About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Monday, April 26, 2010

A is for Alamo, Fort Alamo

And how nice to find a model fort from the 1960's/70's that's not called Apache or Cheyenne, pity it looks nothing like THE Alamo! Made by Muri, and bought in Naples, Italy in the Summer of '69 this is a simple clip-together hard styrene fort with soft plastic/ethylene flats of the sort the Spanish were putting in their 'sobres' at around the same time.

Various views of the fort, because this is a border-line 'lazy post' (late at night, nearest thing to hand I haven't already covered - but more images than a standard lazy post!), I had trouble with the photo's so had to do a collage, as all the whole-fort views were orange again.

It's these new 'green' bulbs, the light is very odd and hard to photograph under, it also creates colour variants among my Airfix figures which disappear in the morning! Try it? Get a bunch of the old 54mm Marines, from more than one source, and watch some of them go bright green under these new bulbs?!

The various soft plastic components and the card, this was a header-bagged rack-toy, the flag is a simple doubled up piece of insulation tape with that sticky white goo one remembers from printed Christmas parcel tape of the period! The number could be twentieth in a series, or the first of a range that only ran to one? anyone know if other Muri stuff exists?

Continuing tonight's themes - Flats, Wild West and untypical production for the nation concerned comes this little bag from Hong Kong, the Plastic Set No. 101 contains hard plastic flats (uncommon for HK) with splashes of gold and silver paint (more like it!), and hasn't been decanted in case I don't find another.

I used to decant/un-sprue/remove packaging, but now I only do so if I have a second one to keep mint, or if it's post the year 2000 in which case it's never going to be 'rare' in the old sense of the word.

There are some purely coincidental similarity's between the Indian poses in the two sets, another reason I did them together and made a lazy-post into a proper post! [Just reviewing my past articles on flats and realised that not only is there a passing resemblance between the HK Indian poses and several of the Gibbs Indians, but at least one is a direct copy!]

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