovo was dying (China be fucked - I wish I'd bought another Lenovo! The price of principle is some Western piece of shit - which was probably made in China anyway - no spyware but no usefulware either!), or at least; not without paying for Windows365 and some other shit I don't need because A) I don't want my life 'on the cloud' and B) I have a perfectly good Office disc somewhere, which I've already paid for - Bastard Microsoft bastards!

And everything's still on the Backup hard-drive, so I won't post much beyond rants about fucking Hewlett Packard and fucking Microsoft for a while longer, but I'm about to try loading the later version of Picasa (3.9) than I've been using for the last fourteen years, so we'll see how that goes!

Hoping to go to the Spring gift fair at NEC Birmingham tomorrow, still got all the Kensington Olympia stuff from Toy Fair on an SD card, along with a bunch of other stuff so I'll have 'some' output in a day or so, and there are three press releases from Barny and a new PW out there!

Most bookmarks restored and I managed to make a payment with Paypal (which hasn't been working for a year or two), so some benefits to a new machine . . . new anonymity!

Had a chat with matey in Rymans and he had the same thing, the first thing you have to do with these new laptops is delete and/or uninstall three-quarters of the shit that comes with it (MacAfee is shit, get Avira free and bin MacAfee!), and then you find there's nothing useful there, I can't even open zip-files with the software I DO need until I've downloaded WinZip or similar, if I had a machinegun there would have been a bloodbath somewhere in the last two weeks, not Macky-D's, somewhere full of authority figures is where!

A is for Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

I'm not posting anything complicated until at least Tuesday or Wednesday of next week as my Hard Disk Drive is slowly dying! It's been doing so for a couple of days and I don't know how long I can steal extra time from it, but it just took over an hour and a half to get online,  half of that was the CHKDSK running, which it did automatically, it hasn't cleared the problem, which Windows first flagged it up two days ago, but it means that when it does die, it'll die all clean and well-ordered!

Fortunately I ran a full back-up over Christmas so I only have to save the stuff I've downloaded in the last few weeks and late December/January's photo's, most of which are still on the camera! But I'll be sad to see the thing go, it's done stirling service for over 12-years, and it was all image heavy . . . Wise Disk Cleaner has deleted nearly 600GB's of crap, there's about 3TB's on the dongles and external hard drives, all of which went through this little Lenovo Z570 Ideapad, it's probably a miracle it's lasted this long!

I bought it with some of the the money my late Godmother left me (along with paying for the 3DSMax course and getting the Volvo roadworthy after the Berkshire mess), however I've ordered an HP 17 for Monday (no more Chinese stuff, they are as safe and trustworthy as the Russians!), and an external disc-drive (laptops don't have disc-drives anymore!), so I can regard that as payed for with my late Mother's bequest.

It's like there's a great spiral of time, we get thrown on it at birth, spun-round, sometime too fast, sometimes not fast enough, and then - at some point - thrown off it again; a few of our memories remaining, but only so long as others we knew stay on the spiral themselves, holding those fragments of the past.

H is for Horsemonkey!

Like a Horseman, but a monkey . . . obviously! And so to London for the Toy fair at Olympia today, but this was already in the queue, and pertains to the previous post.

Picked this oddity up a while ago, recognised the code/marking as standard Lik Be 'Funimal' branding (No.A30 MADE IN HONG KONG in a typewriter style/engineers stamp font), but it was in hard styrene and obviously a tad more colourful than the usual Funimal fare, however I have a big folder with all that stuff in, against the final A-Z post, or an interim 'page', so quickly ID'd it.

Here it is in the Culpitt's 1985 book/catalogue image, you can see it carries a similar code to the Lik Be astronauts previously cropped-out of that page, but that doesn't count for anything, the BV prefix is used for a lot of unrelated products! BV5319 is described as 'Assorted Circus Animals', which at that time it seems were issued as a set of five.

Mine came individually packed in a cellophane envelope, so probably dispensed from a  counter-top box with the other four similarly packed, but whether that makes them much older, younger or just a year or two either side of the catalogue is anyone's guess!

You can see the soft 'ethylene ones (blue) are hand-painted with the good-old stab-and-hope style, in two colours (typical for Funimals) while the Culpitt one is stencil-painted in five colours.

In the 'States Wilton included the more common polyethylene one in an expanded line-up of 12 of the Funimals around 1977 (the date of this catalogue image), although interestingly I have that cat/fox . . . foxy-cat (white plastic, top left) somewhere, also in hard polystyrene with the same stencil decoration, so Culpitt's may have issued two smaller groups of 6, only one making it into the book? Or bags of five randomly taken from the twelve?

F is for Follow-up and Fervent, Faithful Flag-waving, Fifes & Drums!

I think I mentioned back in the autumn, or possibly during Rack Toy Month that one of my bad habits is to post something, then, after I've alerted/reminded you all of them/the subject, go off to evilBay and see what's [still] there! I did it after the AWI post the other day, and managed to find a charity lot (yellow & blue ribbon icon) with six sets of cake decorations!

Among which were these three, so I grabbed the lot (cheap, buy-it-now) and they got here a couple of days ago. It's some of the other Sprit of '76 branded stuff, with the figures I described the other day as "...short-fat-kid caricatures", here - on the left - a patriotic flag waving lady-girl and what is their fifth drummer - within the line. On the right we have patriotically-dressed kissin' cousin's!

Flag lady could double as a pencil top, while the seat of the kissing pair is of more interest, as I have suggested for years that the based-set of Airfix piracies are by Lik Be, due to the similarity of the bases to both the marked robot/alien types and the late set of two astronauts and flag with lunar lander, or at least (as it was in One Inch Warrior magazine I think, so years ago and 'LP') that the maker of the astronauts was the same as the maker of the Airfix Washington's Army pirates . . .

. . . and here, courtesy of Bill B's catalogue is the same bench-settee/love-seat, now providing a place of repose for an elderly couple, in a Lik Be trade advertisement. So I get to use the 'Told you so' tag which annoys some people; but it's the reason I use it!

Clearly LiK Be were supplying (among 'ethylene monsters, 'styrene space stuff and 'funimals' in both polymers) a lot of the wishy-washy white polystyrene plastic cake decorations carried by many brands both sides of the pond.

While these might be by another maker and are obviously another brand, the reverse of the card says "made and packed in Hong Kong", so Emilie is probably a pseudonym for dozens of outworkers!

I'm guessing we have Betsy and Abe here! But the same over-sentimentalised 'kidults', this time with just the big heads, and the painting of the Lincoln-alike hasn't reached the 'stars & stripes' excesses of the Spirit figures!

L is for London Toy Soldier Show - December 2022 - White Tower Miniatures

While I was at the London show I shot a few things, and these are some of they, from Matt's White Tower Miniatures stall, while I umm'ed and err'ed over what to purchase! Blurb-light because the images speak for themselves'.

Normans and vikings, all buildings are also available from White Tower

Round stone-walled hovel

Kievan Russ

Not Russians; early Cossacks - Slava Ukraine!)

[Moscow was still an uninhabited fen-land swamp]

Mounted Normans

Pirates, the third time we've had a pirate ship in January!

Close up of the rascal's vessel!

Wild West - lots of character figures

Townsfolk

A cowboy band!

Annie Oakley (R), Buffalo Bill Cody (L) and Calamity Jane (behind/between)

Medieval Fort

Robin Hood and his Merry Men!

Harrying the North?

And White Tower Miniatures can be found here;
https://whitetowerminiatures.co.uk/

F is for Follow-up - Odd Germans

So, days after I posted the two unusual German Infantry (second image down) which Chris Smith sent to the blog in the Autumn, I spotted a trio on-line in Italy, but these three were die-cast alloy, not yellow plastic? Obviously I bought them before anyone else saw them!

We now have an additional officer who looks a bit like the chap - Simon Cadell - who was always playing German Officers when he wasn't being a rather wet manager at Maplins!

They are twice the size of the Peltro/Westair/Dover figures later claimed by Kinder collectors, and therefore a trio might 'be it', a small, probably transparent or windowed carton for tourists to purchase at a museum's gift shop? Westair still sell larger figures, now soft whitemetal, but singly.

This is not to say they are Peltro, but that could then involve (in a roundabout way) Fontanini/Fonplast and even Cáne? A reasonably extensive search of eBay.it has failed to find any more in metal or plastic, nor under any of the brands, but the fact that Cáne did several Italian sets, a US Marine set AND Japanese, yet don't seem to have been credited with a set of Germans yet, might be a telling snippet?

Can anyone check the back-cover of a PW from a few years ago which showed a shop display of various Cáne sets/sculpts under another brand . . . CGGC-Grisoni? Mine are in storage . . . again!

Back to the figures, their bases are slightly deeper than the plastics, with four shallow studs underneath (yes I should have taken more shots, but it's a bit 'up in the air' here at the movement, and I hope we'll be returning to these), but the same 'clipped coin' edge design, so the plastics are straight copies with thinner bases, and each is marked in Italian;

•          SOLDADO TED
•          FANTERIA TED
•          UFFICIALE TED

Ted is for Tedesca, the Italian for German, so we have

•          German Soldier
•          German Infantry
•          German Officer

Obviously more to discover on these, both the metal and the plastic, but I'm on the case, and if anyone can shed any light on the subject, it would be appreciated! Underlines above are for the dunderheads!

H is for How They Come In - London Show December 2022 - Mercator Trading

I try to always credit people where they've helped the Blog, given me stuff, or let me have stuff for peanuts, but equally, if I pay for something it's mine to do what I want with, without crediting anyone, well, it would be ridiculous to try and credit everyone you've ever bought from, even if you wanted to!

Equally, once the stuff has been broken down and sorted into the collection it gets harder to re-credit, you can't keep track of everything . . . you'll understand if I say I give a lot of thought to the subject, I wouldn't say I lose sleep over it, but I do always want to do the right thing! One wants to credit fairly, not leave anyone out, but not be over-patronising . . . it's a hard balance sometimes!

Adrian Little of Mercator Trading, often lets me have little bits and/or saves me a tub of the same, equally he lets me have things well-under their market value, but I will also pay full-whack for bits or ask him to get something for me, the last London show involved all kinds, but I did seem to come away from the show with a lot of stuff from the one table/seller/mate, so here's a post on all of it!

I actually ordered this in advance of the show, having watched it not-sell to several interested buyers at a previous show, and I wouldn't dream of telling you what I paid for it, but it was considerably less than the market rate, due to the damage to the collar and shoulder, but it's my first 'Porcelain Head' composition figure (and probably my last!), and if you're going to tick that box, you might as well tick it with an example of the head-honcho!

As you can see, he also has a moving arm, but it's giving the full, straight-armed Sieg Heil, not his commoner, strangely bent-wrist, flicky version which always looked like he couldn't really be arsed! And the podium came home with me too!

A interesting trio here, on the left a French Napoleonic figure which might be CL (Charles Lannoy), RF (Rene Fisher) or JSF? All the dongles (and the external hard drive I put them on so they'd all be in one place) with that info' are at the flat, and I'm not!

In the middle is my first Arjoplast from Belgium, the [ceremonial?] uniform escapes me (and my pitiful attempts on Google) but might be some administrator's uniform from the Belgian Congo/colonial era?

While the chap on the right is also a bit of a mystery; I'm pretty sure I've seen (may even have -  I've rather neglected the nappies here at Small Scale World!) a couple of Napoleonic French Grenadiers with the same base, but this chap seems to be another Belgian, except Google says paler-blue top and darker trousers, while I can't find the braid at all? The bearskin however is quite a likeness with the white drop/plume and star-plate, although some of the guards on Google have a side plume in red.

The rifle is toy-like and a separate piece glued into the arm.

While these might be new to hobby, are definitely new to Blog and could be New to Internet! Consequently I can't give you much of any use, but there's plenty to say! Not least that while two of them have damaged rifles, it is of no matter; when dealing with such unusual figures better to have a broken one than none at all!

The first one seems to be a copy of an old Elastolin or Lineol figure, and in that material could be mistaken for a poured resin or even 3D print, but I suspect a test shot, due to the remains of a runner's gate-mark, and a slightly resinous hard-plastic which is sort of semi-opaque. Could it also be Argentine? They did copy some composition in plastic.

The second feels like Portuguese to me, semi-flat or demi-rond, and silver styrene are both traits of their production as seen with Plástico Osul, and the Portuguese used the British MkI/II-'Brodie' helmet for the duration of WWII (and beyond I believe), so that's the clues for this one?

While the third has a different base to the silver one and a more rounded countenance, but may be from the same source, depicting a  neighbouring Spanish soldier of the same or similar 1930-60's era, but could be something else entirely, another South American maker, they liked their 'Jerry helmets' over there!

I think this might be the Apollo moon lander from the Hing Fat sets, we've looked at some previously here, but my sample has the rover and other stuff. Quite well done as it happens with a sticker detailing the stay-behind section's flat top and various plug-in retro'/maneuver jets and radar dishes.

While this . . . is not on Alphadrome as far as I can find, no one on Friends of Plastic Warrior could help, no one on Brian Heiler's facebook group knew anything, so again, possibly new to hobby, Blog and Internet!

Isn't it lovely! The arms move, but the legs are factory-glued, as two separate, pose-specific, left/right pieces, with angled feet to keep it standing up. The head is also glued and the paint seems to be original.

The closest I could get was the 'Dime Store' maker, the Ball Manufacturing Co. who had similar products (Captain Radar) - or the French Rex, who's spacemen could be considered close (they are also quite close to the British Christmas cracker prize spacemen), but both are pure conjecture.

I also tried - and failed - to nail it to a pulp-movie robot, but that's not to say my search was that exhaustive, and there were one or two similar beasts, so it may be based on a half-forgotten B-movie one?

Not new to hobby, not new to Internet! Boo! Looks like it's a Portuguese copy of a Spanish robot by Sel-Mac, but that would tie it in with my suspicions of Portugal for a couple of the other figures in that lot?

https://www.geocities.ws/robot_ole/selmac.html

and it WAS on Alphadrome, just not in the Robot section!

http://alphadrome.net/forums/topic/15347-sel-mac-robot-from-barcelona/

and

http://alphadrome.net/forums/topic/21254-vigia-del-espacio-robot-sel-mac-spain/

Still, it's all fun! And I may have the pistol, but I may be getting confused with either the MPC one (boxier, soft polyethylene) or the US gum-ball one - altogether cruder? Both of which I do have somewhere!

Some nice pieces here as well! Polish large scale and 54mm Napoleonics, the way things are going on the Polish blogs, and among the contributors to the FoPW Faceplant group, I'm hesitant to say PZG for either of these!

The base on the right-had figure seems not quite right for PZG, while I think someone gave a alternate maker's name for a different pair of the left-hand one the other day (but I can't find the post now, trouble with Faceplant is that stuff soon drops off the page with no tags!), although PZG did have a larger sized Napoleonic line, theirs had slightly larger bases?

The new-to-collection 'Toy Town' sentry box is all-wood and rather charming, the chick is composition or chalkwear while the stool is one of the most copied pieces out there; reappearing in all sorts of guises, from Marx 'Kins' window boxes, through those fairy-tail sets, gum-ball capsules, dolls house rack toys and charms, a Hong Kong- made bear's picnic, all sorts; this seems an early phenolic or 'heavy' styrene one - if you know what I mean!

The chap with the tyre is another Cararra slot-racing set figure, my fourth in a few months, after having none for years!

Two more of the Royal Armoury (Real Armería de Madrid) models from Spain, I love these, I don't know how many were issued, and I guess they sold well (as tourist souvenirs) as you often see them, but getting them in good condition is the tricky part - these both appear OK.

They seem to have changed the base/plinth design at some point, which may give completists at least two sets to find? Factory constructed plastic-kits, my guess is ten or more with three or four mounted and the rest on foot, they all seem to be from the main hall, which is the one that comes-up when you Google the Spanish Royal Armoury Museum.

Three interesting animals on the left; a flocked giraffe in reasonable condition, probably British but who did a giraffe with integrated base? The Western horse is heavy rubber, while the cart-horse has such good paint it might be repainted, but more info sought on all of them?

To the right, a couple of Reisler's; a sailor and an African soldier, and yes that's factory paint, I think they were around the time of all the Congolese trouble (??? It's still going-on, 70-years later!) and represent UN Peacekeepers from somewhere? A Betterware cowboy flat, MPC ring-hand cowboy with accessories and a lady wagon-rider from . . . Starlux? Reisler? . . . Polystyrene anyway!

This is a really nice crossover set from the all composition set we've seen here before with Mosquito fighters (now P-38 Lightings) and the later all lead sets with a smaller metal pilot, so very pleased to add it to the pile. Timpo planes and Zang for Timpo 20mm pilots, with the box missing but the card intact.

A handful of Hornby/Dinky Dublo figures (left-hand five) and Wardie/Mastermodels workmen (right-hand trio), with a driver from early Matchbox or Moko-Lesney? Lead for the Hornby's; die-cast alloy for the other four.

A Kellogg's 'Jig-Toy' flat-bed truck and Quaker cereal-premium racing-car join a lead motorcycle in the motor-pool, and - as is becoming a habit - I raided Adrian's cheapie-trays at the end of the show, the most interesting of which is probably the one at the front, who is a die-cast Mazac/Zamak alloy, he's semi-flat and around 28mm.

There's some good stuff above, and Adrian saved/gave some of it to me, and let me have some cheap, so many thanks to him, Mercator Trading always have top-end stuff, either on their website or on evilBay, and . . . guess what - the Plastic Warrior show is only four months away now!