Birthday Dossier! Supercar and Stingray Steering Wheels

A bloggiversary dossier here.

I'm talking origins of the Supercar and Stingray dashboards and steering wheels.

So, Supercar, that fabulous craft designed by Reg Hill of AP Films.

One possible source is this, Mick Imrie and the fascinating Supercar Take Two Ai Austin Blog

  https://share.google/L1CkQoyDbHJo1xhNY.

Their key quote is:

"Mick found that many of the instruments used appear to come from the cockpit of the Gloster Meteor NF12."

Alas, the Gloster picture doesn't include a steering wheel.

Is this the source that Reg Hill went to then? A plane?

I thought I'd go to very source and look at the steering wheel in the Supercar TV series, which is not often filmed in full, as I discovered.

It looks round here.

But I thinks it's the angle.

In reality it's two steering 'wheels', which are more like bicycle handlebars than wheels.

This is confirmed by looking at the original toy Supercars at the time.

The amazing Plaston toy had this steering column. My money's on this being Supercar's design and no other.

*

OK, to Stingray now.

A great line of enquiry is this site by Duncan Willis, whereby he deploys a toy dashboard to recreate the Stingray steering wheel.

The key line here is:

"The originals were made using a child's toy car dashboard."

https://replicagerryandersonpuppets.weebly.com/projects.html

So what about the Deluxe Reading dashboard toy that's suggested?

Here's Stingray's original TV steering wheels.

And the Deluxe Reading Playmobile dashboard again.

Yep, Mr.Willis is bang on! How cool is that!

You can see what I think is more of the toy dashboard behind Troy too.

So was the Deluxe Reading Playmobile dashboard widely available in the UK in the early Sixties? Did you have one living in the US?

Yellow glue spreader caps on the steering wheel!