New arrivals

Johnny, The photo is your's but I felt sorry about this one eyed VW so I removed the headlight repositioned and duplicated it. Alll this and mending the paint scratch takes a little bit of time but is not difficult.I doubt very much that your model is original. The baseplate has probably been swaped from a late # 129 which did have those wheels and which was not painted.

Jacques -- I thought you might have 'mended' my Beetle but I wasn't sure. Why do you think it is not original? Because the Budespost Beetle was deleted before those wheels made their debut? In any case I am not worried, since I will keep and enjoy it. I have given up selling anything since I have no patience for eBay sales.

Here it is, Jacques, my thirteenth Fire Engine with Extending Ladder (+ some extras ) The crown on my Fire Engines collection. Kind regards, Jan

JohnnyI an not sure but I think that those wheels were available during the production period of the Bundespost VW. The transfer is a repro, there is some orange colour in it that is not on the originals, also you can see through the windscreen that there is too much yellow paint inside. Meccano never painted the insides, the paint is very expansive. One should be able to see small spots of yellow paint but not a complete coat. An other thing which atracted my attention but which is not a proof, the general look of the paint coat which somehow does not match the Dinky one. This is just a feeling.

Dear Jan, Congratulations for your 13 th. Commer fire engine but you have not finished the hunt for red engine. To complete the collection, you must now find the rarest ones which were packed in yellow and even the scarcest gold Visi-Pac. Good luck Jan

Jacques, I must admit you're completely correct. I did not manage to obtain a Visi-pac-packed version in all those 40 years of collecting - yet. If anyone can help me, you're welcome. In the mean time: the crown is there already and I am incredibly happy with it! I'm now in the process of preparing two mini-displays for this and the 39 set boxes. I closed the open backsides, used some red velvet for the display bases and the glass ordered has arrived already. Unfortunately two small shelves of books had to give way. A snapshot below. Kind regards, Jan

Several more arrivals today: A Motorway Services Van with the last type front, and a Mercedes C-111 ...

... and now that I have several more C-111s, I decided to take apart both a Dinky and a Joal sample to make further comparisions. The Joal is either made from modified Dinky tooling, or it is merely the most faithful copy of a Dinky ever made by another manufacturer. I could not disassemble the Dinky completely because the plastic interior is riveted in place, but still thought this comparison might be interesting.

Jonathan---Very interesting and so nice of you to dissemble those two to compare.....nicely done!

Dear JohnnyThank you for showing us these pictures which answear the question of : 'has the Joal C 111 been cast in the same mould as the Dinky Toys one ?' The details 1 and 2 and the marking 3 could not have been removedJoal had not yet learned how to cast models without ejector marks which Meccano and Solido knew how to do.There was no aparent reason to move the spigot 6. The angles on the Dinky are much sharper than on the Joal. Joal could have made them sharper than the Dinky but not the oposite.On both models the gaps between the doors and the body is quite ugly.Mercedes certainly provided the same body drawings to both manufacturers, this is why both models are so close to each other.Anyway this is an interesting discussion and I am going to copy this post into the proper thread for the c 111 ref. 224.

For a car with an elegant wind cheating shape, and modelled widely in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in 1/43, sadly the Dinky rendition reflects the low standard post 1964 prevailing, being clunky and unattractive. A toy indeed. Congratulations however on your investigations!

Jacques, thank you for your meticulous work with the photos. Despite the obvious differences in the tooling, I am still puzzled by the great resemblance between these models! Both the Dinky and the Joal are indeed 'clunky and unattractive,' though to be fair it is worth noting that Mercedes refined the shape of the C-111, and I think most toy manufacturers based their models on the later iterations. Here are a couple of photos of the version modelled by Dinky and Joal. An oddity with the Joal is that it is marked on its baseplate as being 1/43 scale. In fact, the Joal model is the same 101mm in length as the Dinky. Since t unsafe link, it is easy even with my limited math skills to see that both models are 1/42nd scale. (The Dinky Encyclopaedia listed them as 1:44 in my copy, an obvious misprint.) I do not know what other models by Joal were 1:42 scale at this time, but clearly the Dinky influence was blatant