F is for Follow-up - Civilian Plunder Post

A few things related to some of the stuff in the previous post, and as I'm going through the files and folders looking for this supporting material, I realise there are similar bits for the odd recent purchase at the recent Sandown, so I think we'll see more of these, as I try to tell the story AND clear the stuff out of Picasa! Lucky police, construction workers and Thomas / Poplar today!

 

A couple of generic 'VEB's from the former East Germany, behind, in this old Vectis (I think?) image, but of note is the Poplar Plastics towed boat in the foreground, the woman driving the jeep seems to be the same blue rubber as the gentlemen we saw . . . Yesterday, now! Hence, my "possibly Thomas" for the similar bloke in that post, although as Thomas you'd expect them both to be in that flesh-pink vinyl-polymer.

 

A Blue Box blister-card, and note the lack of a wheelbarrow, apparently replaced with a rock, which might be the two-sided copy of the Marx Miniature Masterpiece rock? So, even damaged, they are hard to find, and with other damaged bits in the stash, hopefully, I'll cobble a good one together?

 

This generic set is interesting, as it has second generation copies of the Dinky / Blue Box guys (upper two), along with a pair of Marx copies from the recently mentioned Power Mite series of battery-operated trucks, Hong Kong had no favourites when it came to piracy, and they left few stones unturned!

 

While this later set from Jaru, has the polyethylene third-or-more generation knock-offs in bright colours, here pink and red, supporting similar multiply-copied versions of early-number Matchbox 1-75 series vehicles, although, when they were originally produced in the UK, as die-casts, I think the range might still - unofficially - have been '1-50' ?

 

An old shot of some of mine from 2012, being one of each pose, as far as I know they never got a wheelbarrow, despite getting the 'labourer' pose associated with it, I guess it was too complicated a moulding, for the 'bottom-feeder' pirates. He's looking pretty determined though, I think he's going to the stripey-tent to brew-up . . . "Cuppa'tea Lads?". 

 

I think I have yellow plastic ones, and possibly a pale purple, but it may be the same grey as the one from Chris, but the more, the merrier, to maybe get one of each, one day! And it's worth remembering, as we view these blobs, they were originally Charles C Stadden sculpts! 

 

Not the best shot, but it was downloaded years ago, when things were a bit simpler on the wibbly wobbly way! The Land Rover in the background is the normal Lucky thing, a probably Corgi copy in 1:423rd or so, but the figures have been modelled to match the larger-scale bike, at around 1:20?

P is for Peter's Perfect Post-Christmas Parcel! 1 of 2

Back at the start of January I got a suprise in the post, a donantion to the Blog from Peter Evans, roving-reporter for Plastic Warrior magazine and keeper of the knowlage! And we're going through it's contents in the next two posts!

The opening of these parcels, whoever from, is always the best-bit, as everything is fresh and unknown, even if it's grubby and duplicate, if you know what I mean, and it's all in a jumble, prior to any sorting, so you spot stuff among stuff, under stuff, next to stuff!

 

Three more of the smaller cake-decoration footballers, I've been looking out for them, but so far I haven't seen a retail set, and both Hobbycraft and my Clapham Junction haunt still stock the larger ones! The other guy is a rubber/PVC chap we have seen before, but possibly not attributed and without the base, he's been ID'd but is another of those I keep forgetting the maker of, similar figures are found on springs as more generic 'table football' games.

 

A couple of cave men, we've looked at similar, we may have looked at these and there is a folder of sets from evilBay and sucklike waiting for the great sorting out session! While the Hong Kong version of Cavendish's policeman will be a useful addition, as they are always different when you find one, different pain usually, but sometimes different plastic.

 

Three khaki infantry (Britains and Lone Star - actually a Para') and that pesky naval-gunner/MTB crew-looking chap again, really starting to bug me now, I now have about four here, and several in storage, so whatever toy he came with, must have been quite common, but what the hell was it?

 

China-farmer, as found in the Padgett Brothers (A-Z) sets, and others, a Britains lamb and Barrett & Sons (B&S) calf, along with a larger calf, which may be modern or a clean earlier example, unknown to me.

 

Nice polyethylene Hong Kong swoppet Confederate who's stolen a Unionists hat, he'll need ID'ing against the folder of such things, and one of the PVC Toyway Indians sans plug-in disc-base.

Love this! Semi-relief flat of Santa Claus and his sleigh, obviously meant to be laid on the icing, I managed to stand it up in a moulding detail on the lid of the scanner! Santa looks like one of the Elf on shelves!

 

Firefighter from a large carpet/garden/beach toy, and a bunch of the Lucky (et al) figures form the large-scale plastic copies of Western road vehicles, they will all need to be checked against the 'master collection' for variation, new base-marks etc.

 

The usual gaggle of seated figures and road-workers, the red chap on the right is a marked Buddy L figure, the left-hand one is a short shot, while the three in the front look modernish.

 

Two Hasbro Star Wars Command figures, I'll have to have a go at painting some up, one day! And a novelty 'Munch bunch' style, or actual, pencil-top, who will join all the others in another 'To Be Sorted' project, he's missing a hat or greenery frond, and there are many generations of sub-piracy!

Thanks to Peter for this pile of treats, more to come in the next post.

E is for Emergency . . . Empire or Emson?

A closer look at a couple of the sets in the packaging-post from the other day now, with a look at the Blue Box emergency set, and what I've suggested is the Lucky 'version', however in preparing the images, it became obvious that it's probably not Lucky, but E (for Empire? Or Emson, see past article on Thames Trader trucks!), the people who made some of those Tri-Ang Minic ship knock-off's.

The two sets side-by-side, ignoring the illustrative card coming off the front side of the Blue Box carton, you can see the two boxes are roughly the same height and depth, but the unbranded one (sold as Lucky but probably Emson) is wider for double the contents.

 

The Blue Box turntable ladder truck is a bit of fun with a fully traversing, elevating and extending, sectional ladder (a very delicate structure in polystyrene, I don't suppose many have survived outside the packaging!), but purely fictional on a Bedford RL chassis I think?

 

The ambulance, on the same chassis, has been (along with the figures) quite badly discoloured by sunlight (ultraviolet), and you can see that while the far side isn't so affected, the cab/chassis moulding is untouched.

This confirms my own theory much expanded-on in an interesting thread on plastic diseases, on the old HäT forum, long since deleted, when H adopted the 12-month cut-off! Basically, I believe all problems with old plastic are related to errors on the day they were formed, with incorrect temperatures, pressures or additive quantities resulting in hidden flaws with will come out later, I'm guessing the body and figures were probably overcooked in the tools, while the cab-chassis went through their birth without problems?

The other set is aping the 77xxx series from Blue Box, with a window in front of each element, and similar packaging dimensions, and confirms the link between the round-based mechanics and the oblong-based firefighters, previously made here at Small Scale World.

I thought the artwork was rather atmospheric!

 

I don't know my cars well enough to call either of these, are they US vehicles, with that soft spongy suspension which makes kids car-sick, or are we looking at a Ford Zephyr or Zodiac for one of them? Corgi did an Oldsmobile staff-car, could one of these be a clone of that?

 

We've seen the figures before, they are copies of the Blue Box copies of the Dinky figures, but the sticker on the blue Police-car's door is clearly the branding of the 'E for Empire' toys, probably, actually Emson, seen on other toys of this type, which is not to say Lucky aren't in there somewhere, there was a lot of cross pollination between all those cheapo-platic makers, and having discovered that Blue Box (and Redbox) are only brands of Tai Sang, there's no reason to discard previous theories without empirical evidence, so I'll tag all three (Lucky Toys, Empire Made, Emson) until we know more!

 

The Thames Trader water tank (? Or tool-lorry?) is similar in lines to the real-life T55, but that was more streamlined, while the Dennis looks like a bit of a hybrid between a 1971 D600 (Mk 2) and the earlier F101. As different brigades would have replaced different numbers/types of appliances at different times, there would have been a gradual evolution in outline and fittings, as well as different decorations (some have more chrome), so it's a fair representation of a generic Dennis!

It was machines like this which attended our house, and saved it, back in the 1970's, when the heath caught fire (thoughts for the people of Maui, Greece, Portugal, Canada et al.) and the tar on the flat roof started steaming! The firemen gave my brother and I regular top-ups for our watering cans, so we could help 'damp-down'! We found tons of cooked Adder's eggs - sadface, and ended-up looking like a couple of Victorian chimney sweeps!

 

Being a local manufacturer, my childhood memories are filled with Dennis fire engines (and County tractors) being test-driven or 'shaken-down' around the area, and they often went through Fleet, sometimes as plain chassis, with the drivers' using motorcycle helmets and four-point, racing seatbelts, perched - as they were - on a temporary seat over the bare engine! I seem to recall the seats were held-on with a literal network of bungy-cords, but it was probably coloured rope!

 

While it is also similar to the Bedford RL 'Green Goddess' wagons of the Auxiliary [Army] Fire Service (AFS), and of the fire-strikes fame! All gone now, along with everything else in the cupboards - Thanks Tory voters, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing, least of all 'society'.

In both sets, the figures are slightly over-scaled at 28/30mm, but all the vehicles could carry-off service in 1:76/72nd scale armies or on HO or OO-gauge layouts, or maybe not the two cars; just the lorries/trucks?

B is for Blue Boxes . . . Blisters & Bags!

While I was emptying the house I grabbed the opportunity, last year, to put a large board (an old home-pool table without legs, Mum used for her puzzles) on the sofa, and throw a bedspread over it, to make a largish 'studio' to shoot the Blue Box packaging, and this; not so much a comprehensive post; more of an 'overview', is the result!

Going back to the early days of Blue Box, or even pre-Blue Box - the pink box with the Crescent gun copy is an unmarked generic and can therefore be considered a Tai Sang toy rather than a Blue Box toy, contracted-out to a western buyer - are these mostly simple closed boxes.

 

Fold-&-tuck lids, lift-off upper sleeve lids and some with perforated lines to allow for fold back display examples on counter-tops or in shop-windows or display cabinets. The farm set is probably a little later (1970's) than the others, which are mostly 1960's, the gun may well be a 1950's item.

The window era brings us the 'decker' concept, where pricing within a larger display is denoted by the number of levels (or the width of the tray/plinth) of each set, this is all 1960-70's stuff and the basic unit is a single-decker!

Here you can see on the left two versions of the smallest set, card base-insert is identical with the same figures glued-in to the same spots. One with a two-sided window on an otherwise normal box with fold and tuck ends, the other an 'ultra modern' (at the time) variation (it's still how posh gift chocky-things, soaps, small electrical gadgets and the like are packed at Christmastime today) with an all-over folded plastic case, stapled to the plinth-base.

Similar packaging on the larg construction set, while the smaller one has a stand-up card extension for more graphical information, and the larger US army set (bottom right) is about as deep as any of these sets got, so you can see there's no room for the gun, which you-know-who was falsely passing-off as Blue Box a few years ago . . . well I think he still is; they never corrected or deleted any of their nonsense!

So then we add a deck, and get double-deckers, not the buses, not the chocolate-bars! The extended display area of the cards is off the front face on the two small scale sets, while the larger scale US troops - with the same small scale vehicles and equipment - get multiple windows, one highlighting each element.

 

The smaller set on the far right will be returned to but note how ultraviolet (sunlight) has completely discoloured the back body of the truck, both medics and the stretcher-patient, but has left the cab/chassis snow-white. It's all in the batch of polymer, I've said it before, and I'll say it again!

Triple-deckers! The trays seem to be the same trays that were in the single-decked sets above, and while you get green (friendly?) OR grey (enemy?), the contents are otherwise pretty random, with truck, tank and gun trays in the grey set and truck, truck and gun in the green, and with random loads/bodies on the trucks, there may have been some more, and some less disappointing sets in this line!

If you were a poor kid on a sink-estate, and you unwrapped one of these at Christmas, you would have been more genuinely joyful, than some rich-kid getting his cabinet of Meccano or whatever.

 

And I know that; we can't complain, we had a pretty privileged, middle-class childhood, but money was tight, and we had friends who got pillowcases, not stockings at the ends of their beds, on Christmas mornings, but their toys were all broken and unloved stuffed into all these drawers, we looked after ours . . . not the packaging mind!

But yeah, the mighty four-decker! The one on the right (like a fair few of these) is near-mint from James Opie's collection, the one on the left is a mess, but it's mostly there, I have seen a few over the years, where everything is still tied-n with its elastic bands (smaller items were glued), and it's just in need of sorting/ordering properly (even the teeny helicopter), and the figures returning - they are with all the loose ones. Scale in both sets, like most above, is all over the place!

Modernity arrives in the guise of vac-formed blister packaging, earlier sets stapled to their backing cards, later sets heat-welded to them, with hanger holes sometimes present for the true 'rack' toy! Julius Caesar still has his chad intactum, as the actress said to the bishop!

The 'Battleground' set (also hanging-on to its chad) is another Tai Sang generic (possibly for FW Woolworths, it has the look of a Woolworths cheapie?), and probably pre-dates the supply of the hard-plastic brown figures to Tri-Ang Battle Space, so people trying to call the figures 'Giant' when they were only a jobber are missing the point, they are Giant, in or with the packaging, otherwise they are Tai Sang/Blue Box.

We've seen these before I think, and they are oddities, with the one on the left for Woolbro, the one on the right more generic, again containing 'Blue Box' items, but as generics - Tai Sang.

 

Ledapak is also mentioned and may be another recipient (of the right-hand set), or the maker of the vac-forms, which include the crude Fort Apache frontage. The left-hand set also looks pricy for what it contains, and I wonder if they were experimental marketing? Both also came from James.

On the left here are some standard rack-toy bottle bags with header cards, in the case of three; the header having a long-tail to form the backing-card at the same time, in the case of the little set with 45mm US soldiers, the backing card is a seperate piece slipped behind the product.

 

On the right are some of the second-tier Hong Kong cloners, copying the already poor-quality Blue Box, with 2nd generation piracies! And they are there with one, two and tree decker's, blister cards, bottle bags and a closed box.

 

The only brand - on the right - is the Lucky Toys fire-set, they did a larger three-decker too, and (whispers) they are nicer sets than the Blue Box ones; much better build-quality! The camouflaged three-deck set should be the same colours as the pair of two-decks, but is sun-faded, contents/origin are the same. We looked at the Wild West set years ago - it's all on the Blue Box tag somewhere!

[image may be corrupted]

Finally, not Blue Box at all, but along with numerous ex-Marx tools, the Rado Industrial Co., trading as Ri-Toys seemed to inherit some Blue Box or Tai Sang mouldings, and certainly knocked-off others, so here are a few of their packaging types, taking us through the 1980's and into the 1990's with the central combat set.

And that's a pretty-good overview of forty-plus years of Hong Kong rack-toy output and the types of packaging at the lower level end of the market, if I say so myself!

 

Thanks to everyone who's ever saved me stuff, on this one, as I know James, Adrian and Trevor have given me Blue Box packaged sets over the years, John's helped me hunt them and bring them back from the far flung corners, Gareth let me photohraph his Marx/Sunshine version of the Wild West set for an earlier post . . . it's not that Blue Box are rare; they’re not, but there's a lot to track down as they were one of the biggest HK manufacturers for years and one of the first to own-brand, so there are tons of variations out there!

T is for Two - Mighty Antar's & Conquerors

We looked at both these back near the start of the blog and have revisited features of them once or twice I think, but the opportunity to do 'full line-ups' wasn't to be ignored, indeed; sorting and packing was held-up for a day while I struggled to find the Matchbox one, the others all lined up on the green-baize, with a gap ready!

From the rear/right; Raphael Lipkin/Pipin Toys (1:30^th'ish), Dinky (1:43^rd), Airfix (1:76^th), Budgie (damaged), Matchbox (painted, badly!), unknown - might be Scotia? The last being two at approximately 1:125^th 'box scale' and one 1:300^th 'micro-armour' scale.

Anomalies include the Lipkin load being an FV 214 Conqueror rather than the Centurion (from Mk.5/1 - FV 4011) everyone else went with, the Budgie having the later cab design of the Mk.III [not 'mighty'] Antar with narrower bonnet and Matchbox having a simple rendition of the Sankey 50-Ton Tank Transporter trailer along with the error of the name 'Thornycroft' as "Thorneycroft" moulded on the base of the tractor-unit.

The micro-armour one is a curates egg, seemingly based on a ballast-body variant (draw-bar trailers, for the use of) it nevertheless has an articulated, fifth-wheel, DAF style trailer like the others, and may be based on the RAF's lone C6T variant, but with added 'saddle' fuel-tanks? The fuel tanks being used as tool-bins on the Lipkin biggie!

The recent purchase of another Conqueror from [The] Lucky Toys meant that while the Lipkin was out . . . anti-clockwise from the top left; the red version I got at Richmond-call-me-Whitton (the . . . no . . . THE Plastic Warrior show!) a couple of three-years ago!

Then the standard green Lipkin one that came with the transporter (you may remember we looked at the individually boxed version a while ago and both colours were on the box-art), while bottom left is the new Lucky one - I believe a home paint in gray over the chromium-finish still visible on the tracks and running gear, and about the same as the Dinky Centurion at around 1:43^rd scale.

Then the two version of Tri-Ang Conqueror (approximately 1:72nd [00-guage compatible]), one from the Minic Motorway sets (I believe) as a tank, the other from the latterly Hornby-Triang 'Battle-Space' line of the wider railway range, as a well-wagon/flat-car load with twin rocket-launcher turret and finally two box-scale (1:76^th'ish or smaller?) Tri-Ang Minic's configured as imagi-nation armoured cars but with scaled-down Conqueror turrets!

Instead of an anomaly, we have a coincidence with these; they are all equipped with push-and-go motors! Actually - maybe the train one isn't; just free-rolling? I've sent them to the storage unit now!

For those who don't know the Conqueror; it was a post-war super-heavy tank in the same family as the Soviet Russian Joseph Stalin - JSIII and American M103. The Lipkin is probably the closest to the real thing, turret-wise, but none of them really do the actual vehicle full-justice.

The Lucky Toy's model (new to me when I saw it on evilBay for no money! What else is out there?) is clearly a copy of the Tri-Ang rendition, scaled-up and with an integrally-moulded, non-revolving turret and equally integral radio-aerial.

Base-mark; aft of the forward axle's push-and-go motor housing, which is very similar to the one fitted to TAT (see tags)'s Universal/Bren-carrier, and their dime-store lorry-copy. I don't know if there is any significance to the 'v' suffix of the model-number, or if it just means 'v-ehicle' range?

L is for Lucky Lorry

I shot this at Sandown Park on Adrian Little tables, but little did I know at the time how apposite it might prove to be only a few weeks later, as the measures to control Corvid-19 bring the haulage industry to its knees and their own 'professional body'; the Road Haulage Association, mutters darkly about  a possible need for nationalisation.

Because - if I'm remembering it correctly - BRS (as they were called when I was little) were the national, tax-payer owned transport organisation? I think they were being privatised while I was still little, as I don't remember any great 'sell-off' under Thatcher, so it was probably sold piecemeal to regional independents and gradually scaled-down to nothing?

Presumably some leftover from WWII, I think their wagons were blue but a little (a lot?) darker than the shade chosen by The Lucky Toys for this model, although I equally remember tarp's of exactly this colour among all the greasy, charcoal, navy and turd-brown ones!

Under the corona virus pandemic we have seen how both private railways and bus operators cannot survive, giving full-light to the lies of 41 years of outsourced, downsized, privatisation and sell-off. Lies which were identified as such at the time, but sadly, the Tories have had the newspaper editors on their side!

Quite apart from the selling-off of all our war-store depots and all our laboratories and the obvious failure of rail and bus networks, all the other obvious failings of our nation in this crisis can be laid at the feet of the Tories, and while 'New Blair' is hardly an innocent party, it is the people in charge - right now - who are responsible for that fact that while we (a developed, '1st World' country) have no face-masks to speak of, Turkey (regarded as a 2nd World developing nation) has a compulsory face-mask policy and enough face-marks to adhere to such a dictate?

A national haulier or the mechanism to create one at short notice is something we should have had, or had ready. That we had no such organisation, no national lab's, no face-masks, is all you need to know about the Thatcherite-Reganomic desire to protect the citizens they want to vote for them and their Trumpundbrwreakshit.

We were offered a part in a pan-European respirator procurement program last  the other week, and turned down the opportunity, now we're taking 200 off the Yanks . . . who need them just as badly? Capitalism has been failing us since before the crash of 2008, now democracy itself is failing.

Enough politics for now, although there will be more . . . it's my Blog!

Look! The treasure-chest from the Dinky Spectrum Maximum Security Car, cleverly copied to make a lorry load! And many thanks to Adrian Little for letting me shoot this.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Th above obviously written while I was off line, it's all here;

https://www.brs.co.uk/page/103/history

And I wouldn't recognize one of it went past the window as I type! They were ours and if they'd been retained, we'd have had them when we need them! Sweden (who own BRS!) haven't gone into lockdown, because they are a high-tax/high-welfare society with spare capacity in their health services, New Zealand have a low death rate because they moved sharpish and hard (instead of watching and waiting like Boris!), we aren't 'great' anymore, we're just breaking Britain, struggling with the dichotomy between true democracy and big business' interests.

B is for Bullshit and Bollocks! And Be . . . Like . . . Lik Be!

Do you remember back in 2017 when I found it necessary to put the diabolical-duo right on the LB thing (worth a read to contextualise this post)? It had come out of previous posts I had published on the range of Blue Box, Lucky and other copies of various Western sculpts within the oeuvre of Hong Kong civilian-vehicle/vehicle set's  production.

"We will have to disagree...."

But let's first go back to January of that year, both TJF (Stadinger - the Jabbering Fuck) and his sidekick are waxing lyrical about an IDL? No italics because it's not a real company! I don't think I corrected them at that time, they get so much wrong, so often, it's a bind to follow it all - Grand announcement/title block on 'Crescent Guardsmen' the other day and he showed us Zang's; then, irony of ironies, the other week he gets Jecsan (the same Jecsan he 'corrected' me on) wrong! He's not a "Legend", he's an idiot!

Irrespective of whatever they'd been saying, I had been preparing a set of articles which published over a few days in the March (of 2017) and culminated in a long post pulling all the loose-ends together, and in which I also proposed a theory on LB and Lucky being one and the same. Within three days they - the twat twins - were having their little pop at me or 'some people'.

Earlier in the same article TJF goes on to further 'educate' us with the following;

"One thing Erwin uncovered is that each figure not only has the name of IDL and Hong Kong..."

D'ya'see? he 'uncovered' it, sort of like a 'discovery' (they're good at those too!) but you have to really dig at it, by . . . err . . . turning the figure over and finding the same information previously published elsewhere (by your 'emies') has been left on the base - and then (ignoring fifteen years of hobby-accepted wisdom) misread it! Too funny, they're both too funny!

So we had the above-linked 'logo' post, to re-establish what had been common knowledge in the hobby for some fifteen or twenty years, except - obviously - where Mr Standinger and Mr Sell were concerned; they being happy to A) remain in ignorance and B) use that ignorance to try and score points in their silly war with me.

What I perhaps didn't address fully enough (I did say "The contention I referred to in the post linked to above, was the relationship I postulated to, as existing between LP [now LB] and The Lucky Toys, not the logo...") was the core of TJF's statement - that I was saying it meant Lucky Products. I wasn't and I hadn't, I'd said it was LB [not IDL].

In fact, I had gone out of my way to explain that it was a theory, that other people disagreed with me (in private correspondence) and had  reason to, given the lack of empirical evidence (to back up my theory), but nevertheless gave the circumstantial evidence that had led to my proselytising the theory.

Now . . . those of you who have been following events over the last ten months will know "that evidence (of any kind) 'against' or for a firmer, alternative narrative . . . " (as I put it at the time) has now turned up courtesy of Bill B and/or Alphadrome! But before we fire the salvo to sink my theory (which only remains a theory until proved or disproved!) forever, let's return to the latest from the fraudulent-frères over at shitestuff.

Erwin is now the world expert on, not only LB, but idiots who mistake it for IDL! Idiots like 2017's Erwin and his Jedi Master . . . that's Master Bates to you! "...confused and wrong labeled..."? Who? Who Erwin? Who was that man who confused and wrong-labeled it while trying to attack me . . . twice!!!!?

You really can't make it up. He is waxing lyrical spouting illiterately the very information I had to give him, as if he's known it for years! He then goes on to list the colors in the order they have appeared previously in other people's posts, sometimes as long ago as a decade!

But, being a phony and a fraud, he's only caught-up with where the hobby was on the subject a year ago; had he been paying more attention to his plagiarism he could have told us they were Lik Be . . . and probably, actually LB!

Which brings us back to my [now dead] theory and as to why there's more of my stuff in this post than is normally called-for when countering the shite issuing-forth from other_peoples_stuff_cos_im_a_dealer_not_a_collector.com

I was myself rather suspicious when Lik Be was magically slipped into a picture caption on another site last autumn, but subsequent work by Bill B, in the spring just gone, revealed the truth.

AND . . . could it be that after all these years . . .

. . . the LP is actually a poorly executed LB? I'm not calling-it . . . yet . . . too busy; I've got a bunch of tags to change and I'll be sticking with 'LP - Lik Be' for the moment . . . but - given the company's name -  it would make sense; Lik[-Be] Plastics or Lik Be. . . ooh! I think I've got a new theory! . . . 

Meanwhile the only 'legendary' thing over at shitestuff is how they can cover for their own mistakes with time and bullshit, while castigating others for theirs! 

...●==================◦●◦==================●...

A few weeks later; It is isn't it? I'll 'call it'; the more I look at it the more sure I am, new tag; 'LB (LP) - Lik Be', I think it's gotta'be, despite the poor artwork . . . there are worse Hong Kong logo's around, the next correction will be 'AJP''s wanna'be Blue Box sets - actually HP!*

You will also have noticed - if you followed the link, that the tagging has been done and to be fair, most posts still read OK as I was careful to keep the theory and the figures separate (really only the tag that was joined), but a few caveats will need to be added to the round-up post in the plastic-vehicle series and the 'LP' logo post, requiring links to this which can't be done until this posts; the vagiaries of Blogger, but it will all be updated by the weekend . . . I hope!

 

* 2025 - HP is for Holly Plastics Factory! So yes, two callings in one post, deffinately worth a 'Told You So'