F is for Fort Mavrick, without the E!

Heay! For years, they thought I was 'only' dyslexic! We had a group-project at Uni', where we had to renovate/rebuild/replace (the choice was rather ours, but front and back walls had to line up) a crescent, down near Elephant & Castle, and after weeks of individual project work, Design crit's, building crit's, more crit's and so on, we were required to place them altogether for the end-of-year exhibition, to which parents and the like were invited, which left us having to fill the empty corner with something, we whacked in a roundabout I think, and some formal beds, but I thought the kids who might live in our eclectic collection of . . . . dewllings (?) might like a play area, so this was born, literally overnight, as it wasn't part of the marking process!

The base was just a sheet of sandpaper! The whole thing got a bit warped in storage over the years, and realising I'll never be an architect now, it went on the fire back in 2016! I had no use for it, everything dies in the end, and at a scale of 1:50 it could really only be used by Space Marines, and they are too busy with Morlocks and Slitheens and suchlike, to find the time to relax on my wobbly rope & log bridge!

 

The two end pieces however, taken from old Hi-Fi equipment I think, or a TV set, are that compressed, die-cut hardboard I mentioned in the previous post. The one having bundles of wire directed through the holes, the other separating wires on the prongs . . . it must have been a TV!

 

There's a PC element to the construction, with no gates, easy access and the lookout accessible from the fort, but outside of it, although the leftie elements are balance by the fact that they could hurt themselves easy-enough, but - I like to think - in a non-terminal, character-building sort of way!

OOO is for N-Guage!

The Trebel-O-Lectric trains from Lone Star, or at least the unpowered version, which was just called Lone Star Locos, and a bit of a box-ticker as there's plenty more online, and I don't really collect it . . . much!

No, seriously, I had our childhood collection in a biscuit-tin for many years, but sold it in a moment of madness, when skint, and doing car-boot sales with a bunch of mates (you wanna' learn human nature, run a car boot stall for a few months, Jesus, we're scum!), back in the 1990's, anyway I got a good price from some chap who knew what he was looking at, at the Wavell School sale in North Camp, I think I asked 20-quid, and we settled on £16 or £17?

But a friend gave me his chuck-out set a while ago, also push-along, and very similar to my old set, but better paint! I had more track, more flat-trucks, the micro-vehicles for them and some Shell Oil tankers, along with a streamlined Mallard Loco, with I think was early Lesney (?), it wouldn't run, just sort of bumped-along the sleepers, but it looked stunning parked-up in the sidings!

In fact, I think there was a smaller Matchbox 1-75 loco, which Mum managed to get Lone Star wheels in? We also had the footbridge ('we' shared everything at that age), of which there is one in this lot, but it's missing a pillar, so I didn't shoot it, and we had a little die-cast level crossing.

 

I will look out for some of the missing bits!

 

Sidings

 

Vinyl cottage from the Gulliver County range

 

 

US style

 

 

UK style, but very-much a European-looking locomotive with those red wheels!

 

 

My favourite as a kid!

 

 

Junction box

 

The electrified version had dedicated left and right crossovers, but in the push and go range it was a single universal job! The lights had 'jewelled' red and green 'lights', replacements for which could be purchased from the gemology shop in Chobham, Martians allowing!

 

As a British Rail liveried locomotive it's considered a Deltic, but really it's a North American design, a market Lone Star were keen to tap, Deltic's were reversible with a cab at both ends.

T is for Two - Childhood Survivors

In all the sorting of the last two-and-a-half-years, I found two fascinating pieces of childhood ephemera, from or related to Palitoy/Action Man, which I thought I'd chuck up here under the nostalgia heading . . . 

 

I can actually remember when the parcel eventually arrived, a while later (probably the 'winter of discontent'? So 1973/74'ish?), as it had about six or eight hands, two feet and ankle assemblies and the elasticated-loop with chromed-hook for mending the waist of my older painted-head figure which had come from a Church-fete.

Then we had two grippy-hands men with flocked-hair, one each, and they needed new hands as the fingers were starting to crack-off from the inside! Which left some spare! But we had got older in the meantime and took greater care of them, so I don't think we ever even used the other hands, or one of the feet and matey from Modeller's Loft (Alan Hall?) bought them from me in the 1990's!

 

Bugger-me if I haven't got enough for a guard dog, or a sentry box! I think it was supposed to have been sent off for the sentry box, we'd got the guard dog a few years earlier, he came with a ridiculously gold-anodised chain which would have looked better on a Mr. T doll!

I don't know why it never got sent, but I suspect it was 1980, and the whole divorce, house-move (to here) and teenager thing all came together after a few months in a caravan or two . . . I don't remember the Action Men ('Action Mans'?) ever coming-out at this house?

Funny how I can remember the name of my brother's figure, but I can't remember the names of either of mine or the guard dog, which definitely had one? Painted-head might have been Douglas, thinking about it!

S is for Seen Elsewhere - Torgano Alpini

Bit of a box-ticker this one, I collected an incomplete set of Torgano alpine troops or 'Alpini' a while back, and as the weather was good, I took them outside and shot them in the garden, these shots were the result, and I've shown them elsewhere, so here to tick the box!

54mm semi-flat, or demi-ronde; do you use French for Italian figures? Five of six figures I think, the missing one being a kneeling machine-gunner and the weakest of the sculpts as far as realism is concerned!

The plaque is one of two from our childhood, the other is a squirrel I think, or a badger; I can't remember? But they were obviously bought at a craft fair or some holiday destination as keepsakes, and we had one each hung on the bedroom wall at the ends of our beds - we shared a bedroom until I was sixteen!

Hand-carved sandstone, it originally had a knotted leather bootlace to hang it, but when I found them last year, they are perished brittle with age. Anyone know where they came from? They may have come back from America in '69?

B is for Building Brick Blocks . . . I Bloody Loved 'Em!

We all had them, my earliest toy memories are of them, up until about 6 or 7-years of age (when playing 'army' or Cowboys & Indians outside and Lego or Meccano indoors began to take over), these were the toys I played with most; the collection of slowly disappearing bricks which were kept in an old draw-string topped sack or gym-bag.

When I cleared the garage after the leak was fixed, I found a still soggy-bottomed and much the worst for wear cardboard box, that turned out to be our old bricks which Mum had kept; nostalgia, see!

They must have reminded her of our childhood, as much as they did me when I found them - you may remember I also found the old family cake-decorations in the garage a little earlier and Blogged them at the time. Anyway I bagged them, as I saved them from their puddle of nastiness and left them, open, in the greenhouse to dry-out.

A few weeks later I was having the board-game photo-shoot on the lawn and shot them too, the late, great and still missed Girly-Girl thought she would help, first by sitting on them and then by conducting an initial inspection!

I have now bonded with her son - Boysey-Boy, naturally! Actually Katie and Cassius. Basically, I feed him and he fucks-off for hours at a time and comes back with fighty-bitey marks, wanting more food! He recently nearly died from a nasty wound and cost me 1300-quid in vet's bills! It's like American human-healthcare; going to the vet's these days!

And he's been 'done', that's what I don't get, even the vet said his face looked 'intact'; apparently he has choppy-whiskers? After 14-days of confined to house with a cone-of-shame, he went straight back out and got a claw-mark in his shaved-patch, millimeters from his just healed stitches!

Anyway, back to bricks; this is what had survived the 55-odd years since they started accruing, a mixed bunch, here, on the lower left, they have been separated into thematic piles which were then washed - lower right-hand image. You can also see - top left - the little green man from our racing car, already Blogged, who was another strong childhood memory.

If I was the sort of toy collector who wanted to monetise with several websites, a Twitspace, Insta', a Facebook group, Vlogging site and the odd TV appearance (and some do, very successfully) I could - of course - go to a large toy store and buy modern products which are either exactly the same, or so similar as to make no difference, prepare backgrounds, use lights &etc.; to produce something far more polished as an overview of 'Building Bricks' But this is meant to be a vintage Blog, and for reasons of pure nostalgia I'd rather get a Blog post out of this childhood detritus!

While he was Commandant of Brecon, Dad rebuilt a Welsh stone cottage; Tai Hirion, from the ground up, in his spare time, and any useful off-cuts would be added to the brick-bag, and these are what are left after those many years. I suspect the arch and half-moon were more . . . 'custom' pieces!

They, being untreated, had survived the damp worst of all and many went to the compost as shoddy (dry rot) during the recovery phase, but there were enough left for an Airfix 6x6 to take some supplies up to! I imagine an Italian village being liberated, circa 1944!

The truck-load is what's left of one of those 'tap and something' (?) sets, which came with a baize-covered, wood-framed, cork sheet, a hammer, an assortment of coloured wood shapes and lots of little brass nails? They were sort of next thing-up from Fuzzy felt, which we never had, but friends did and I loved that too! There's also half a wooden version of the Christmas Cracker pyramid puzzle toys, we seen before here.

Peg-leg Pete (Kipp brothers?) is defending my favorites of these square blocks, real 'early learning' stuff, they often used (and still do) to come in little wheeled trucks or trolleys, although I don't think his actually did. They have machined alphabet letters on two sides, nicely finished in gloss paint, two numerals branded-in on the other two sides of that 'equator' line, with animals on the bottom, also hot-metal branded, while the top is a blank face.

It meant you could do '3 X DUCKS ڲڲڲ' if that makes sense within the constraints of ASCII code limits! And with about 40 bricks, there were plenty of letters, numbers and pictures. I can find a similar set from Playskool from 1978, but these were pre-1968!

And they were early examples of mechanical 'computer' aided manufacture (CAM), in that a cam-bar with bends, peaks and troughs was followed by a 'pointer' roller, which used a slaved pantograph to transfer the coded information of the contours to a milling-head on a wood-lathe or router, which milled out whichever letter that bar was the 'former' for, the whole process automated, a bit like the holes in the punched cards of self-playing pianos or the pins in the drum of a music-box.

The Hing Fat mob are hiding behind a barrier of blocks I was never that keen on, even as an infant, because (Asperger's!) my visio-spatial sensibilities couldn't get themselves round the fact that the gold-foil letters stamped into the face of the bricks were A) not fucking straight, or centered! And B) faded as they rubbed-off (that's an E on the end) with play! They may have been Hong Kong knock-offs?

The Airfix Guards are establishing the size variation of otherwise similar bricks from different sets.

"X marks the spot"

"There isn't an X though?"

I hate them so much I shot them twice? Another thing which annoyed me about them was that four of the edges were rounded off with ogee profiles, but the other eight weren't, so you had to be careful placing them if you had a form of ADHD which wouldn't be diagnosed for another forty-odd years  . . . and which I don't really believe in anyway; we're all on the 'spectrum' somewhere!

The plastics; they haven't survived at all well, there were several cup towers, which have totally vanished, bar the powder-blue one, while most of Mr. Hilary Page's Pyramid Rings (the other two are 52 and 53) have also gone for a Burton's and not come back! I think the red one is a storage/anti-corrosion cap off the terminal of a Morris Traveller's battery!

While the blow-moulded blocks (pretty-sure these were Blue Box, not because my memory is that good, but I think I've seen them on evilBay) were awful, they crushed easily, the corners could be paper-thin, and I mean cigarette or bible-paper thin! And dogs, cats and young me, or my brother, could chew holes in them!

The other (yellow) item in the pile of rubble being skirted by a contemporaneous Airfix Jeep is the base of a Playcraft railway's road-sign or street-light. The rest of that childhood set are still around, but in storage and I will Blog them, before they go on feeBay - at some point in the future.

I did know (do know, but can't find the resource) who made the little railway, I've a picture of one on the dongles somewhere I think, but surfice to say it came with three ore-hoppers like this one and a little locomotive, a real infant's carpet toy! They were joined with simple chrome-plated hooks-and-eyes, long since rusted to buggery.

Below is one of the things I loved about the sets in the final image below, the way they all nested together in their boxes, trolleys or little lorry/truck to make-up complete layers.

Another comparison, with the Berserker who hasn't been pulling his weight much recently! The church spire was part of a larger modular set, which was probably German, and the orange side bit pivots down to be a wall or ramp? There were various holes in the larger elements, with smaller elements having a matching dowel glued-in, and they all went together in various configurations, the roof is also removable.

These were my favorites of all, we had two or three sets or part sets (we used to get a lot of our toys at the church-fêtes and jumble-sales, so they weren't always complete or 'with packaging'!

And while they all followed  a vague set of 'industry standard' rules, regarding colour and/or shape, they didn’t always match exactly in diameter or length, so you had to be careful pairing them up to build things straight or level!

Glossy painted wood, smaller unit size than most of the above, and there were usually pillars in one or two sizes, acute and equilateral 'roof' pieces, longer beams and shallower half-depth plates, the arch 'bridges' and the half-circles or rounded-corners which went inside them for packing - I loved them, it was all about the colours!

The beams were multiples of the cubes (which matched the rounded corners), they were so bloody tangible, they could keep you playing for a whole rainy-afternoon! I remember one of our friends had a set with different colours and his rounded pieces were apple-green instead of the indigo of ours; I was so jealous!

Most of the wood in the above article started the first fire of autumn 2020, as kindling, it was sad, but nothing last forever and the water damage was too great to keep them hanging about. Little did I know that within three months Girly-Girl and Mum would have gone too.

A bit maudlin, I know; but with all the Monarchy stuff going-on in the background right now, and the inordinate amounts of death in the last three years, I think we are all a tad contemplative these days? And it's the 11th of September today, bloody month needs to be taken out of the calendar and replaced with a happier one  . . . and Autumn is normally my favorite time of year!

N is for Nostalgia Hit "Yeah! Hit it!"

There will - over the next few years - be more general nostalgia here at Small Scale World, as I'm finding all manner of stuff both in my late Mother's estate and in the combining of the stuff here and the stuff in the garage (which was in storage), and one of the first things to turn-up has been this old toffee hammer!

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the patented [not], not sharp, Sharp's Toffee toffee-thwacker!

I saw another one online the other day, but can't remember the branding now; it may have been Blue Bird, or some Australian brand on Worthpoint? Strangely the commonest in junk shops seems to be the Walker's hammer, not the crisp-people (chips to heathens!) but another Walker's altogether I think!

They are not rare, indeed you can still get them on Amazon, but it's nice when an old friend turns-up, and why don't you seem to see sheets of hard toffee anymore? Did you have a toffee hammer, what branding did it carry?