PROJECT ARK THE TOY .....

The main rocket is made of 2mm Styrene sheet that has lasted remarkably well, without age yellowing. The perspex bubble on the roof was vacuum formed from a record player cover and the nose and stern were carved from styrofoam, cast in plaster and formed from resin and glassfibre.

The ship is meant to float with it's boat shaped hull, but I was always to scared to test it out! The small airlock contains a slow friction powered tractor made from rectangular plastic draw inserts and a yellow pill bottle for the windscreen.

Opening the airlock hatch pulls a lever, which slides open a door sealing the upper deck crawl tube, which allows access to the animal cargo areas. A ramp for the upper deck deploys when the main hatch is lowered. The rocket engine is a humble red plastic bicycle reflector -remember them?

The human figures and alien creatures are all made from Das air dry clay with model paint colours.

...and all because I didn't have a proper Space Safari toy as a kid!

Looey,

Oz Base

A PROJECT 40 YEARS IN THE HIDING.......

Hello Moonbasers, 

as Woodsy has already said, I had a weird experience with the Space Safari toy as a kid. It was too high up for me to get my jammy hands on, so I only had half remembered memories of the real thing.

Fast forward to around 1976 when I was studying Interior Design at Sydney College of the Arts. I had to design and build a child's toy and I decided on a Noah's Ark.

Unwrapping the stored object for the first time in decades, I was surprised at the amount of Daizo printed hand lettering on the package. The comic story on the back was all hand coloured using inks. 

These days the whole thing would be laid out in a Vector program and laser printed, but back in those days I was hand using a Rapidograph pen on tracing paper. The triangular package was me thinking I could make a cleverly stacking product, but it doesn't work quite as well in the real world...

Anyway, to set the scene, here's the included backstory featuring a suitably 70's multi-ethnic crew with Biblical first names!

The next post, we'll get down to the toy itself which features a Slow-Slow friction motor as recently featured on this very blog...

Enjoy, 

Looey

Oz Base

the last dyna soar II

Like many of my early posts on the blog from nearly 10 years ago this one sort of fell under the radar with very few views [ here ].

So here it is again, my comic strip entitled The Last Dyna Soar.

For some reason its become blurred now I've edited its shape and reblogged it.

See what you think - if you can read it!