Shite in Miniature II

[Datsuncog]

Bingo bango, it's another decent showing of new stuff this morning, in amongst the bar tat:

Look closer, my eager children...

Some Lesneys in - mostly repaints, I'm afraid. £3 each sought.

The pinkish Corgi Corvette Stingray is also a repaint (possibly using nail polish - it's not brilliant). Lesney Bedford Transporter is fairly clean and original, though.

Up top: some DeAgostini Russki GAZ models, including an Aeroflot-liveried Volga estate (widely available everywhere, to be fair - I snaffled mine from Poundland) along with various Atlas Touring Car collection tat. Fiver each.

Down below... oh, hello.

Right at the back we have a Corgi MG Maestro in red - the box is ruined, and there's a tiny bit of battery corrosion to the base plus a small chip in the back bumper, but it's eminently displayable and seriously tempted me for a tenner.

Ultimately, I decided since that I'd previously owned one and sold it, there was no point buying another. But if anyone here fancies it, I'll nip over at 12...

The Vanguards Stobart Transit and Allegro rally car are priced at £5 (also the Batmobile thing); the 'Hidden Treasures' Marina and Corgi Escort van are priced at £10.

Most of the cars out front seem to be between £3 and £5 - some Corgi Bond stuff, and Hongwell/Cararama peelermobiles.

Also some 70s Matchbox Speedkings: a Mercedes C111 concept, and a Shovel Nose (which, strangely, seems to be the same as the smaller 1-75 Rolamatics toy of the same era, but which was named Clipper).

The pewter castings of the MG and Morris Cowley were very nicely done, though had no maker's name on them.

50p tat box had nothing new this week. 

Another 50p box has appeared alongside, though...

Anyone remember Tiger comic? 1971 - 1973 issues in here.

 

So I didn't buy anything for myself this week (shock, horror etc), though another collectables stall over at the far side of the market had these...

While the era is right, the price really isn't... I'm not sure £2 for a sloppily repainted Superfast with bent axles is really reflective of the going rate.

You'll note that the most expensive item is a battered Days Gone truck with a missing roof, for £3... despite the fact another fella opposite had the same model, as new and in its box, for £3.99.

Gotta love an optimist.

 

So! That's it for today's tat round-up... and as ever, if you discern your pickle being tickled, give me a shout and I'll see what I can do...

[Datsuncog]

19 hours ago, Amishtat said:

I had a few of those Dinkys too, some are still boxed too. From memory an E-type in green, a blue MGB, green Mustang and a metallic red 59 Cadillac. Always quite fancied the Bentley Continental and didn't they also do a Tucker? 

 

16 hours ago, bunglebus said:

Yes, I had the 59 Caddy and 57 Chevy as well as a Beetle. Lovely things, I've been eyeing them up on eBay

 

14 hours ago, Split_Pin said:

I have the 'Dinky' MGB and I think it's a lovely model. It captures the real car pretty well I think. They are a bit more detailed than the Corgi equivalent but in my opinion the MG and the Triumph Stag are the only ones that interest me as the rest are too overmodelled by other companies.

Corgi did well with their 1/43 Classics range by covering everyday saloon cars and vans together with a few sports cars.

I've a few of the Matchbox Dinkys too - though I did sell a couple of unboxed damaged ones last year (VW Beetle in pale blue, Delahaye in navy, '57 Chevy in red, MGB in blue).

Many of mine were acquired from a local chemist shop, of all places, at the tail end of the '90s. From memory, I managed to bag the Citroen Traction Avant (black), Ford V8 Pilot (silver), Ford Thames van (green, Radio Times), Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing (black) and Bentley Continental (met. blue) for, I think, £3.99 each. I've picked up a few others too - the MGB in orange, and that lovely metallic green Ford Mustang (sadly not boxed).

There's a model shop in Belfast which has quite a few of them - they were cheap a couple of years ago (I think £7 or £8) but they must have reviewed their prices last year and now they're sitting around the £15 mark. So if anyone's desperate, I can make enquiries...

(I've mentioned this model shop before: My Old Toy Box, in Smithfield Market. It's really good in terms of stock, both old and new - but it's not cheap by any stretch. They do have some fantastic stuff to drool over, though.)

 

16 hours ago, bunglebus said:

I'd like to see that - especially if you include the blatant rip offs by Zee toys of Matchbox/Corgi/Hot Wheels!

It may be a while away yet, but I'm fascinated by the toy business itself and the various sub-licenced castings/ pirate versions knocking around yet... if you know of any particularly shameful examples, hit me up!

 

4 hours ago, RoadworkUK said:

Quick, and somewhat gushing shoutout to Datsuncog: this is consistently my favourite thread on AS of late, and it's largely down to your fine work. Keep it up.

 

2 hours ago, 155V6 said:

I'll second that.A lot of the things shown are from the period after I'd left school,and become more interested in other things,so it's good to find out about things I'd missed ?

Aw, shucks... glad you enjoy, but I don't think I bring any more to these pages than the many other contributors: those who diligently track down the finest of tat and post them up to share; those who bring forward some fantastic restorations and custom builds; those with encyclopaedic knowledge of special editions and rare versions - you know who you are!

There's FOUR HUNDRED PAGES of shite in miniature here, and my contributions are slim compared to many others... but I'm pleased and humbled to be part of such a vibrant community of self-proclaimed minishiters.

Onwards!

[Amishtat]

Too late for the Bedford transporter? 

[sierraman]

I might just be a tight northerner but the prices he’s after are quite on the high side. 

[MorrisItalSLX]

Can you please buy that Fosters tray for me and end it’s existence. Use it to weld up an Allegro sill or some such.

[sierraman]

But hang on doesn’t everyone in Australia drink Fosters? ?

[Datsuncog]

Apologies folks - I had a message to run over the far side of town, and by the time I got back over to the market, Blokey had already packed up the stall and legged it... can't say I blame him, mind: there's a severe weather warning in place, the rain was coming in horizontally, and St George's was doing its best impression of the Marie Celeste...

So I'll keep an eye out for the Lesney Bedford transporter next week for Amishtat, should it still be available.

I'd love to buy the Fosters tray to do something unspeakable to it, only I'm unable to overcome the stigma of having to walk round all day holding a Fosters tray and putting my carefully cultivated craft-ale persona in severe jeopardy. I would definitely need a disguise of some sorts... dreadful, dreadful stuff.

 

With regard to pricing, he is indeed all over the place. By his own admission he has no particular interest in diecast, he just sells all sorts of collectables - postcards, books, comics, toys, coins, penknives, brass ornaments - which are largely sourced from house clearances and the like. His overheads are probably minimal, and nothing's given a price label, so it's all pretty much just the first figure that comes into his head. From observations, if he's having a slow day he's more likely to let stuff go for cheap just to land a sale.

Hence, some common is silly-dear, while other stuff is extraordinarily cheap (like the repro Dinky Honda S800 I bought for a fiver, and could easily flip for £35 online - only I'm already very attached to it...) 

But there's stuff on the stall at a fiver one week, and then the next it's in the 50p box. If he has lots of really good boxed stuff in, I've noticed the loose stuff tends to be cheaper (£2-3). If he hasn't any, the loose stuff becomes £5-6. Basically, the best stuff is about a tenner, regardless of whether it's something mint/boxed or just some tatty 80s Corgis with broken windows. Dynamic pricing, eat your heart out.

If you think his prices are on the high side, you should see My Old Toy Box... as I say, some really great stuff in there but a few too many zeroes on the price labels for my liking (seriously, north of £100 for boxed '70s Corgis).

They also rarely sell the less-than-mint old stuff separately, which bothers me - instead, they throw a few chipped 1960s Corgis into a ziplok bag along with a handful of beat-to-shit Days Gone and some rubbish no-name Poundland diecast, then charge £60... no substitutions allowed.

I'll have to throw up a few surreptitiously-taken pics of their shelves, though... just in case there's owt of interest to you folks.

[C1am]

Does anyone know anything about Ace-Toy (Hong Kong manufacturer)? I have this wind up scooter but can't find any information on the company.

[Datsuncog]

Okay, so I didn't end the day empty-handed... I took a swing past My Old Toy Box, and emerged with these...

The 1980s-issue Lincoln and Volvo are replacements for rather more chipped and paint-pen attacked examples I sold on last year.

The Superfast Lotus Super Seven was procured largely because it still has its fragile windscreen in place, which is a bit of a rarity! This was a model I didn't even know about until a few years back, so it has a certain novelty value for me.

At a pound each, these weren't bad value. A spot of T-Cut and they should scrub up fairly well.

If anyone fancies the Super Seven at the price I paid, you're welcome to it.

 

So, this is what the shop tends to stock (surreptitious pics):

Modern-ish stuff. I'm not really into military stuff, so I tend to ignore everything on the right hand side.

Lots o' Vanguards and similar... mostly around the £20-£30 mark.

Buses, and some 80s/90s Corgis. Volvo 760 is priced at £10, as is the Mack Fire Tender beside it.

Now, for the sheer shite factor these are pretty good value at £3-£4 each.

Plenty of ex-magazine partworks in dump bins. £6-£7, mostly. I would have had that Pajero, and the beige Toronado, if only I had more than a handful of shrapnel on me.

James Bond partwork stuff - I have one or two of these, and they bug me slightly as they're nearly really good. But some of the proportions are just a bit off, and so I've been in a cycle now for years where I'm drawn to them, but then I'm annoyed with them...

Some goodly shite subjects in there, though.

As mentioned, there were also these:

Many many Matchbox Dinkys. They're actually less than I thought - £10 each. Don't see any Stags, but they've at least three TR4s. Some boxes are now cracking due to age, annoyingly.

Also Corgi Classics, at a tenner each (not the taxi though - that's £35)

Loads and loads of Models of Yesteryear and Days Gone were also on the shelves, at anything from £4 to £10. Optimistic.

Then there's the notorious Bags:

And there's lots of them.

I'm just not seeing the value here, frankly. Thus they don't sell, but people tend to hoke through them anyway, so most of the bags are now like little plastic snowglobes with paint chippings instead of fake snow. If they weren't in bad shape when they went in, they sure are now.

Oddly, most of the old stuff seems to go in here. Over by the till, there's modern 1980s/1990s/2000s stuff being sold individually for a pound or two.

I suspect the owner, who looks about ten years older than me, has a sort of mental 'cut-off' about what's old and valuable, and what's modern and not. It's possible he hasn't yet twigged that post-1985 stuff is possibly more collectible than his 1960s Dinkys priced at £130...

As a case in point, his 1960s and 1970s Superfasts, mint and boxed, are there for about £35 each, some much more. But there's more reasonable prices to be found for toys only slightly newer:

And I had to titter at these, as I'd mentioned them only yesterday:

Even so, the models in this case are mostly in the £5 range - boxless Matchbox Dinkys and Corgi Classics.

The shop is totally rammed, and you're best coming in and having a browse for yourself if you're ever in the area... as I say, he's not terribly cheap but if there's anything you see that you really fancy, I'll happily make enquiries on your behalf... there are deffo a few bargains to be had.

[Split_Pin]

WHAT A PLACE!!

Now, I forgot about the 'Dinky' Series 1 Land Rover and the TR4, these were ones I was after at the time.

 

[egg]

I think your market stall guy is cheap.

Compared to prices round here- many shops are selling rough MB regular wheels for £8-£10 a pop. And a lot of boxed stuff is crazy priced. When I was in Lewes earlier this week almost everything was 50% more than I thought it should be (apart from that Norev Visa I picked up).

[sierraman]

The price of the tackle in that shop is nuts. Get to the car boot, for now it’s considerably cheaper. 

[Amishtat]

I suppose it depends on what sort of nick you want stuff in. Not a lot of boxed stuff at the boot sales in my experience, if you're not bothered about boxed models then yes, there's quite a lot to be found at reasonable prices.On the other hand there's a couple who attend my local sale with about half a table of sixties Corgi and Dinky stuff but I can't bring myself to lay out fifteen quid for models not quite rough enough to be worth restoring but a bit too playworn to display. I've tried negotiating but no, the price is the price. Am I being too tight? 

[Sudsprint]

 

Matchbox Yesteryears..

I find them both curiously resistible and curiously irresistible at the same time.

 

[egg]

Model supplies ladder has cheered up this Kent fire brigade model. My grandfather was in Kent fire brigade in the 50's, so I like this one.

[Sausage5000]

On 8/8/2019 at 11:02 AM, Datsuncog said:

If you can get your hands on a 1988 Matchbox Catalogue, it gives the complete Superfast Lasers range of 30 different models...

Some of them also came in different colourways - for example, I had the LW-8 Corvette in a pleasantly naff shade of metallic brown.

In keeping with the Matchbox era under Universal Toys ownership, themed playsets were also launched to provide gift solutions for adults, and to drive additional sales of the individually-packaged cars pitched at pocket-money prices.

Interesting to see that Universal Toys not only revived the Superfast name for this range, but also put the early 1970s Superfast Track System and launcher back into production for the LW-200 'Laser 2000 Race Set' (with bonus added 'space monster', because hey, why not??) . I'm not entirely sure one car constitutes a race, either.

My brother owned the LW-100 Big Bang Launcher blaster thing (which came with basically a miniature till receipt roll, which you stretched across the path of the plunger to make a not-very-big 'bang' upon deployment), and now I look at it, we had a fair number of toys from the range between us - there's ten in the catalogue pages which we had in the toybox.

Weird thing is, I don't remember buying or requesting any of them - they must have all been gifts or summat. Although the laser wheels were pretty eyecatching, I was the kind of boring literal child who tended towards realism if possible...

I can only assume the range never really took off as hoped, since it seems to have disappeared by the time the 1990 catalogue was published.

Bullshitter friends with supposed millionaire uncles are the best entertainment you can have, in retrospect.

I remember a kid at school called Duane who swore to me his 'millionaire uncle' had a Trans-Am like the one out of Smokey and The Bandit, only it was also a stretch limo a hundred feet long, and it was tuned so it could do 500mph.

And, naturally, he'd driven it - despite being only nine.

When challenged on the feasibility of this claim on practical, legal and engineering grounds, he would only admit that this feat had been carried out on his uncle's private runway.

A quick LinkedIn search indicates he now works as a manager for a lettings agency.

Kinda figures...

I also had a millionaire uncle in America. He was going to send me rare transformers toys, eventually. My friend used to mock me until recently about my obviously intended uncle.

[sierraman]

1 hour ago, Amishtat said:

I suppose it depends on what sort of nick you want stuff in. Not a lot of boxed stuff at the boot sales in my experience, if you're not bothered about boxed models then yes, there's quite a lot to be found at reasonable prices.On the other hand there's a couple who attend my local sale with about half a table of sixties Corgi and Dinky stuff but I can't bring myself to lay out fifteen quid for models not quite rough enough to be worth restoring but a bit too playworn to display. I've tried negotiating but no, the price is the price. Am I being too tight? 

I don’t know about Dinky as it’s not my bag but £3 on battered old Lesneys is expensive. Even battered old rubbish on eBay is fetching crazy money. I think once the price of collecting starts going up I’ll reappraise what I’m collecting. 

[Amishtat]

This is why I'm surprisingly picky about what I buy (the O. H.  would disagree..)  There's a chap near me who only really deals in mint boxed stuff and as lovely as his stock is, the prices are just eye-watering. There's a few things I still want (Dinky Singer Vogue and Gazelle, Dinky Victor 101 in particular) but I just refuse to part with more than about twenty quid given that I'm not bothered about the boxes. 

[Noel Tidybeard]

if by any chance the maestro is still about colour me interested pleaseses

[Jon]

1 hour ago, Amishtat said:

This is why I'm surprisingly picky about what I buy (the O. H.  would disagree..)  There's a chap near me who only really deals in mint boxed stuff and as lovely as his stock is, the prices are just eye-watering. There's a few things I still want (Dinky Singer Vogue and Gazelle, Dinky Victor 101 in particular) but I just refuse to part with more than about twenty quid given that I'm not bothered about the boxes. 

Is this the Victor 101 you're looking for?

https://www.trademe.co.nz/toys-models/vintage/listing-2261478723.htm?rsqid=bc60ba1869b7442a94ffde6095030120-004

 

Currently no bids with a start price of $25 (NZ - or £13.44) with 2 days to go. If it's bargainous at that price, I'll happily bid for you. I sent a plastic Norev to Junkman last year and it cost £7-8 in international postage from memory, so those two combined would stretch your budget a smidge (I can likely collect from the seller) but I very much doubt you'd shell out more than £25, max. Maybe a little too playworn but it does look like a nice casting!

[Amishtat]

That's an FB Victor but it's not bad! Certainly not too worn to go in the cabinet. Let me sleep on it, drink has been consumed so probably not the best time for me to decide but thanks very much 

[bunglebus]

For some reason mint in box stuff doesn't do much for me. I get excited when I find 12 year old Hot Wheels still in stock at WH Smiths, but there's something a little bit sad in a toy that's never been played with and enjoyed. 99% of what I buy is in good but playworn condition. If they're really battered I have fun making them nice again. 

[Jon]

58 minutes ago, Amishtat said:

That's an FB Victor but it's not bad! Certainly not too worn to go in the cabinet. Let me sleep on it, drink has been consumed so probably not the best time for me to decide but thanks very much 

Ah yes, I see the error of my ways, now!

Having just looked up the Victor 101 casting, I can see why you'd like one! There's something very continental/French Dinky about it, so I can totally see the appeal. Slight shame about the 'INJ' Dinky number plate though - the 'I' irks me much more than it should. Does INJ stand for something in Dinky's history?

On the French Dinky subject, check out this guy's offerings, all currently at a tenner a pop, with a short time to run:

 

 

Which looks a lot like my Norev one:

 

And also this, which actually makes my Atlas version look very accurate!

 

 

 

Anyway, if any of these take people's fancy, the listings are below: 

https://www.trademe.co.nz/Members/Listings.aspx?member=375548

 

Again, local enough to collect.

 

[egg]

Decals applied and grille painted, and this is looking better.

 

[bunglebus]

On 8/9/2019 at 12:08 PM, Datsuncog said:

 

 

It may be a while away yet, but I'm fascinated by the toy business itself and the various sub-licenced castings/ pirate versions knocking around yet... if you know of any particularly shameful examples, hit me up!

 

 

I'm not sure any of the Zee toys are actual copies, more a homage/looking over the shoulder type deal. Thus;

Hot Wheels Silhouette and Zee toys version

[bunglebus]

Corgi and Zee Toys Zakspeed Capri

[bunglebus]

Husky/Zee Toys Transits

[bunglebus]

Matchbox/Zee Toys 928s

[bunglebus]

Hot Wheels Hot Heap/Zee Toys "Baja Bug" (?)

[bunglebus]

Matchbox/Corgi/Zee Toy 760