New arrivals in August

Gift Set 10 £TBA

1118 or 1133 (not sure now!) £TBA

1134 with 1135 cab! £TBA

418 late version with black steering wheel £40

Gift Set 19 £80

201M £65

Not a lot this month and really the only item acquired for re-sale is the Austin, a very nice example and a great improvment on the other one that came in last month.

The Rambler and Gift Set 10 items are awaiting a good box and missing elements. they are, though, in excellent condition and so this will make a good set for someone eventually. The two US Army items are not for sale at the moment. The truck is now confusing me as I realise now that it has text along the bonnet which makes it a 1133 but the flat roof on the canopy would have been a 1118, I think. And 1133s have stars on the doors. all in all, I am about to give up on these (for probably the third or fourth time since I started trying to list everything!) I need help with these.

The 1134/5 mix-up is weirdly fascinating but that's about all and I really don't expect that the other bits will be coming in any time soon so it'll be here on a desk for some years to come, I suspect!

The taxis are fun as there are so many small variations to collect. I thought I had this one but don't seem to. I do have a lot of deep maroon ones however that I shall probably never be able to sell for much more than a tenner. This does look pretty black which is a relief.

The Gift Set 19 is here merely because a customer wanted an original elephant. Now he doesn't. So I've added the cage and trailer I had to buy to get it to a nice red land Rover I had lying around and to that I can add either the plastic canopy shown here or the earlier tin blue canopy as required.

Corgi Toys @ 60: Bedford Machinery Carrier

From September 1958 we have another use for the 'Big' Bedford cab, now attached to a machinery carrier base and similar in many ways to the Low Loader issued earlier in the year. This has the same winch but in place of a ramp there is a detachable rear axle and two fold-down ramps of wheel width only.

You could have fun with this model, hauling whatever you could find on to the back, or driving other toys up the ramps and off again somewhere else on the carpet. Only certain shapes would work with the winch, though, and that handle was rather unrealistic and tended to spoil things a bit. I am sure that something more to scale would have still functioned as well.

Strangely, I have never had one of these 1104 models and so the illustration is with acknowledgements to QDT. It seems that all the 1104 models had a red cab with a black detachable rear axle. Some may have a matt black finish but the normal ones are gloss black.

This model has a long life and this gets extended yet further in 1963 when it gets the later TK style cab and a capstan affair with a couple of spare tyres replaces the winch.