Birthday Cake Toppers: Ed's Motorbikes

Woodsy,

While I'm not a big fan of motorbikes, a few have nevertheless showed up in The Hoard:

-The Auburn #520 Motorcycle Cop is part of my general Fire & Emergency vehicles collection.

-The yellow dirt bike came to me as part of a job lot of vehicles.

-Bakery Crafts #ICX-409C Batman - Batcycle w-Cave Cake Topper

-Mattel 2004 #G3439 Dark Knight DC Comics Batcycle

-Mattel 2005 #H6296-0710 Hot Wheels Batman Begins Batcycle

-Mattel 2009 #M7093-0910 Hot Wheels 1-50 1966 Batcycle

-Mattel 2012 #X4227-0910HT Hot Wheels Batcycle

-McDonald's 2011 Young Justice #1 Robin

-Lemax Set #73297 2017 Grim Rider

-Tim-Mee Toys Army Motorcycle Rider

-Britains Deetail WWII German Army Combination Motorcycle #9678 (1973)

-Britains Deetail WWII U.S. Army Motorcycle Rider #9682 (1972)

-Marx German Motorcycle 54mm

-Dimestore Dreams #20300 Motorcycle and Rider

-Dimestore Dreams #20310 Motorcycle Sidecar and Rider

-Dimestore Dreams #20320 Service Cycle (aka 'Servi-car') and Rider (interesting tidbit: when I was growing up in the '50s & '60s my dad rented a garage from one of the neighbor ladies and her son Jack would come to the house every month to collect the rent. He rode a Harley 3-wheeled servi-car just like this and he wore that same type of hat and dressed like the toy figure shown here - just like Marlon Brando in 'The Wild One'!)

From The Hell's Angels Clubhouse Las Vegas

Ed

Lenticular Soup! A Birthday Bowl

 Always fascinating, we've seen lenticular postcards on MC a few times. The larger cousins of flicker ring pics, these beautiful mementoes of a bygone card-writing age are a delight.

Here are a few I've spotted on auction this year. 

Which is your favourite?

Mine's this, Rollout! 

Bloggiversary Party Piece! Arto's Action-Lobeco Rocket Car: New Discovery!

The Project S.W.O.R.D. range of toys keeps on giving what comes to clones and variants. This must be one of the most peculiar ones. Stretching it a bit, the Probe Force 1 has transformed into a - Rocket Car!

Made by Action-Lobeco of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in British Hong Kong, the Rocket Car comes in an oblong 46 x 11 x 6 cm box. The box is a tight fit, with slots created for the wing tips. Orange colour and oval ornamentation on the inside suggest the Seventies. There is no box top, so it may have come shrink-wrapped. The item number is 2351.

The toy itself is a standard PF1 with NASA stickers on the back fin. The photo on the box side has "Probe Force 1" stickers on the toy, but this example has only the "Probe" part (it seems the rest was never applied).

It remains to be seen if the other toys in the Probe Force range got the same rocket car treatment by Action-Lobeco.

Arto

Helsinki Base

Ancient Weapons are no match for a good Blaster at your Side! A Birthday Bootleg

 The Star Wars eternal knockoff machine went into stellar overdrive from the off and toy guns were no exception.

Yep, you're our only trope and then some!

Take this for instance. How brazen can you get to simply slap a photograph of Mark Hamill on the side of the box, deftly replacing his blaster with the Space Saucer!

If that wasn't rip-off enough then just scatter some Star Wars craft throughout and use the typeface too!

A more subtle but no less obvious lift is Kusan's Sonic Fazer. This is actually a tin plaque on auction, so it gets even more modern shelf life!

Yep, there's old Harrison Ford's Han Solo, with all but his face, posing in his classic blaster pose. The little picture of the kid below adroitly captures Carrie Fisher side-on too!

And just what is that spacecraft?

A lesser global sensation that Star Wars but a muscled cash cow nonetheless, Rambo had his platoon of admirers in knockoffsville too!

Here's the Kes-Uzi and the Sly Sta-clone has two of them! He'll give you a bootleg you won't believe!

It's not only screen icons which garnered faking fans. Top toys did and still do too. 

In fact Topper's mid-Sixties Mega-seller Johnny Seven had quite a few including a whole decade later, Remco's ..... wait for it ..... System 7!

Really! C'mon, Remco, you're better than that! 

I do really like the spinning rotors ammo though. Johnny don't spin!

And a toy rifle I would have adored as a kid, the mighty Mitraglia Spaziale.

Looking at this I think the butt is upside down!

It's one chunky blaster and I love the background box art. What is that?

I read the words Battlestar Galactica in the old Spanish auction. Surely there's no connection?

And last but not least, my favourite space weapon name this week, the Super Trembling Space Gun! 

No need to be afraid, the pistols trembling anyway! Ha ha!

Do you like any of these readers? Have you any knockoff toys?

WHAT GOES ROUND: Shelby’s Turbines

 

On a recent holiday excursion to the Peak District, I found a great little shop selling vintage toys and just outside was a basket of die-casts. 

After ferreting through the Matchbox, Hot Wheels and Corgi junkers, all labelled £1 a go and all in serious need of restoration, I spotted a plastic model, about 3" long, which I recognised as a Shelby Turbine. 

Digging deeper into the box and holding up foot traffic on the pavement as I sprawled on the floor, rooting about - I found another two, in similar beat up condition. A quick check underneath showed 'Made in Japan' but no other trademark. Nevertheless, all three went in my bag and came home with me. 

The models were pretty scuffed and had the remnants of stickers on them and all three had the cockpit windshield pushed down inside. All three were also missing a front spoiler. They were all freewheeling, being too small for a standard sized friction motor and seemed to date from the late seventies.

My principle interest in these odd shaped cars, was that Hot Wheels had released just such a car in their lineup in 1969. The Shelby Turbine was a real life race car, owned by Carrol Shelby and designed to steal the 1968 Indianapolis 500. 

Shelby had previously shown his expertise in car design with the Ford GT40 and had seen the potential in turbine powered race cars, with a rival entry almost running away with the win the previous year, until an engine fault had put paid to its finishing. As a result, Shelby procured the services of race car engineer Ken Wallis to build a turbine based car and Bruce McLaren and Dennis Hulme to drive it. 

With a massive budget, Shelby set to with Wallis to install a General Electric T58 aircraft engine in a car, which Shelby was aggressively confident in its success.

 However, after building the car and experiencing 200mph record breaking speeds and 'terrifying' acceleration, the Indy race directors and governing body at the USAC reviewed and changed the rules for the upcoming race, having seen the potential of turbine powered race cars over standard piston engines.

A turbine powered engine is reliant on the amount of air that can be fed into the engine and the intake for the Shelby car needed to be 24" or more wide, but concerned that aircraft engine powered cars would render other cars obsolete, the USAC dictated that the maximum intake diameter be just 16". 

As a result, the maximum achievable speed for the Shelby Turbine would only be around 160 mph, way below the speeds reached by standard Indy cars and nowhere near the STP Turbine car that had almost nailed the win the previous year. The regulations eventually led to Shelby giving up on his attempts to create a turbine based car.

Hot Wheels also made a model of the 1968 Lotus Turbine car as well as a standard Indy race car.

So, given that the three plastic cars were in pretty poor shape and did not appear to be particularly valuable or rare, I decided to customise them a little and make them a little more road worthy again.

The green car was in the worst condition and the plastic had become brittle. When I slipped a knife in to separate the two body shells, the side cracked by the cockpit and split in half. It was difficult to reset the windscreen, as I couldn’t separate the two pieces, so it had to stay in place as is. I added a roll bar on each one and for this one, dropped in a bit of chrome engine greenly. 

As all three were missing a front spoiler, I removed the remaining one from the other two and used one to complete one model. I hand painted the body with Revell acrylic paint, to cover the cracks and added orange accents like the classic Gulf Oil livery. Some hand made decals finished it off.

What had been the red car, got two new aerofoil wings on the front, courtesy of a Kinder Egg aircraft, a spray finish of lime green and a coat of lacquer. The windscreen sat a little higher and the chrome parts were touched up.

Finally, I left the cream coloured car as is, cleaned it up and removed both front spoilers for a more classic ‘Shelby’ look. Some white accents and laser printed decals completed the look.