Some years back, I saw an amazing toy at auction on ebay, battered and incomplete, it was the Waco tinplate space station. Naturally interest in the rarity was high and it quickly vanished for a tidy sum into an international buyers collection. Even though i'm not a tin fan, I could appreciate the beauty and complexity of this wonderful toy and I was even more surprised when I realised that it was lifted directly from a model kit from around 1959, made by Revell.
Just recently, during a space book resurgence, I came across a book with the very same model on the cover, which I duly bought. Unfortunately, the cover was the only interestin part of it, as the book was almost entirely text!
The model kit seems to have been quite sizeable and for the 1950's, very complex. A partial restoration project appeared on an auction site in the US, which shows some of the interior detail.
Scale Model News carried a very interesting article recently, showing how rocket engineer Ellwyn Angle designed both the Space Station and the fabulous Manned Lunar Space Ship - another fine creation from Revell.
http://www.ninfinger.org/models/html_pix/station.html
http://www.scalemodelnews.com/2012/03/rocket-engineer-who-designed-revell-xsl.html
Just beautiful, I grew up with a hobby shop just 10 minutes away and it held a lot of old revell stock, kits that were beyond my modelling skills, but I was still in awe and still am now at things such as this! I'll say it again! Beautiful! -Mark J Southcoast Base
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing the Revell 'Everything is Go! Mercury Atlas kit made up in a display case in a local toy shop and thinking what an amazing model it was. Compared to the low level Airfix kits I was used to, it looked fabulously complex. Even now, looking at the early Revell and Monogram catalogues, the amount of rocket and space kits from the Space race period is amazing - all Airfix had was a couple of Saturn Rockets and a LEM! The later Vostok kit was really nice, though, with the Soyuz and Sputnik alternate payloads, but still very basic in comparison to the delightful Revell creations. Its almost impossible to buy a straightforward space kit nowdays without getting into expert grade or collectible level desktop models.
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