Shite in Miniature II

[sierraman]

I’ve a spare 220SE and an Alfa Guilia if anyone is still looking for one. 

[bunglebus]

So, I had half a day to kill while in Birmingham. There's a road near my dad's with something like 17 charity shops, so I had a wander. First of all, those annoying bags with loads of crap inside. Bought two because;

 

Majorette 240 estate

 

20191119_194759 by RS, on Flickr

20191119_194901 by RS, on Flickr

 

I can feel a Corgi comparison coming on.

 

Also Early Matchbox Fiat 1500

 

20191119_194934 by RS, on Flickr

20191119_194940 by RS, on Flickr

 

Bags also contained an engineless Superfast Road Dragster

 

20191119_194723 by RS, on Flickr

 

And a Welly Merc van - anyone fancy this one?

 

20191119_194648 by RS, on Flickr

20191119_194642 by RS, on Flickr

 

So, what else did the rummage bins full of previously loved toys have to offer?

 

Hot Wheels Cossie - another one I'm happy to pass on

 

20191119_195005 by RS, on Flickr

 

Blackwall Colour changer for my ever expanding collection

 

20191119_195037 by RS, on Flickr

 

This next lot were in a locked glass cabinet in Oxfam, so they weren't pennies - but way below eBay prices

 

Early Superfast Muira

 

20191119_195114 by RS, on Flickr

 

Regular wheels Opel Diplomat - been on the want list for a while

 

20191119_195217 by RS, on Flickr

 

Cadillac ambulance, shame the screen is broken

 

20191119_195255 by RS, on Flickr

 

Jeep Gladiator

 

20191119_195318 by RS, on Flickr

 

Corgi Zephr Estate

 

20191119_195416 by RS, on Flickr

 

I've saved the best shitest for last - check out this Lada 2108 AKA Samara. In true AS fashion it is minus a tyre and the motor doesn't work - how could I leave this glorious pile of crap on the shelf?

 

20191119_195501 by RS, on Flickr

20191119_195509 by RS, on Flickr

20191119_195521 by RS, on Flickr

 

 

[bunglebus]

Also thought you might get a chuckle out of this Chinese Trans Am - check out that ride height!

 

20191119_194608 by RS, on Flickr

[egg]

Nice lot, the rarer red/orange Fiat 1500 too...

[Tenmil Socket]

11 hours ago, bunglebus said:

Also thought you might get a chuckle out of this Chinese Trans Am - check out that ride height!

 

20191119_194608 by RS, on Flickr

Off-road innit...

[Datsuncog]

12 hours ago, bunglebus said:

Also Early Matchbox Fiat 1500

20191119_194934 by RS, on Flickr

As you're probably aware, and as @egg has alluded, the rarer red version of the Fiat 1500 wasn't properly a mainline car, and your find most probably came as part of the G-1 Service Station playset:

Mind you, a few did get packaged up and sold individually in a standard box - now worth about ten times as much as a standard green one...

Some nice finds there, looks like it was well worth your while taking a poke round the charity shops!

[Tenmil Socket]

9 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

As @egg has alluded, the rarer red version of the Fiat 1500 wasn't properly a mainline car, and yours most probably came as part of the G-1 Service Station playset:

Mind you, a few did get packaged up and sold individually in a standard box - now worth about ten times as much as a standard green one...

Some nice finds there, looks like it was well worth your while taking a poke round the charity shops!

There's never anything in my local charity shops... one day maybe...

[Tenmil Socket]

My Fiat 1500 is missing the luggage if anyone's got a spare please?

[egg]

20 minutes ago, Tenmil Socket said:

My Fiat 1500 is missing the luggage if anyone's got a spare please?

Sorry, I haven't, but the reproduction units available from Model Supplies and elsewhere are pretty good.

[egg]

I bought this last week

I didn't like those decals on the side, so used some G3 scratch remover to take them off. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it was too harsh and damaged the paint. I did remove some wheel silver in the process. I polished it up with autosol and even waxed it and it is 'ok'. 6/10 for effort. Will try other approaches next time.

[Tenmil Socket]

17 minutes ago, egg said:

I bought this last week

I didn't like those decals on the side, so used some G3 scratch remover to take them off. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it was too harsh and damaged the paint. I did remove some wheel silver in the process. I polished it up with autosol and even waxed it and it is 'ok'. 6/10 for effort. Will try other approaches next time.

If the wheels were bronze it would look very similar to my real MX5...

[sierraman]

The new Mk1 Golf from Matchbox in 2020 looks decent. No doubt they’ll be mental money on eBay for first few months! 

[egg]

8 minutes ago, Tenmil Socket said:

If the wheels were bronze it would look very similar to my real MX5...

You're welcome to it, I'm not going to keep it long-term, happy to send....

[Tenmil Socket]

1 minute ago, egg said:

You're welcome to it, I'm not going to keep it long-term, happy to send....

Great,  could you put to one side please...

[egg]

yup, with pleasure

[Datsuncog]

14 hours ago, bunglebus said:

I've saved the best shitest for last - check out this Lada 2108 AKA Samara. In true AS fashion it is minus a tyre and the motor doesn't work - how could I leave this glorious pile of crap on the shelf?

20191119_195501 by RS, on Flickr

Lovin' that Lada in all it's shiteness, too - not that common, I'd have thought.

 

Here's two I picked up:

I still have the white one (Chinese made magazine partwork), while the original USSR version went to @Felly Magic of this parish.

When I first bought the red one (c.2000) I had no idea the metal was so soft... I put it in my trouser pocket, and when I took it out again the roof and pillars had bent to the side considerably!

Fortunately, it was pushed back into shape again with fairly little effort...

Much as I like the chunky toy-like proportions of this one, I find the white version looks a bit better on display.

Have you plans to restore your charity shop find, or leave as-is?

[egg]

Oh this arrived today. Very pleased with it, but probably will restore

[Split_Pin]

Very nice indeed! I love my Tomica collection courtesy of @Datsuncog back in the summer of '18.

2 that didn't fit in have since found new homes. The Mitsubishi Canter being a truck that I wasnt familiar with now lives in The Ukraine and the Corolla Levin (plastic base, not as nice to hold as the others and felt flimsier) now lives elsewhere in the UK.

The others are with me forever though!

[flat4alfa]

It’s only Wednesday and this week’s haul was delivered by the nice post lady

I’m absolutely broke again.  Nasty letter from bank this month.  But what I do have is all of these wonderful ‘assets’

This photo also introduces Dolly and Ken, the happy doggers campers.

[bunglebus]

What are them there space vans then? Some of the others look familiar...

 

The Lada will probably gain a tyre from the spares tin then hang about for a while before getting passed on

 

Pleased the Fiat is a rarity, I just knew I hadn't got one. Charity shops are hit and miss, but honestly the road in Hall Green where I went is full of them, how they have enough to sell between them I don't know. My usual favourite one now just has a few Chinese oddments in the box, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time I guess

[flat4alfa]

25 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

What are them there space vans then?

SZE TOY  renditions of the Corgi 1:36 Chevrolet.  Not casting copies, more of a homage.

Improved* photos of the ridiculous van collection are to come shortly - now I've finished sweeping the nation of the blighters.

[flat4alfa]

Was feeling left out on the ~70 Mustang collection comparison expertise

So took these anyway 

[bunglebus]

Took a couple of pics of the copies and the original, quite a marked difference in size especially 

[Datsuncog]

19 hours ago, Split_Pin said:

Very nice indeed! I love my Tomica collection courtesy of @Datsuncog back in the summer of '18.

2 that didn't fit in have since found new homes. The Mitsubishi Canter being a truck that I wasnt familiar with now lives in The Ukraine and the Corolla Levin (plastic base, not as nice to hold as the others and felt flimsier) now lives elsewhere in the UK.

The others are with me forever though!

Good to hear it!

Here's some potatocam pics of the two before they departed for pastures new:

The Levin. 

I agree that the plastic base does make this one feel much more flimsy than most of the others, plus the shape is all wrong - really low and flat, which is not how I remember the E70 Series Corolla liftback. The pic on the box is ace, however.

The Canter was pleasingly chunky, although all the rivets necessary to facilitate the tipping action meant that some detail was lost.

As much as I tried to like this one, I just really couldn't get that passionate about it either.

 

I bought all of these boxed '80s Tomica in a massive hurry one afternoon, from a model shop in Queen St, Brighton.

I'd quickly nipped in while making my way from the bus stop in Churchill Square to the railway station at the top of Queen St, to see if they had any new Cararama 1/72 in - only to be unexpectedly confronted with a shelf of about 60 boxed Tomica models.

At that time, I was permanently skint and also on my way to Gatwick airport. I'd no time to go and find a cashpoint - and wasn't even sure I had any money in there, anyway - so I quickly grabbed as many as I could, using all the cash I had on me (intended to buy me lunch and dinner) and just about scraped together enough for nine of them.

I didn't even have time to open the boxes in the shop and see exactly what was in there - that had to wait until I'd huffed and puffed up the street and jumped on the train.

Of course, by the time I returned to Brighton the following week, all the others were gone.

I still wonder what else I left behind on the shelf...

 

Nice as the Tomica models are - and I can understand why they have such a huge following - I never quite gelled with them the way I expected to, so I'm delighted they've finally found appreciative homes.

The unboxed 1990s models at the front of the pic mostly came from the model shop I worked in, when we bought in some cases of Tomica because our Matchbox rep went AWOL and we had no carded stock for the 99p spinners.

These four (plus the silver Datsun Cherry at the front of the previous pic) are reproduction Chinese Tomicas, bought unboxed from a Hong Kong seller on eBay c.2007.

Again, I tried very hard to love them - but I guess I just wasn't in a good place at that point with my diecasts.

Way too much random stuff, mostly boxed up for decades and scattered over multiple locations, meant I had no real focus for my collection and simply didn't know what to do with them. I ended up feeling this acute and pointless embarrassment at having so many models but nowhere to display them, and no time to appreciate them.

But! Slimming down the collection massively was a good start for me; and while I've had one or two pangs since at having let certain stuff go, there's no way I'd be in a position to browse my collection and appreciate individual items from the way it was...

( ^^^ this isn't even half the collection, as it was)

More Tales from the Toybox later, kids!

[flat4alfa]

5 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

Tales from the Toybox

That's the title of your book, yes?

Have you the ISBN number so I can get it stocked, please

[junkyarddog]

I quite like Tomica models, it's always a bit exciting to find one in a box of tat.

The pictured one is a Toyota Corolla ke35 coupè.

If any of you chaps out there find one(in any condition)I'd be very interested in it.

I have the full size one you see  

 

[Datsuncog]

1 hour ago, flat4alfa said:

That's the title of your book, yes?

Have you the ISBN number so I can get it stocked, please

Heh, still a long way away from that, I have to say...

Still, feeling in a somewhat reflective mood, I had a good poke through my personal 'reserve selection' box of tiny tat last night.

This is the box.

Bit smaller than my previous receptacle for Matchbox/Corgi/Majorette/Hot Wheels, which was a 10 gallon fermentation bucket.

And here's what's inside, at the moment anyway...

Most of the vehicles in this box have a story of some description - though not so much the ones on top, which tend to be more recent market finds.

 

The other box containing previous 50p market finds, now earmarked for rehoming, are nearly as numerous.

 

There's also these two carry-cases....

...and that's where some of the old gold lies...

And some newer stuff, too - many from Matchbox's last purple patch for realistic depictions of 60s and 70s stuff, c.2007.

And some boxless Cararama, from when I had a massive interest in them.

It'll take me a while, but hopefully there'll be stuff of interest in here.

[Split_Pin]

I agree that focusing your mind on what you want to collect is a good idea.

I went through a diecast wilderness in around 1997. By that time I had a very eclectic collection and I pretty much had everything I wanted that was freely available through Swapmeets and model shops. Being 18 and having earned my own money for 3 years, I was no longer able to get excited about a 1/18 model as I could afford to buy them at any time. I was also heavily into buses and trucks at that point and had shifted my focus to 1/76 buses, trucks and 1/24 truck kits.

Like you DC, I sold about 2/3 of my collection in 2013/4 as I just had too many and needed the money.

Ever since, and because I was older by that point, I became interested in diecast which I had wanted as a kid but couldn't afford or which I did have but swapped or ruined.

Now I focus almost 100% on models from the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Bburagos, Polistil, Majorette, Matchbox, Corgi together with more unusual stuff such as French Dinkys, Pilen, Mira, Guisval, Guiloy, Gama, Schabak and Siku. You get the idea. I also focus on weird stuff like large scale plastic friction models from eastern Europe and the halowed Stahlbergs.

Tomica however were unknown to me as a kid, but it always frustrated me how you couldn't get a model of a Datsun, bar a 240z which didnt really interest me much. When I saw Tim's collection, it's like the models that never were and I had to have them. A Datsun 120y, Cherry, Bluebird, Cedric, a Honda Civic and so on and all in the style of a small toy car like I would have wanted in the early 1980s as a wee lad. They are definitely at the top of my collecting tree!

[sierraman]

I try to focus on Matchbox but then I’ll see a Corgi 1/36 I haven’t got and I’m unable to stop myself. That said I still buy ones I’ve already got if they’re tidy, I’ve got this wierd thing where I think I’m saving them from being chucked about by some errant kids ?

[egg]

My long-term collection is essentially Norevs from the 50s-60s (with some 70s ones allowed, if they are good) and matchbox 'a series' (with some other later regular wheels). That's the focused bit. But as you well know, I'll let almost anything else come and go through my grubby mits...

post count - 11,111 - ooh, I'm going to enjoy that for a bit, so I'll go quiet now for a few hours ?