F is for Follow-up - Deep Sea Divers

Mine wasn't Tresco, although looking through past posts on the Divers - Deep Tag, I do have one, however, by then I'd shot the ones I have here, and Brian had sent me a bunch of shots of his, so I raided the Divers & Submarines folder for a few carded sets off of that evilBay, and we have a quick post!

Two Tresco's from Brian Berke, old and new, with the Tobar one, still on the card, and which I know you could also find in Hawkin's Bazaar, as I saw it before I was collecting all scales, so at least 15-odd-years ago?

 

What seems to set them apart as two groups, whether copies or originals, Tresco versus Hong Kong, is that those from or after Tresco have a small 'pouch' like a binoculars case, on the chest, while the Hong Kong lifts have a longer, thinner case-like object you might find spare machine-gun-barrels in!

 

In the centre is what must be Tresco's last production, in bright yellow, while to either side are the ones with the tubelike piece of equipment marked-up to Imperial and Kingsway, a quick check-back to Brian's image, and you'll see all three are the same Tresco design, with the packet/parcel.

 

While all three of the ones I have here are the tube-design, which I'm calling Hong Kong, to which I added the giant 5" one we saw a while back, so you could see how giant he is! From the apparent age of the paler two, I suspect they may be earlier and the origin of the tube-design, changed from the parcel of the Tresco they were aping?

 

I should have shot that fish-tank one from Chris again too, but . . . next time! Divers are a bit of a favourite here, and we do return to them regularly! Brain also sent three individual shots, but as we've seen the subjects before, and they are in the above line-up, I put them in the folder to replace the three carded ones, against another of those re-visits!

 

There are some very interesting things in that folder, but I need to find more in context to Blog them with, and I have a feeling there's some on the old 'unknown' dongle? So we may return to divers sooner rather than later?

B is for Best Show on Earth! 9. Divers

Thinning-out a too-long civilians post, we find ourselves with some all-diver stuff!

In the centre we have the mini-sub from Hing Fat, with older bagged James Bond knock-offs (Thunderball - the original version) either side and a couple of the air-line uppy-downy bath toys behind.

 

We've seen (with much help from Brian Berke) various domestic and foreign versions of the smaller one, but the other is, as you can see, jai-huge! It has heavy-metal (lead?) feet, to which the body is melted on, presumably because the amount of plastic made the diver too buoyant even when filled with water?

 

The bags seem to contain sub-piaracies of the ones we looked at here, which had a handful of accessories missing from these bags, it may be that the moulding is the same, and price-cutting is responsible, but it's not clear without taking them out and comparing with something currently in storage, so a future post there!

 

Thanks to all for everything last month; Brian Carrick, Trevor Rudkin, Adrian Little, Andreas Dittmann, Gareth Morgan, Michael Mordant-Smith and Peter Evans.

D is for Dastardly Duckies!

Haahaa! I've found the missing Halloween post, so there will be one more sometime this afternoon or this evening, I got the images sorted in the early hours, but still have to do the blurb, however I have important stuff to do first! In the meantime this was the last of the pre-loaded posts . . .

A quickie, but fun, I had a Girlfriend/Lover about 20-years ago, who had a thing for Rubber Ducks and I managed to buy a shed-load for her one Christmas or Birthday which got me brownie-points! Colour Change, Glow-in-the-Dark, some character ones, possibly Hawkin's Bazaar (Tobar) as I seem to recall starting with a/the 'basic' net of five and then adding one-each from pick-bins?

Brian Berke shot these in a store a few weeks ago, and took a picture for us . . .

. . . then decided Grandson might like them in his bath so went back and purchased a few, taking more shots for the Blog!

What can I add? Supplied by FLP (Frontline Products) of Arizona, the Ghoul Essentials line of Halloween Rubber Ducks and they look to be about 60-mil by 70-mil, with paint variations - the 'Frankie' on a hook has different paint from the close-upped Frankie.

I know some people love these, they have dedicated collectors, they've been tracked across the oceans of Planet Earth, they are figural, they are Halloween related and one of the best, quirkiest Blogs I used to link to was 'Duck a Day' which showed - over time - thousands of these, and a few other non- 'rubber duckie' ducks, sadly it ran out of steam and disappeared down the link-list, before vanishing altogether, but we've got four different ones here today, so a big thanks to Brian and enjoy!

T is for Toy Fair 2020 Reports - Zimply Kids (Simba Group)

And so to the free sachet of 'stuff' I got at Toy Fair 2020, which I'm not going to experiment with; it looks like a prime way to piss-off the water utility!

This is Gelli Play from Zimply Kids, there is also Snoball Play (the above - colourless) and Slime Play (smooth consistency).Although, if you have kids or are looking to entertain the grandkid's on a sunny day, I recon a packet of wallpaper-paste (or bulk-gelatine for the slime) and some food dye is all you'll need, but god-help the goldfish!

But . . . the play-sets have figurines in them which may be of interest to some readers, although I think most of them are common'ish generics, but they may be unique sub-copies? For instance, here, the polar bears are an old sculpt from the 1960's and the penguin looks like either the Henbrandt one or the D&D Distributors one?

And - although I can only see one seal, it looks like you get two-each of four animals - these shots were taken at the end of the day and a lot of play had happened in my absence, the 'other' seal may have wandered off, or been wandered!

This is the slime gell, which as hinted at above, I suspect is a gelatine based product (which would therefore be unsuitable for vegetarians?) and again it looks like the items are paired although it's not so obvious from the pack's artwork, but artwork often differs from final contents and the pack is a Gelli pack not a slime pack!

Here we get an extra tree in the display, but not the artwork, so overall it would seem you get 2x4 items in each of some of the larger sets, and they are reasonable figures which even if you don' go looking for them, will soon start to turn-up in mixed lots on feebleBay or in charity/thrift shops?

Mucky stuff from Zimply Kids!

S is for Submarine - on a Card

I purchased this at the same time as the Tank in a Tin although it was a more reasonable pocket-money price of three-quid-odd I think? Also; it's the 3rd or 4th 4M thing to appear in the Blog now and I think I muttered 'up and coming' last time!

I love the card-art, an ocean filled with submarines like a school of dolphins, but then I guess a German wolf-pack would have looked something like that - if visibility in the North Sea was anything like an artist's imagination!

Because it's not that long since the last 'Subs' round-up I've no other images to fill the post with, so it's just a case of here it is; another bath toy, submarine. The slot for the coning-tower is slightly tapered so you can't put it back in the wrong way - helps the watch-officer navigate if he knows which way his 'fish' is pointing!

Shades of the old Kellogg's sub in the deck-slots and shades of another, more silvery modern one, in polystyrene (this one is propylene I think, with a nylon plug) which we've seen here before at Small Scale World, another novelty baking-soda submarine, or baking powder, it's all the same stuff!

Shipper's are Great Gizmos in the UK, Toysmith in the US and Playwell in Canada.

T is for Toy Fair 2020 Reports - Aquagel

Just a bit of fun with this one, there's a bunch of 'H is for . . . 's' in this afternoon's post, but you never know; years from now this post may help you with a weird blob of multi-coloured silicone-gel in a mixed lot on an auction site somewhere!

I can't give you chapter and verse on the technique as we didn't hang around longer than it took to fire-off three images and while as first glance there seems to be the simplicity of putting coloured gel in a mould, dropping it in water and . . . heay-presto!

However, there is the matter of the bag of granules which might be 'soluble mix' or 'solution mix' it's not clear and therefore the suspicion is there are several steps to the process, which some attendees had been having some fun with as you can see from the mess! The granules look like models of flu-virus cells!

At the bottom of the tank were the results of the effort of the prior-visitors to the stand - lots of coloured blobs, and what I suspect were the efforts of the more practiced stand-holders, of which I have identified three taken from the supplied moulds.

Like I said  - a bit of fun, but nevertheless figural! And we'll be returning to gels before this year's Toy Fair 2020 season is over, whether I get it done next week or drag it out 'till Christmas!

DUK is for "APION" Amfibies Jeep!

This is an odd one; sometimes I just don't understand how the hobby works. What we have here is a never seen before, may never see again, South African toy of a military vehicle in 'around' a 54/60mm compatible scale, yet having shot it at length back in the early spring, [not] watched them not-sell on evilBay, watched them not sell at the Plastic Warrior show and bought an orphan - at the end of the show, I wonder how that happened?

Most 'large-scale' collectors, or at least the more generic or ephemeral collectors, the completist or competitive collectors or the curious (which is all bar the subject-specific collectors, i.e. most of them) would happily have a bright red Tudor Rose Land-Rover or bright yellow Pyro or Banner 'dimestore' Jeep in their collections, yet no one wanted these?

Yet, I also half-understand, as despite sliding the first image between the two introductory paragraphs, and sticking another above this continuation of my opening point, I am going to struggle to find enough blurb for the post, as there's hardly anything to say about them, but having taken a load of images when I first saw them and some more of my example (red one) I now have five collages to write up! Now obviously, the next paragraph can be all about the Box . . .

Which comes in at least two colour-ways, both are three-colour processes, but different colours, litho'd, not dot-matrix, so green/orange are reproduced by overlaying. Each box also has two panels and one end with the the written details in Afrikans and the other three faces in English . . . like the contemporaneous stamps!

This leaves maker and the vehicle to describe; but you've already seen it as I spread the images through the text! It's an amphibious Jeep in leery colours, reasonably accurate for an infant toy, and in a phenolic resin which is starting to distort - in the case of the yellow; particularly so. Opposite colours are placed as 'small parts'; red on the yellow vehicle and vise-versa.

Final image leaves us with the maker . . . African Plastic Industries (Pty) Limited trading as Apion and the price . . . three shillings and ninep'nce, for something this large, which has probably been sent half-way round the world on a tramp steamer, places them in the nineteen-fifties I suspect, while there's nothing on Google!

Phew! Got there, can't understand why no one wanted them, can half-understand why they generated so little interest, but . . . humans are weird! Still they join the Haarlem and SA marked SAE in the collection, what next from that part of the world?

Q is for Question Time - Car & Boat

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on bar-b-queing/hunting/exploring apparent-Africans, and in part to illustrate the type of set I think they might belong to; there's this:

The bag is crinkly cellophane and probably is the original carrier, however it has no sign of staples (so no header card) nor tape (so always open, but folded closed, so should probably have had a box, but the shape of the bag seems to preclude the kind of long, thin, box we saw with the Laurie-branded set here.

Therefore I suspect maybe a larger box with some other bags; a bag of trees or shrubs, a tent, camping accessories or another vehicle and the whole in a larger, flatter box, a bit like this circus set (which also has a mix of 'styrene and 'ethylene)? It's that sort of thing I was wondering about for yesterday's figures; a Jeep or Land Rover, trees, some animals to interact with the spearman, maybe a white hunter or explorer, a cage . . . ? It's all conjecture!

An oddity with this set is that while all the components of the car and trailer, along with the two figures are 100% soft polyethylene, fully dismantle'able or clip-together, the boat is 100% polystyrene and glued together - possibly to ensure it floats, by sealing the join between the deck and hull?

Like the car/caravan linked to above, there is a lot of play value in this (whether or not is was part of a larger set), but it is the next level down as far as production-budget/quality (and aimed-for retail price-bracket?) is concerned and may have been an unbranded generic sold at beach-side kiosks, where it would have been pushing-out the domestic products of Kleeware, Poplar, Rafael Lipkin, Thomas and Tudor Rose, et al as the 1960's slid into the 1970's

The figures; there are some similarities with yesterday's African chaps, but the differences are stronger, with the pin-marks in the diving figures base, the paint carried round the figures and a more opaque plastic, they are also 50mm though, and there was a lot of this stuff around, and more remain to be ID'd . . . a brand or even just a set title for this would be a start!

Further to and rather rendering the above superfluous; Peter Evans just emailed me on yesterday's Africans . .

". . . Those native figures are from a Safari set made in Hong Kong. Sold in Woolworth's in the 1960s

There are two more natives, one carrying a case on his head - case was a separate piece and a native holding a bow.

There were two white hunters. Both wearing shorts and based on the Swoppet cowboy prisoner body and the firing rifle body.

As far as I can remember it was a carded set with about four copies of Britains Lion, Panther, Gorilla and chimp

No idea who the brand was but definitely Hong Kong . . . Peter"

Cheers Peter - So a carded set!

While looking at the circus set just now, fetching the link, the bag's are almost identical, so probably an unbranded 'generic' boxed set for the above 'Beach Bums'!

S is for Six of the Best

The bulk of the show plunder has been sorted and put away, and while some of it will be seen again - in closer detail - soon, some of it may not be seen again for years! While I was sorting it I photographed those things that perticularly cought my eye or imagination, later we'll look at a 'top five' figures, these both figural or not are the also-rans, or the other half of a top ten plus consolation!

I bought this early British bath toy from Steve Vickers (who I think trades under the same name on eBay), like divers or parachutists, these small submarines are becoming a 'side-bar' collection of their own, and as we've recently had a quick round-up/recap on them; if I don't show it now it might be ages before it's seen again.

Totally unmarked and with a semi-transparent upper hull/deck/conning-tower in what can only be called cherryaide-red, lower hull in a charcoal grey-brown and photographed on a mirror to take advantage of the flat bottom; I once saw the Indian Ocean - as far as the horizon - this still, flat and mirror-like.

Adrian Little had put this aside for me, it's about N-Gauge compatible (maybe a little bigger - 1:100th?), and is marked nicely 'Lemco No. ML 75', all wheels go round and I think Adrien thought it was Scandinavian (where there is a Lemeco copying larger die-casts), or might be? I can't find anything about a Lemco or a Lem Co., so it may be a tool-engravers typo? But isn't it a dinky little thing?

A bit of a cheat as three of them are extant (in the collection) from one or two years ago!

As I started saying on Tuesday, Mike Harding had sold me three, he thought last year, I think two years ago? Anyway, I was chatting with him toward the end of the show and saw he had some more, "You have some more Gem skateboarders!" I said, because there's nothing like stating the obvious! "Yes..." he said, "...you had a couple last year didn't you?" . . . "Three, I had three but wasn't it two years ago?..." I replied - yes; this anecdote is in danger of becoming wheels within wheels and disappearing up its own fundament!

"...But you've got new colours?" I continued, and began wracking my brains to remember which colours I already had, luckily I'd only looked at them a few weeks earlier when I had the box out for something else (footballers and over-moulding posts - proper discovery!), and I knew there were only two of the 'flame' colours and couldn't picture the yellow as clearly - in my mind - as the green so I took a punt on already having red, orange and green and I knew whichever 'flames' I had were in rainbow-sequence and yellow would lead to green which I knew couldn't be the case - Heay, this is how Aspergics work!

Which all turned out to be good guesstimation as he had the red, orange and green again, but I took the blue and yellow . . . phew! Then, when I got home and started sorting through the plunder;  I found Trevor Rudkin's bag had a very nice subdued fawn-coloured one which is an unusual polymer colour for either Gem or Culpitt - I think, the whole leading to the above squadron-in-line images!

This was in a little tub of stuff from Adrian I think, and what interests me about it is that it looks a lot like those US-Emenee-Transogram/UK-whoever Fairy Tale sets we looked at here.

Now having tentatively suggested there's still one set to be found (which should contain Jack & Jill), the 'rule' with those sets was 5/6 figures and an accessory or two. Jack and Jill are two, with bucket and a well; you still only have four items, could he be a play-value, make-weight from the missing set/s?

I'm not suggesting he is, his sculpting is poorer in my opinion, but he is the same 20mm lump of PVC and something went in the 8th set - if it existed . . . actually I AM suggesting it, I'm just not committing. Nice addition to the collection anyway!

We've looked at this before, but in green, it's the Raphael Lipkin ConquerorTank, but in red. I've never seen one in red before and presume it must be a 'Ruskie'-red one from a two-sides play-set of some kind, maybe Pippin Toys?

The green ones turn-up more often and I'm hoping to find an otherwise 'clean' one going dirt-cheap with a broken barrel so I can cannibalize the running-gear, which - missing on this example - led to it's also being very reasonably priced!

Presumably from a large vessel toy's deck, I'm tempted to remove the locating/mounting spigot, but I know that if I do I'll immediately see the parent toy on evilBay, missing it's deck-gun, going for a song, but equally; if I don't remove it, I'll probably never find the originator model! I have some large, deep plastic washers somewhere, if it needs displaying in can sit in one of them!

What I like about it is the throwback to early US pod-foot figures of the Barklay/Manoil type, where a guy (often smaller than his set-mates) is posed operating some huge artillery piece all by himself. I think It's an anti-Dalek ray-gun! Does anyone know offhand where it's from?

All good 'Stuff'!

M is for Minestrone of Marine Marvels

A post which has slowly grown through contribution (Mr. Berke - thank you), accident and delayed deliberate action!

Brian sent this in reply/follow-up to the previous post on the subject (itself a minestrone of things gathered together on a theme) back in May 2016, which he also contributed to and it was sat in his folder for a while, not because I couldn't have posted it at the time, as a follow-up, but because I wanted to shoot the stuff in the attic to go with it.

It shows his collection of the 1990's Kellogg's re-issue (really a re-hash?) of earlier baking-soda powered bath toys, the submarine being based on the old 1960's one, the PT-Boat, all new. The boat in the same red as the divers (also looked at here) is not so common; usually it comes in the apple-green.

I already had the upper image left over from some other photo-shoot, possibly the multi-parter on vessels years ago? Anyway, they were put together and given their own folder, where they sat for a year and a half! The lower shot was finally taken the other day.

Mine are all in the green, the PT-Boat being called BarnaBee's Boat (is he a cereal character?), with; to the left of the upper shot, some of the older versions with their four periscopes/aerials.

The larger sliver/gunmetal one is from an unknown (to me) source, probably also cereal and interestingly has the same mechanism as the boat, with the exhaust gasses (produced by the baking-soda mixing with water) being channelled out of the scoop at the back to provide forward momentum.

Then this turned-up in a bag of mixed bits from Adrian the other-week, and I was so busy looking at some of the other things in the bag, at the show, I didn't notice it until I got home! It's a whale (obviously) with the same suck/blow action as the larger submarines and divers we looked at in those earlier posts.

A whale! It's a whale! I've never seen one before, so I'm quite excited by it - I'm easily excited!

So that called for a new 'family photo' comparison-shot, with the two larger (but smaller of the larger-) submarines also visited before here at Small Scale World. The grey/gold submarine also being a suck-blow type, the bottom one being a baking-soda one - I think; the bottom piece seems wedged-on and I don't want to force it.

In the meantime, and a while ago now; Brian had sent me these to chivy the post along, it's the re-issue for Hawkin's Bazaar (et al) of the old cereal diver, who accompanied the submarine, although as we saw last time they were also sold as stand-alone 'pocket-money' novelties - as were the submarines.

From the neutral language and artwork on the card it looks like they re-issued the Submarine as well?

When I call them suck-and-blow toys, we were either doing it wrong as kids (as I always wondered at the legality of a toy which resulted in regular mouthfuls of bathwater) or they have changed the design slightly, as the instructions seem to suggest they sink themselves and you blow them back to the surface? Maybe we were impatiently accelerating the Dive! Dive! Dive! But mouthfuls of soapy water were a feature of my younger days.

Seen in the links above and here for completion; the previous, and the fact that I'd finally got them out of the attic, meant I took this just for the hell of it. The Tobar is a copy of the old British moulding on the right, as pointed out before - the Hong Kong clone has been updated to a more modern helmet with single-piece window-glass.