#1060 PINMARK - VOLVO 760 (Nr. 001) (Around 1985)

This is another extreme die-cast rarity made by the company Pinmark in Poland. I found it in a flea market in Austria and I have seen it also on the Internet, although there seems to be only a few units remaining worldwide. 

I have seen pictures of this model in red or pink "Straz", green "Police" or white "Red Cross", but all of them with holes in the roof for a couple of sirens. This other toy that I have does not present the holes and comes with two stickers (one on the roof, another one in the bonnet) which are a racing number (RN34) and Pirelli logos, a bit in the style of rally cars. It is the only one of its kind that I have seen so far. The packaging (an important source of information) is unknown so far, so I cannot provide any remarks about Pinmark, the company that made them. The car is marked with number 001 in the base. Were there other models available? Was the numbering system (001 to, hypothetically, 999) a bit too ambitious?

The paintwork seems to be of very low quality, all cars I saw on the internet (except one) are playworn, and the interior is hidden by dark green windows. At the same time, the opening trunk is a sign of quality and the metallic base gives it some weight, which makes it looks like a more qualitative product in your hands. It is also noteworth that the base is painted black, when it would have been cheaper to leave it unpainted.

When it was new, I guess it looked great. We have to consider that, when it was made, Poland was still under a communist regime with limited access to foreign goods and raw materials, everything was done inland for the national market, which was closed to every other foreign toymaker, except maybe those of other socialist regimes. 

FACTS AND FIGURES:

• Name: VOLVO 760 (Nr. 001)
• Scale: 1:64
• Year: Around 1985
• Company: Pinmark (Poland)
• Size: approx. 7 cm

#1059 RONSON - RONSON REPEATER (Around 1922)

Ronson is, in principle, not a toy manufacturing company. They are world-wide known for making cigarette lighters, being one of the most important manufacturers by quality and market share.

My father collects gasoline lighters and he bought this one by mistake, thinking it was actually a lighter, but it is not. It is a toy gun that works with the same powderstrip that some kind of lighters also use. It produces a red flash and a soft sound and it seems to be the predecessor of the guns I knew as a kid which worked with plastic powder caps, and which action figure collectors may know from Thunder Punch He-Man from the masters of the Universe.

It is a very old gun, I have seen marked it in professional auction sites as mid-30s, but I have also found newspapers adds from 1922 or 1926, highlighting that it is completely harmless. The price in 1922 was 25 cents of a dollar, and you could get 1.000 shots for 1 more cent. For some reason, this product (and other similar ones) were broadly advertised on the newspapers, a simple internet search revealed dozens of pages like the following.

I can imagine, it was a great success at the time (the advertising says, they sold 100,000 a week before they started a national advertising campaign for it), there must be millions of them still around that have survived until today. So, it is not a complete rarity, but it is still around 100 years old. This makes it one of the two oldest toys presented in this blog so far. Despite the age, they are not expensive to find today.

Back to the product, the gun is completely made of metal and painted/lacked in black. The metal casting increases the detail level and it is also used to mark it as a Ronson product. My gun is still in a good shape, although the paint has been scratched (and is now partially lost) when playing with it. At the time there were no restrictions on toy guns, and, for example, the tip of it did not have to be painted red, so it really looks like a real gun. Other models I have seen in the Internet are in better shape.

 The body of the gun is marked with patent indications, as you can see in the next picture.

 

I didn´t have the chance so far to test it with the appropriate powder caps, as they are very rare nowadays, but it fits well in my hand. For adults, it looks like one of those lady guns that often appear in detective movies from the 1950s or before, which were much smaller than the male models.

This was one of the original boxes in which it was sold (picture taken from invaluable.com)

FACTS and FIGURES:

• Name: RONSON REPEATER
• Year: Around 1922
• Company: Ronson / The Art Metal Works (U.S.A.)
• Size: Around 14 cm