Risk Tolerance

Now we know why there was a delay in getting the BreyerFest Contest information posted: they did… stuff to the rules. The Costume Contest is still online and the Diorama Contest requires you to “pre-enter” it online before bringing it to BreyerFest. And some people are still barred from entering because of the legalities involved in that.  

The Customs Contest seems to still be mostly the same, even though I think (personally) that it’s the one contest that needs the most revision. (The “Most Drastic” category is really just an Original Sculpture competition, and you can’t convince me otherwise.)

To be honest, I really don’t have a lot of free time I can exclusively devote to being creative for its own sake, so I feel like I’m the only person in the hobby right now who is not terribly phased by all this.  

I do have a couple of Diorama ideas I might pursue if some free time does open up – one easy and silly, one elaborate and time consuming. I am assuming that 95 percent of the entries for this contest are going to be either Oktoberfest or Christmas Market-related, as will be winners, which might also affect what entry I end up choosing. (If I even do it.)

While I do have Costume Contest ideas, most of them involve a lot of sewing, and what little sewing time I do have for myself (lunchtime, basically) has been spent working on my backlog of quilt projects. So that is likely a complete no-go.

I like that this year’s random category in the Customs Contest involves a relatively unpopular/not often customized mold. I kind of wish it had been something vintage instead of more modern, but going with something that’s currently in production makes sense, since not everyone has easy access to cheap old bodies like I do. The Geronimo mold doesn’t do much for me, though. 

(The three-legged Grazing Foal in my body box, on the other hand, has me full of ideas!)

But anyway, here’s a little of the actual model horse content you come here for: another mystery model!

When I saw the auction lot, I initially dismissed it as either a heavily yellowed Fleabitten Gray Sham, or a discolored Shrinky Bay Sham. But the price was not… terrible, and there was enough evidence there that I decided to take a modest bet on it. 

And it seems to be authentic?

Alas, the model came with no documentation, and the group of models it came with offers no clues to its origins, either. The qualities of the paint job suggest an origin in the 1990s, but it’s clearly not the same Buckskin Sham that was auctioned off in 1998. 

I’m torn between getting him restored and leaving him the way he is; I’ll probably keep him the way he is, because I’m cheap and I’m also unlikely to show him.

Incidentally, this means my tally of “oddball” Shams is now up to four. I swear I don’t have a problem. 

The Test Subject

While I’ve had my share of fabulous Internet finds, the thrill of actually acquiring one still hasn’t faded after all these years. But it doesn’t feel entirely real until it arrives at your front door:

Initially I thought he was one of that class of models where a production color has been altered in some way, usually with the addition (or more rarely, the absence of) an additional layer of factory paint. You see them every once and a while – Chestnuts turned into Bays, Palominos turned into Buckskins.

One of the more recent Special Runs of this type was Koh-I-Noor, a 2018 Web Special on the Totilas mold that was created from leftover pieces from the 2017 Christmas Horse Winter Wonderland.

There are lots of Test Colors of this type that were created in the 1970s and early 1980s, presumably by employees. I also suspect that the small number of Production Run models that were issued in both Palomino and Bay probably had some flawed Palominos turned into Bays, though I’d classify those more as oddities or variations than actual Test Colors. 

So when I bought this Five-Gaiter, I assumed he was one of that subcategory of models, presumably a Sorrel with added black points (among other things). Even his braids are white and red, just like a typical #52 Sorrel Five-Gaiter.

No, this dude is way weirder than that, and I’m not just referring to the arbitrarily added chain reins. He has a masked blaze – like several Five-Gaiter releases in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Wing Commander – and his color definitely has yellow undertones you don’t see in your average vintage Breyer Sorrel. He also has tri-colored eyes similar to the lizard-like “bi-eyes” that were experimented with in 1995, though more neatly rendered. 

You know who he most reminds me of, though? Releases like the Half-Year Shams in the early 1990s, including the infamous “Green Bay” Sham from the #3163 Arabian Stallion and Foal Gift Set. He has the same gray overspray that’s meant to add depth and shading to the base color, but just turns the entire model a weird muddled shade of greenish-gray, instead.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this guy was simply a model that wasn’t so much designed, but experimented upon. In other words, he’s not a Test Color, but a Test Subject. 

And as such, so much more fascinating to me than fancier, more modern Test Colors. 

Buy It Anyway

You’d think I’d be pretty blasé about just about everything Breyer by now, and by and large I am, but sometimes even I see things that leave me a little stupefied. 

During my lunch break at work last night (a little after 3 a.m. Eastern, in case you’re wondering), I’m noshing on my cheese and crackers and window shopping on eBay, until this mystery pops up on the computer screen: 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/165089494902?ViewItem=&item=165089494902

My first reaction was (naturally) What the what?

When confronted with models of a questionable nature, it’s generally a good idea to err on the side of caution. Most things are – or turn out to be – absolutely ordinary items that we misinterpret due to a combination of bad photography and wishful thinking. 

I always shake my head when I see things get priced or bid up to some crazy figure in the hope that it’s something that, to my eyes, it is obviously not. (Chalkies and Glossies, ahem.)

Anyway, I had no idea what I was looking at, but it appeared to be Original Finish, it was located in New Jersey, it was cheap, and the postage was free. All that added up to the right side of questionable to me!

So that’s when I discovered how to do a Buy It Now on eBay as a Guest, because of course I couldn’t remember any of my passwords for any of my accounts, because it was 3 a.m. and I thought I would just killing a little time on the Internet.

I guess this might make up for missing out on that pretty sweet Albino Five-Gaiter a few weeks back? Guess I’ll find out in about a week! 

And even if it isn’t all that, the monetary investment was pretty minimal. I’ve spent more on raffle tickets that have gotten me bupkis. 

Das Model

Today’s going to be a bit of a mixed bag. I spent most of the weekend pulling weeds and dodging tornados:

https://weather.com/storms/severe/video/possible-tornadoes-leave-trail-of-damage-near-detroit

Armada is where my infamous local flea market is, the place where many of the things you see here were found. Though I haven’t been there since the pandemic began, for many reasons.

And for obvious reasons the paper Samplers are still delayed. Just a few more days though, I think.

But back to happier thoughts! Like a thing I bought!

Although superficially similar to the 1987 Just About Horses Special Run, this Trakehner appears to be a Test for the Samsung Woodstock, on the Morganglanz mold. And since I’ve been casually window shopping for both Trakehners and Morganglanzes, I kind of had to have him.

In terms of Trakehners, the only ones that seem out of my reach are the Gloss Hicksteads, and the Solid Chestnuts that randomly popped up in Grab Bags back in 2008. I’m not sure I am even going to count the Trakehner Society Trakehner, because unless it comes with paperwork or an ironclad provenance, I am going to find all of the ones advertised as such extremely suspect.

This Chestnut Trakehner is also slightly suspect, but there was enough there to hang my hat on, so I went with it. I try to limit myself to only a handful of extravagant purchases a year, and this was it. I wanted the Classic Andalusian Stallion Unicorn from the same sellers too, but I decided not to push my luck after winning the Trakehner.

I am not going to see him as a portent of next year’s German-themed BreyerFest; I am a little skeptical that they’d pull the mold out again after it was used last year for Thorn. Morganglanz might be a nice choice for a Diorama Contest prize, but I’ve already committed myself to getting my ENTIRE STORAGE UNIT OF CRAFT PROJECTS (no lie) done instead. 

Besides, all the ideas I already have in my head are either too obscure (making a Breyer look like a Steha!) or kinda terrifying (I don’t have the legs for a Klaus Nomi costume anyway.) Kraftwerk, Fritz Lang, Der Blaue Reiter….

(Am I the only one that thinks a Wedgewood Blue Cleveland Bay with a darker blue mane and tail would be perfect for the Decorator offering, though? Pretty please?)

I am also thinking that if BreyerFest next year (crosses fingers) is in person, that it might be time I host an Ice Cream Social/Meet and Greet at the Kentucky Horse Park at some point during the weekend. The idea is only notional at this point, and dependent on my getting my nonsense together. But if it looks possible, that’s where my extra energies will be directed.

Liver Chestnut Scratching Foal Oddity

On the left is your standard, garden-variety #169 Liver Chestnut Scratching Foal, a relatively scarce vintage model who was only in production from 1970 through 1971. This release used to be hard to come by, but then the Internet and eBay happened, so not as much anymore.

They still sell for decent price – especially ones with good shading and detail, or with original boxes and stickers – but the big money in the Scratching Foal game is with either Test Colors or some of the scarcer Fun Foal variations like the Black, Dark Gray, or Blue Roan.

But who is the Foal on the right? I’m not sure! It’s either a Test Color that just happens to be very similar to the Liver Chestnut, or it’s a Liver Chestnut with a factory overhaul, and lots of extra dark shading and added black points.

There were a lot of Special Runs in the 1980s that were basically just updates of previous Regular Runs; the first ones that come to mind are two of the Montgomery Ward Christmas SRs: the Dapple Gray Shire from 1982-1983, and the Alabaster Old Timer from 1983.

There were subtle differences that distinguished those SRs from their Regular Run antecedents: the newer Shires tended to have fewer and more random dapples, and the newer Old Timers didn’t have the heavy gray body shading that the original #200 was known for.

So this subtly different Liver Chestnut Scratching Foal could have been a Test for a similar Special Run that didn’t happen.

The other theory is that – like some other Oddities that have popped up in recent years (the Palomino Family Arabian Mares with black points, et al) – it might have been something that a painter enhanced at the factory, either as a gift or for their own amusement.

There’s also the possibility that it was a Cull that Marney or one of her cohorts salvaged at the Chicago factory: it came out of a collection in Illinois within a reasonable driving distance of Chicago, with other oddities that obviously came straight from the factory. And touching up salvageable Culls with a bit of black paint was very much a Marney thing!

One this is certain, though: it’s not a Test Color for the original release of the Scratching Foal. The earliest Scratching Foals – including my Liver Chestnut one, above left – don’t have a USA mold mark, but my new dark and lovely one does.

Test Colors on the Scratching Foal are a bit hard to come by; the closest I came before was a Cull that I purchased off eBay from the family of a former Breyer contractor, also in the Chicago area.

The funniest thing about this situation was that I was making a few additions and changes to my BreyerFest want list, and the Scratching Foal was one of the molds I wanted to focus on this year!

Brown Rin Tin Tin Variation

On the left is a standard issue #64 Rin Tin Tin from the 1950s or 1960s. On the right is the re-release #327 “German Shepherd” from the early 1970s.  But who’s the mostly-brown guy in the middle?

Heck if I know!

Normally I’d just chalk him up as a later variation of the original Rin Tin Tin, with looser, less defined markings. The #64 Rin Tin Tin ran for about ten years (from ca. 1956 through 1965), and variations are not unusual in production runs that long.

My fellow on the left is the most common variant – dark saddle and tail, white chest, face and tail tip – but I’ve seen him lighter and darker, with more shading and less, with pink tongues and red. I’ve even seen a Chalky one!

The thing is that this brown one was being sold as a part of a collection that was obviously from a collector active in the Chicago area during the Chicago era (pre-1985).

Whenever something a little unusual is found under those circumstances, it makes you wonder if there’s more than meets the eye. Test Color? Oddity? Employee Take-Home?

I know there’s at least one Matte Brown German Shepherd floating around; the 1972 and 1973 Collector’s Manuals show a photograph of a light brown one, and one was listed in Marney’s estate sale in 1992 (though the list doesn’t specify if it was Matte or Gloss).

In spite of the fact that Breyer was phasing out Gloss finishes by then, they still continued to experiment with them on Test Colors in the early 1970s.

So it’s possible that there’s something more than meets the eye with my newest Rin Tin Tin.

Most likely not, though; too many of us automatically assume that whenever we run across something we haven’t seen before, it must automatically be something rare, or unusual. Sometimes it’s just something we haven’t run across before – nothing more, nothing less.

He does make a nice trio with my other two though, doesn’t he?

Suckling Foal Oddity

I’ve been keeping busy the past several days by sorting through ephemera – both stuff that was pulled for research purposes, and “new” stuff that I’ve acquired over the past few years that I never got around to properly classifying and filing in the first place.

It’s almost as much fun as cleaning and sorting box lots of horses! Speaking of, I find myself presented with a particularly challenging little filly in a recent box lot acquisition:

The Suckling Foal from the original #3155 Thoroughbred Mare and Foal Set didn’t come in a lot of variations. It does come in Chalky, and it was one of the handful of releases that came in Gray Plastic without a Chalky Basecoat.

(The best known of those being the Elephant and Donkey, of course!)

But other than some slight variations in color and shading (lighter and darker) the Foal’s paintjob was remarkably consistent throughout its twelve-year run (1973-1984).

So when I found this one with two front stockings – well, she clearly had to come home with me.

The rest of the items in the lot weren’t bad either, but did not provide any hint of her origins. The seller was from a location not too far from Chicago, so that opens up the possibility of her being an Employee Take-Home. The paint job on the other side of her neck is a little uneven, too, which would be consistent with her being a finished Cull.

The only problem I have with her is that someone decided to spray some aftermarket gloss finish, and  they did a terrible job of it. Runs, drips, globs, lint and hair? She’s got them all!

Aftermarket gloss is not impossible to remove, but the fact that she’s a more-unusual-than-average oddity makes me extremely apprehensive about trying anything. So on the shelf she goes, with all my other rehab projects...

Another Oddball FAM

Here I thought I was doing pretty good earlier this week when I picked up an inexpensive box lot of unicorns through a local auction house. Even after taking out a few treasures for myself (the Hagens), I should be able to make a nice little profit from the rest of the lot at BreyerFest.

Then I saw what that Mahogany Bay Family Arabian Mare went for on eBay. Yikes! If only I could be that lucky.

Well actually, I have been, but my problem is that the really good stuff tends to stick around. The ability to own a rare and beautiful thing tends to trump whatever financial considerations I have – and it’s usually easier just to sell off things I am not as emotionally invested in, horses or otherwise, until the need passes.

Ironically, one of the models I had been waffling on has been my other Oddball/Test Color FAM, here hanging with a couple of friends:

Isn’t she lovely? She’s basically a mid-1970s Matte Palomino with a Palomino mane and tail, a simple yet surprisingly effective alteration. I assume she was another Factory Employee Take-Home, possibly a Cull that was fished out of the reject bin and finished for gifting.

I picked her up pretty cheaply several years ago on eBay, before Family Arabian Mares of any stripe were a thing. I remember being a little apprehensive about paying that much money for what was essentially a glorified Matte Palomino FAM.

It doesn’t seem as foolish a deal now. (Less than two percent of the Mahogany Mare’s selling price, if you’re curious.) She is staying: she only happens to be on my sales shelving unit because I am still in the process of reorganizing here.

I have to say, though, that I am as shocked as anyone that the Family Arabian Mare – who has been, historically, the least appreciated of the three Family Arabian molds – is now a “hot” item.

This is good for her, though not so good for me. I might have to find another lightly collected, underappreciated and cheap Traditional mold to obsess over now, or at least until this craziness blows over.

FAMs as PAMs?

Several years ago I acquired a Matte Dapple Gray Family Arabian Mare in a Body Box lot. She was missing a leg and half an ear, but I didn’t care:

I knew there was at least one other Dapple Gray Family Arabian Mare like her out there, and where there are two, there are usually more. I assumed that she was either a Salesman’s Sample or very early production piece of the Proud Arabian Mare, produced before the Proud Arabian Mare mold was ready for full production.

I also assumed that meant there had to be at least a few Mahogany Bay Family Arabian Mares out there too, either sitting unnoticed in someone’s collection, or passed off as a simple variation of the Bay.

(Any Matte Alabasters that would have/could have been produced would have been virtually identical/indistinguishable from the original Matte Alabaster FAMs, save for a little extra body shading, perhaps.)

So it wasn’t a complete surprise when a Mahogany Bay Family Arabian Mare showed up – on eBay, of course. What was odd about it was that it came with the original White Cardboard Picture box, and a not-quite-matching Bay Proud Arabian Foal.

Oddballs and obvious Samples have turned up in retail boxes before, especially the enclosed cardboard ones of the 1970s and early 1980s. It might have been done to round out the production quota for the day, or (according to a rumor I heard from Marney herself) to give the hobby community a few little surprises to go hunting for.

But if these Oddball Mares were Samples or simply very early production items, you’d expect to find them with Corrugated Shipper Boxes: the Proud Arabian Mare debuted in 1972, but the retail-friendly White Cardboard Picture Boxes didn’t appear until 1973.

A random thought occurred to me a while back, now bolstered by this Mahogany Bay Mare and her box: what if these Mares were straight-up goofs? What if – like so many hobbyists – one of the factory painters simply confused the PAM mold with the FAM mold?

If so, it was obviously a mistake that was caught early. This is a darn shame, since I have grown rather fond of Mahogany Bay as a color.

I had the strange misfortune of actually finding the Mahogany Bay FAM auction very shortly after it was listed, and fumbled around the page for a few anxious seconds desperately looking for the “Buy It Now” button that was not there.

So I will simply have to be content with my three-legged mare…

Another Oddball Stud Spider

Something short today. Work’s been running late this week and my brains feel like mashed potatoes right now.

In spite of my best intentions, I bought a horse this week. You can totally see why:

It’s a Stud Spider with two socks!

Like the #48 Black Morgan, the original Stud Spider release was prone to variations. I’ve seen multiple blanket variations, gray hooves, black hooves, missing stars, and oh goodness, the socks.

Right fore sock, left fore sock, four actual socks, no socks at all? Seen them all before, and own most of them. And now, another! As with the Morgan, an alarming number of Stud Spiders variations have turned up on my doorstep over the years. Few are turned away.

Most variations from the right front sock “norm” were incidental, occurring randomly within day-to-day production. (The four-sock version was allegedly a one-day production error.) They show up in the market with varying frequency; the left front sock variation seems to be the least difficult among them to find.

This two stocking combo is something I haven’t seen – or even had heard of – before. That’s saying something, coming from me.

It’s possible that he was some sort of Chicago factory employee “Take-Home” model. I have good reason to suspect it: it’s from the same Chicago-area seller on eBay who recently sold that oddball Palomino Family Arabian Mare with the Black mane and tail for over $1000.

That particular kind of oddball is actually semi-common: it seems to have been a thing back for employees back then to touch up botched Palominos Culls into quasi-Buckskins. Or even as production salvage jobs: every once and a great while I see a “Bay” Grazing Mare or Foal that suspect started life as a Palomino.

(“If we put black points on this we can totally pass this off as a Bay, right?”)

More About Iridescence

I had a perfectly lovely day today – had a last minute work reschedule that actually gave me the day off, so I spent it doing (mostly) fun stuff, including a bit of horse shopping.

(Yes, I know I am extremely lucky that I can go horse shopping at multiple stores. I’m telling you folks, if the possibility of coming to the Metro Detroit area comes up for you, let that be an enticement.)

Here’s the thing I’ve been meaning to show you all for a while: a Poodle with an iridescent collar!

It’s a little hard to capture in a photograph, but basically it’s a red color with a translucent layer of gold iridescence on top. It’s 100 percent Original Finish, and came out of that Chicago collection with all those other odd and mysterious models that were probably factory Oddballs, Tests, Samples and Whatnots.

Since the only early, pre-Reeves models that I know about that have any factory-original iridescence on them are the Kittens – released in 1966 – and all of the models in that collection date to 1966 or before, the logical assumption is that they are somehow related.

A test of the paint before production for the Kittens? A test after production of the Kittens for possible use on the Poodle? Or someone just getting silly with the new paint at the factory one day?

The seller never provided any more context, so it’ll probably remain a mystery.

The funny thing was that when I purchased him (paired with a White one) he didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary: the effect is hard to capture in photographs, and the seller obviously didn’t know there was anything different about them in the first place.

Needless to say, I was extremely pleased when I pulled him out of the shipping box back in March.  

On the flip side, he was supposed to be an upgrade of my other green-eyed Poodle, so now I had to make room for another. I think I have enough Black Poodles now to form a sled team...

Another Mustang Oddity

From another grungy box lot arises yet another weird Buckskin Mustang I feel compelled to keep….

He’s another one of those plastic oddities from the early 1970s – the surface physically feels like chalk, the plastic looks bright white in places, and he has some paint flaking characteristic of an Opaque White Plastic Chalky.

But he isn’t a White Plastic Chalky – he’s not opaque enough. And he’s not simply an exceptionally white model that hasn’t yellowed one iota from the day it was pulled from the mold, because he doesn’t have the translucency of standard, garden-variety Tenite, either.

(Most exceptionally white vintage models, I believe, were molded from fresh Tenite that was completely unadulterated by any regrind. The more regrind there is in the mix, the faster and more deeply a model will yellow.)

No, this fellow is something in between.

He was found in a collection with a couple of genuine Basecoat Chalkies and at least one other piece that might be of the same “stuff” (that one’s still grungy, so I can’t tell yet).

So he fits in with my earlier hypothesis, which is that at some point during the Chalky era, Breyer started mixing the Opaque White Chalky plastic with the standard Semi-Translucent White plastic to get this – kind of plastic I still struggle to find a proper name for. (Milky White? Bright White? Partial Chalky?)

So now I find myself in the possession of not one, but two oddball Buckskin Mustangs from the 1970s. Of all the crazy things you can find in box lots....

Silver Linings and Gold Trims

Not that one either:

Even though I wasn’t as emotionally invested in Rodney as I had been the two previous Micro Run online Payment-Raffles – Marshall and Dugan – and I’m stretched rather thin financially at the moment, I still entered every day anyway.

I have the two variations of the Dall Sheep – Gray Horn and Tan Horn – and a nice early example of the original Bighorn Ram itself. But I do not have one of the later Reissues, from which the bodies of this Special Run were likely drawn.

I did at one point, but I must not have found the example I had to be particularly appealing enough to keep. (I didn’t find the “right one”, I guess.)

That makes me 0 for 3 since the switch to the online raffle system for Micro Runs, by the way. Y’all know my opinion on this new system, and since I seem to be in the minority about it, that's as far as I'll go.

In the meantime, on to happier things. Here’s another Traditional Man o’ War. There is something special about this guy – can you see it?

He doesn’t have any gold trim on his halter!

Generally hobbyists are quick to label something like this a Cull, but since this model is otherwise flawless (for a model from the early 1970s), I think he is better classified as an Oddity: the gold trim was the last, or one of the last steps in the decorating process, and it was obviously skipped.

A detail like that could have easily been overlooked, especially if it was the end of the day and/or they had to rush an order out. A lot of times even we don’t notice these subtle mistakes, unless it’s a mold we obsess about – like me with the Traditional Man o’ War, currently.

(Which may have been the reason why I got him so cheap!)

Since he has lighter gray (but not Battleship Gray) hooves, a USA mold mark, and warmer orange-brown tones to his body color, this example is probably dateable to the period from 1970-1973.

He also happened to be purchased from the same collection as that mighty fine Bay Proud Arabian Stallion I recently spotlighted, who also from that same time period.

Anomalous Chalky Alabaster Running Mare

Since the minor research projects I’ve been working on this week aren’t yet ready for prime time, here’s a picture of an oddity I picked up a little while back in a box lot. A strange chalky Alabaster Running Mare:

Believe it or not, she was in significantly worse condition when I found her; there’s still plenty of room for improvement, but I haven’t had the time to do much else than add her to the herd whitening in the window. She’s presentable enough for our purposes today, though.

Chalky Alabaster Running Mares are part of the “Anomalous” group of Chalkies, ones either not made during the Chalky Era (1973-1975) or of more recent (Reeves) origins. The Alabaster Running Mare was discontinued in 1970, and the mold mark on this old lady is absent her USA mark, which means that my example is not an early 1970s Reissue (aka Post Production Special Run) either.

What’s even weirder about her is that her Chalkiness is uneven; where she’s yellowish in the picture is where the Chalkiness is thinnest – or in the case of the lower part of the left hind leg, nonexistent. It’s not a matter of wear and tear, since the gray shading on the mane, tail, head and hooves is not equally “worn away”. It’s most noticeable in her tail, in fact, which appears to be half Chalky and half not-Chalky underneath the gray paint!

Weird, very weird.

At first I thought maybe the opaque white areas were an unusually smooth and even form of precipitate – typically a crusty layer of powdery residue that can form on the surface over time, usually in areas that were aggressively cleaned (buffed and smoothed down with acetone) at the factory, but I don’t think that’s the case.

Is it milkiness, maybe? The thing about milkiness though, is that it’s translucent, not opaque. And usually sits on top of any other paint, not underneath it.

What it looks like to me is that Breyer might have taken a model that was inconsistently white for whatever reason (due to contaminated regrind or differently-colored acetate batches?) and lightly sprayed it with white paint to smooth the color out. It’s only with the passage of time that the unevenness becomes obvious.

The Alabaster Running Mare is a relatively rare Chalky, and I haven’t seen any others in person to judge if mine falls within the norm, or is even more anomalous than I thought.

(FYI: Yes, her mouth was sawed open by a previous owner.)

Not What She Seems

One of the advantages of switching to overnights at work for the time being is that I’ve managed to miss most of the drama involving Copperfox. It’s kind of hard getting angry or righteous at 7 a.m. in the morning, after working the previous 12 hours.

As for my opinions of the matter itself, I’ll have to decline on commenting, as I was once in a very similar position myself many years ago. Nothing that progressed to the point of incurring any legal or financial burdens, fortunately, but it did provide me some insight and and a certain degree of circumspection.

Here’s another little nugget I unearthed recently:

At first glance, she looks like a Buckskin Touch of Class. Since the Touch of Class mold was never released in Buckskin, either as a Regular or Special Run, the first assumption would be that she’s either a Test Color or a variation, right?

Well, that’s what I thought when I bought her, too. You don't see many Tests, Variations or Oddities of the Touch of Class; she's not the most popular of molds, so she doesn't get around much. As you likely know by now, I sort of have a thing for Tests and Oddities on unpopular things, so I was somewhat excited when I came across her on the Internet some time ago.

However, when I received her it was very obvious that she was a Shrinky who had color shifted in a particularly appealing way: to a Golden Buckskin, instead of the more typical Greenish or Grayish variety.

Funny how slight changes in the paint formulas can lead to such different chemical reactions!

It's probably a moot point with this Touch of Class, since she's not the kind of thing most hobbyists would take to a show anyway, but I've often wondered how we'd classify something like her.

While it has some similarities to the situation we have with older Breyer Palominos, in this case the color has changed not from one shade to another, but from one thing (Bay) to another thing (Buckskin).

Yes, I am aware that Buckskin is a dilution of Bay, genetically, but we're talking paint and intent here. She wasn't meant to be Buckskin: when she came out of the factory, she was a run-of-the-mill Bay. It was a fortunate combination of chemistry and environment made her the way she is today.

Perhaps we can create a "fun" class for Bloaties, Shrinkies, and other ne'er-do-wells who would otherwise be collectible? We all have a few environmentally-challenged beloveds in the herd just itching to get in the ring, even if only in jest...

I wouldn’t mind seeing a Touch of Class in this color for reals, but considering the lack of popularity of this mold, it seems to be a ways off. Especially since she was just released this year in flaxen chestnut in the new #1727 "Let’s Go Racing" set.

Brick Pavers

Another quiet day at the flea market; it’s not that there wasn’t anything to buy, but that I’ve been in more of a selling mode than a buying mode, and I already have plenty to sell. I have a rather big expense coming up this week too, that helped stay my hand the few times.

I guess there was a big model horse auction down in Indiana on Saturday; I was momentarily tempted, only because a Raffle Model Fiero was involved. It’s a long story, about a debt I’m not obligated to pay, but weighs heavily on my mind nonetheless.

The interest it generated on Blab quashed that idea almost immediately. I think it ended up going in the neighborhood of $600 - "cheap" in a relative sense, though not sufficiently for me. Good for the seller/estate, though, which is all that matters.

I’ve spent most of the weekend so far taking care of other old business, some of it model horse related, but mostly not. (The garden looks…better. Not good, but not embarrassing.)

I did a quick survey of my Polled Hereford Bull situation, and I have six, not five: one I had thought I sold I apparently didn’t. He’s very similar to another variation that I have, as in both of them appear to be made of one of those bright white, almost-Chalky Tenites they were messing around with in the early 1970s. (I haven’t found a "true" Chalky of the PHB - yet.)

The one I’ll be keeping is a very bright cinnamon color with high airbrushed socks, and the one that I’ll be selling (eventually) has shorter socks and more of a brick-red tone. Even thought they’re easily distinguishable, and not one of those only-I-can-see-it variations, I’ve gotten to the point where more subtle variations aren’t that much of a big deal to me anymore.

And besides, the PHB mold is BIG. He’s like a brick paver with legs. He has an almost Othello-like quality for eating up shelf space. There's only so many I can keep around.

One of my Polled Herefords who is not going anywhere for quite some time is this oddball that I picked up from Bob Peterson a while back:

He wasn’t too expensive, actually, because there’s not a lot of competition for rare and/or weird Polled Hereford Bulls. I’m not too sure what he was supposed to be - a touched up cull, maybe? Someone goofing around with the airbrush on their lunch break? A straight up test color? Something associated with the Robbins Weathervane program?

I tend to think that last supposition is the most likely, because he has a "piggy bank" slot cut out of his back that was done prior to painting, not unlike the drill holes that were done on the Weathervane models. I find his slot incredibly appropriate: if any model had sufficient interior space to store spare change, it’s the Polled Hereford Bull.

Shades of White

Okay, so now the scuttlebutt is that the Shetland Ponies I mentioned last post might/will be a Vintage Club release, so the reference to last year’s e-mail photo was probably the correct one.

I am a little ambivalent about the concept only because, duh, there never were any Decorator Pintos. There were rumors of Decorator Pinto Test Colors floating around back in the day, but I found those rumors even less substantial than the Christmas Decorator ones.

(I swear Reeves does these sneaky reveals on the "Kid Tours" just to mess with us, knowing the kids are going to be fixated on the newer molds in more realistic colors.)

I found some charged batteries, so here’s the Calf I mentioned previously, with his Regular Run cohort:

So now you see why I am not so eager to send the little bugger back!

Yes, I know my Regular Run Calf is yellowed, but it looks worse than it actually is because the Oddball is very stark white - not Chalky or Opaque White Plastic, but I could see how some people could mistake it for such.

That sort of thing happens, from time to time: someone at the factory - possibly by accident - came up with the perfect mix of virgin (fresh) plastic, plasticizer, and colorant. I have an Alabaster Western Pony that’s so white it almost glows in the dark. (Discontinued in 1970, if you’re trying to do the math at home.)

It’s been recently reported on Blab that someone found an older Chestnut Belgian that was actually made of a mix of standard white and Chalky white plastic, which only really reveals itself when held up to a strong light. (Ooh, swirly!)

This does not surprise me at all. Breyer was experimenting with whatever plastic they could get their hands on in the early 1970s (the Chalky Era), and it undoubtedly included many different colors of white in addition to all those funky reds, browns, grays, purples and greens.

In the sometime questionable light of a factory, the mixing of these various whites would become an inevitability, if not an economic necessity. 

It’s even happened more recently, with some of the Stablemates molds: at some point, the Glow-in-the-Dark plastic that was used to make the Giveaway Andalusian Keychains was mixed in with the standard white stuff, giving some later releases a faint luminescence.

Other colors sometimes got swirled into the standard white plastic, especially in the Chalky Era, but they generally got painted over - either by a solid dark (or black) paint job, or with a Chalky basecoat first. Reeves does this even today, as many faux finishers have discovered first hand.

And…I just opened up my Yellow Mount that I bought from That Guy, and guess what? Aside from being one of the nicest Yellow Mounts I’ve ever seen, his plastic is also snowball-white.

Interesting.

(His variations are pretty subtle - tan instead of pink shading, more gray on his muzzle - but I bought him mostly because I wanted a nice Yellow Mount at a nice price. Done, and done.)

Rumor Roundup

I really need to learn how to estimate my time better: I’m still dreadfully behind on my To-Do list. And so much has happened in the past couple of days in model horse land, it’s like a whole new landscape every time I log on.

Since I still haven’t located the thumb drive with those extra posts I wrote during my Illinois excursion, we’ll do a brief roundup of that news…

The latest Collectors Club Web Special is the Show Jumping Warmblood in a Glossy Solid…Chestnut? Palomino? Dunalino? Something warm and sunny, appropriate for the god who totes the Sun around in his chariot: Apollo. A solid color on a Web Special is a nice change of pace, and he is quite handsome, but my even my emergency fun-money fund is completely tapped out. I hate to pass on him, but I just might have to.

I made a late-night semi-awesome Buy It Now purchase on eBay a couple days ago. You’ll see why I jumped on that BIN button like Vita on a bone when it gets here in a few days.

In other eBay purchases, another one of my lots from That Guy with That Stuff on eBay has arrived, in another painfully small box. The Cow and Calf set I bid on was not the Cow and Calf set I received. Normally this would be an automatic return, but it’s a little more complicated than that: they were not the oddities I bid on, but they were still oddities nonetheless.

The auction pictures showed a Holstein Cow with a gray udder, and a Calf with tan hooves. What I received was a Holstein Cow that appears to be a cull, and a Calf with gray ears, gray muzzle, and a solid black tail.

(I’d show you all a picture, but my battery charger for the camera is packed away. Also.)

So yeah, kind of a weird situation. I don’t have time to deal with any extra drama at this point, so I think I’ll just let it go. At the price I paid, they could have been ordinary Regular Runs, and I still would have been a good deal. Anything after that is a bonus. (I also don’t think there was any genuine malice intended: That Guy, like so many of our friends and family, might not be able to tell one subtly different set of Cows from another. So it goes.)

Reeves released the BreyerFest 2013 App, which would matter to me more if I did anything more with my phone than send and receive phone calls. (I’d rather not even have one, but that’s another issue entirely.) Half the hobby is complaining about having to pay a whole 99 cents for it, and the other half are complaining that it’s not available on Android.

My brother actually downloaded the 2012 App to his phone last year just for kicks (allegedly) and found it quite admirable, and I generally take his word with these sort of things. (BTW, my brother is fully BreyerFest-trained and knows what Woodgrains, Decorators and Hagen-Renakers are. And he’s single. If you're looking.)

Per intel from the Mother’s Day Kids-Only Breyer Headquarters Tour, the previously announced mid-year release of "Trooper" is going to be on the Cleveland Bay mold. The photographs I’ve seen are all fuzzy and somewhat unreliable, so there’s no way I’m going to pass judgment on him based on that. A Dark Bay/Sunburnt Black Cleveland Bay seems like a winner to me, at least conceptually.

Also speaking of unreliable, the same source just happened to spot what appeared (to them) to be some Decorator-y Shetland Ponies. That’s all there really is to that bit of news, Everything else is speculation - including the initial reports that you have, or will run into in the next several hours that they might be somehow related to this year’s BreyerFest Surprise/Gambler’s Choice model.

It must also be noted that the much-circulated photo of proposed Vintage Club SRs from last year also featured a Copenhagen Pinto Shetland Pony, so it might also be related to that. Or any number of things. Might not even be a Shetland Pony at all, for all I know. 

There was more than that, I'm sure, but that To-Do List is not going to complete itself. Unfortunately.

Great Breyer Graveyards

They just listed a few more items from the Big Hobbyist Auction on the Munda’s web site (May 24th) so I’ve decided to temporarily add the Munda’s Auction site to my link list, for your convenience. The listings this go round are slightly better, though much amusement will still be found there. ("Bat Pinto"? Batman had a horse?)

Like a lot of people, I’m currently intrigued and baffled by the eBay auctions of a vendor out in Arizona: what looks like variations, oddities, culls and outright test colors are being auctioned off in rapid succession, and in great quantity. I’ve already bought a couple of what I’d consider
"safe" lots, where I think my potential loss of investment will be minimal if they don’t turn out to be what I think they might be. The first one has already arrived:

A Fawn without spots, and a Doe with darker than normal ears? Yeah, I know, not the most exciting lot of Breyers ever, but remember who you’re talking to here. This is the kind of stuff I eat for breakfast.

There’s been much speculation about these models and their origins. I’ve done a little of it myself over on Blab, but I’ll expand and continue my thoughts here, for the benefit of a wider audience.

There are several locations that seem to be harbors or wellsprings for rare and odd Breyers. Chicago is the first, of course: that’s where the factory was for the first 35 years or so of production. Then there’s New Jersey, the current location of Reeves International, and where full-scale production continued for the next 15 years, give or take, and still continues on a minimal basis.

California is sometimes seen as another one of the Great Breyer Graveyards, though I think its plentitude is exaggerated, a bit. California is BIG, in every sense of the word, so it’s only natural that there’d be slightly more rare and unusual stuff coming out of California than, say, Kansas or Wyoming. I do think that the Decorator saga has its roots out there, due to the Ungers, toy development gurus and longtime Breyer Sales Reps who were also partly responsible for bringing us Brenda Breyer.

The location that has always fascinated me, however, has been Arizona. When I was just getting into the hobby in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I kept hearing stories about crazy things being found at the flea markets in Arizona. I had relatives out in Las Vegas, and whenever it was casually mentioned that we might go on a road trip to visit them, my thoughts always turned to those magical flea markets I heard so much about.

(The furthest west we got was Arkansas. It involved Elvis, the Kentucky Horse Park, a liquor store, and Breyers. Of course.)

A few years ago - when I was working for an antiques dealer, who also was a story unto himself - a number of lots came up on eBay from a seller in Arizona. Lots with multiple pieces of the same item - a half dozen Bassett Hounds, or Benjis, or Charolais Bulls - and one spectacular collection lot with multiple bulls in colors I had never seen before: Brick Reds and Browns and Chocolate Milk Sorrels.

I tried for the lot, but naturally failed: I think it went somewhere in the $4000 to $5000 range, which isn’t as outrageous as it sounds, considering that there were at least 10-12 of those bulls in it, not including the more "normal" looking stuff that was thrown in for good measure. Even at that price, money could have been made.

They looked authentic to me, and apparently, it did to a lot of other people, too.

Since then I’ve always kept a lookout for auctions in the Arizona area, just in case. I’ve come across a few treasures, but I missed this vendor’s auctions earlier this year because I’ve been trying to keep my eBay shopping to a minimum. I was doing so good, until this week!

As to why Arizona, that’s still something of a mystery. Longtime mail-order company Horses International was based in Phoenix, and had many unique Special Runs of its own: perhaps these were samples from the warehouse that somehow came into someone’s possession?

Another theory that I’ve been mulling over is that these were somehow connected to Breyer’s little adventure in Mexico in the late 1970s. Peter Stone got a wild hair and thought that they could move production to Mexico, an endeavor that likely failed due to infrastructure problems. Most - though not all - of these models seem to be from that time period.

It could be that there’s a more mundane reason. Like all of the other Sellers of Unusual Breyers of Dubious Provenance, this seller is not being terribly forthcoming about their origins. Whether it’s because he’s got something to hide, or is just bluffing to cover his lack of knowledge, we also do not know.

All I know is that I performed the Lestoil test on the two most peculiar pieces in my Deer Lot - the Doe with the dark ears, and the spotless Fawn - and nothing but a little dust and dirt came off. 

Crazy Days

Man, another crazy set of days. I just want to go outside and run around the yard like the dog does when she’s in one of her moods. I’m not going to, because the consequences would be inconvenient, at best. I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next several days, and I don’t think they’d let me do it from whatever location they’d send me to if I did.

Anyway, I’ve been given clearance to talk a little about the project I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks. It’s not related to the Black Family Arabians in any way, so that’s going to have to wait a few more days to be discussed, because the matter I want to talk about today is somewhat time sensitive.

Much debate has been made in hobby circles about what to do with our collections when we are gone, or are past the point of managing and/or enjoying them to their fullest. We fret over the how the dispersal of our plentiful herds will happen, and if it will be done in as careful and meticulous a manner as they were assembled.

I was recently contacted by an old acquaintance who was facing this prospect. She has a rather large and impressive collection, but for a variety of reasons - some related to her health - she decided it was time seriously downsize.

When I mean "seriously" I’m talking about 1000 pieces, give or take.

Ebay, understandably, was not a practical solution to this problem.

The decision was made to send it to an auction house, one that would allow online bidding concurrent with the live auction. The collection would be broken up into discrete lots, and descriptions and notations carefully written to accompany them to assist the auction house. They were familiar with Breyers, and had auctioned some in the past, but nothing of this scale.

The first lots went up, and - well, here’s a link to them and you can observe for yourself:

http://www.mundaauctions.com/
(Auction house web site direct link. The auction in question is May 10th.)

https://www.proxibid.com/asp/Catalog.asp?aid=65691
(Direct link to catalog.)

Things did not go according to plan. This is a hobbyist who took a great deal of care to acquire this collection, and had a very good eye for oddities, variations, or just darn good pieces - in Chicago in the 1980s, so you can just imagine the kinds of stuff she has just from a Breyer standpoint. (There are more than just Breyers involved, but I'm assuming by your presence here that that's what you're looking for.)

Of course, none of this work is visible in the auction listings, which are cursory at best, and oddly focused on the dimensions of boxes, rather than the contents within.

After much phoning and e-mailing, it was decided that I’d come in and help curate the rest of the auctions. This will involve sorting, organizing, matching boxes and sets back together, getting proper descriptions written focusing on the details collectors would actually be interested in, and so on.

In the meantime, the auctions that are running now can’t really be changed, and since I haven’t seen them in person yet, I can’t give you any more details than what I can see myself. All I can say for sure is that there’s good stuff to be had there, and will be in the near future.

I have been given the go ahead to "advertise" these auctions, as they are, from every avenue available to me. This is being done in the hope that it will generate a response enthusiastic enough to catch the auction house’s eye, and perhaps garner a little more respect for the items being auctioned off at a later date.

The ultimate goal of this exercise - other than the dispersal of a collection - is, I hope, to set an example for these kinds of sales and auctions in the future, and allay some very real fears that we all have about the dispensation of our beloved herds.

More on the story, of course, as it develops.