Very orange and very expensive

Some nice people in Yorkshire have asked me to sell their little orange Mini. I knew these were quite scarce and even my very battered examples often sell for £50 so I realised that this was something a little special, despite the annoying Whizzwheels.

It did come as some surprise, however, to see just how much one of these in A+ condition with a pretty good late box was worth. QDT had one for £450 a few years ago. The buyer paid £335 which would have finished up as a cheque for not far off £450 by the time the usual auction fees, tax and delivery had been added.

So this is one little valuable item indeed.

I have to say, though, that I didn't know why.  The 204 Whizzwheels Mini was first issued in February 1972, accompanied at the time by the Chevrolet Camaro, Mini Marcos and Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray Whizzwheels editions, all of which had seriously short production periods and are now some of the most expensive to buy in good condition. None quite make the heights of the Mini's figures (ignoring for now the blue Mini Marcos which probably would if ever one were to appear).

I can only imagine that the production numbers for the Mini in this short space of time have had to be divided between the three different bases (matt black, glossier black and silver), the different colours (metallic blue, non-metallic blue, orange with a black roof and all orange), the different screens (clear or tinted), the different interiors (yellow or red) and, yes, even different wheel styles (4 or 5 spoke). 

OK. Now I understand. In theory that could lead to 96 different models but I am pretty sure that some of these combinations don't exist. Let's say there would be just 20 editions. Even for a production run of a quite massive 100,000 (for those times) that would be a mere 5,000 of each of the different models. Naturally some would be rather more and some rather less but my best guess as to the maximum that could possibly have been made of this particular (more 'normal') model would be 10,000. That is not very many at all. It's very likely that it is a lot less and other people have done the same sums at some time and that, friends, must be why we're now talking about such high price for this little orange car.

Collectors also like Minis. And complete collections. So they'll need this one. Available now. At a price.

Corgi Catalogues 1958 to 1972

You may have noticed that I have changed the site's home page. That has been necessary because I would like to be easier for collectors to find when they search for Corgi Toys. Google now say that web sites should adjust automatically to match the type of device they are being viewed on. So there need to be different versions for big desktop monitors, large tablets, small tablets and phones held one way or the other. They punish those sites that don't comply with low rankings. It's annoying bvut that's life these days. You can imagine that the coding for all that can be something of a nightmare!

Luckily, there are some nice people out there who not only make templates we can use but they also include code that detects the type of device and makes all the adjustments automatically. It's all quite impressive. I can just about manage to figure out most of it but it isn't that straightforward to transfer data from one place to another. So I found it considerably simpler to make a few new pages with the new style and leave all the rest as it was.

I am really hoping that Google will now start giving me some credit for this, although there are still 1000+ pages that do not comply with their requirements. The chances of me ever changing all of them are extremely thin unless someone out there has a particularly bright idea and some spare free time!

The new home page does enable me to show some nice images in king-size view and each one relates to a different section of the site: British cars, American cars etc.

The new 'latest additions' page works in a similar way, with links on the big picture page to the main site description etc.

While I was at it I decided to make the catalogues more accessible to collectors. These are great sources of information and just lovely to scroll through for hours on end. I still feature them under Lists in the main site but they can now be seen directly from the Corgi Catalogues link on the new home page. I have published nice quality pages from complete catalogues from 1958 all the way through to 1972, which I acquired recently.

I used to offer to supply digital copies of catalogues at a small fee but now you can download images as you wish without charge. A customer did ask me if I could make printed versions of these and I can imagine that they would be very popular. However, with many having 40 or more pages I would have to pay for at least 10 double sided pages. In small quantities they would come out at about £8 and setting up the pages in the right order so that they make a booklet at the end of the day isn't as simple as it sounds at all! So they would have to cost at least £10 and, guess what, that's about the price you can buy originals for if you look around! So, until I can find a cheaper print solution I will leave it to people to print their own if they wish.

Some of the catalogues are American or European versions. Sorry if the prices are confusing but these are the best I have at the moment.

The 1970s were very orange

I've added numbers for all the models featured on the cover of the 1971-2 Catalogue. Note that the only non-Whizzwheel survivors at that time were the Mini (in dark red-purple), the Bubble Car (why??) and the everlasting Batmobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the illustrated James Bond Aston Martin still has spoked wheels and tyre slashers.

161-6 are dreadful dragster models (165 isn't shown) which I really didn't want to include in my lists and certainly din't want to spend money acquiring. 163 is a revision of the Capri, making three versions around at this time and 166 is a disastrous wreck of the ancient Ford Mustang that used to be so cool. So those two will get into stock lists and I hope I can find a really cheap model of each for stock. The dragsters, though, I shall ignore and treat like the aeroplanes and other odd stuff so don't ask me any questions about them!

Following my previous musings on when to stop, I have now got lists of everything issued by Corgi from Marcel Van Cleemput's Great Book of Corgi and Andrew Wood's great summaries at Little Wheels. As so many casts were re-used in later years it seems sensible to take things up to the end of 1:43 scale. Ignoring farm machinery and commercial oddments, that would appear to add just one in 1974 (yet another VW Beetle!) and three in 1973 (Lamborghini, Datsun and Capri) as well as several more from 1972.

I have already included the later 1:43 versions of the James Bond Aston Martin and Toyota 2000GT in my stock lists and this will bring in the red Mustang #291 from 1972 and I may have to consider later versions of that. There have been many later 1:43 models but not until much later and after the listings I've got expire in 1983 so I think I can safely regard them as a whole new venture for another day.

I do finally have something approaching a complete catalogue to work to now. I had been worried about just what extending past 1969/70 would bring and there had been some sense in stopping at Whizzwheels, i.e. not including any, but the extra 56 cars is a manageable number and it will be quite fun tracking some down, looking variations and seeing how cheaply I can get the awful ones.

I shall add an on-line list in a separate post as it is likely to be something people find useful without wanting to read through all my ramblings on the topic.

The 1970s were very orange.