Mmm, Waffles

Good weekend at the markets:


The Donkey’s a Chalky, the Japan is unstickered but also unbroken, and the Misty body was a freebie. Unshown: a stack of Arabian Horse News magazines from the early 1960s, and another box of unfinished quilt blocks.

I left a lot of good stuff behind - including a rather fine late 1970s Traditional Man o’ War(!) The prices were good, but as they say on the picking shows, "there wasn’t enough meat on the bone" to bother. I have enough marginal stuff to sell as it is, and these tirekickers are getting tiresome.

(I’m becoming more and more convinced that the Internet needs a "minimum age requirement." Or, at the very least, a reading comprehension test.)

None of the models are keepers; the Donkey is tempting - I don’t have a straight up Chalky one - but I need the money more, and Chalkies are so super hot right now. I already have enough - and find enough, every year - that sacrificing a few to the greater good doesn’t bother me much.

What’s really neat about this Donkey is that she has such clear, distinct waffling on her hooves:


"Waffling" is a term used to describe the texture - similar to that of a waffle - found on the hooves of many early Breyers. It’s typically seen on models that received a "full body" coat of paint: Glossies, Basecoat Chalkies, and Matte Topcoats. The waffling pattern, it is assumed, comes from the perforated drip racks the models were placed on.

Not every vintage Gloss, Chalky or Matte Topcoated model has waffling; sometimes the excess hoof "goop" was cleaned up or ground down during the finishing process. It depended on how messed up the hooves were, and how industrious the painters and finishers were that day, I suppose.

The quality of the hoof bottoms usually doesn’t affect the value of a model one way or another, unless it’s particularly bad. Sometimes the presence of waffling can enhance the value, especially in the case of a finish that may be deemed of questionable authenticity. It’s pretty hard to fake a detail like that.