Machinas (not really)

OK, then, If you have not been following Carmen's Fun Painty Time and his amazing work with large cowboys and samurai, you've missed out.  But the coolest thing on his blog (and he has retro 1950's space ship racing there somewhere) is the Machinas post apoc car thing.  Which has even spawned a kickstarter card game.

Now this is not actually anything to do with Machinas.  What 'Evil Cartoonist' has done with some toy cars to turn them into post Apoc cars is innovative and well executed.  Which is something you'll not see here:

These are the cars with which I whiled away the endless summer holidays of my youth, building roads around my grandparents flower beds: When I found a place that did not cause any conflict (at the bottom of the garden under the apple trees) the roads and little mud walls stayed there for years.

So you can see, a lot of the cars ended up with alternative paint jobs.  I probably stopped playing with these about 31 years ago (at a guess) and started crashing BMX (short-lived) and soon embarked on decades of AD&D and MERP.

And then festooned with decals, mostly left over from airplane kits.

Now, I spent years keeping these clean(ish).  Now I spend ages trying to get my 40K models to look this weathered.

You can tell the age of the car by how many times I re-decorated it. These two range rovers are my favourites.

And you can see the newest car there is the 1982 car show XJS.  Sheesh.

Now, as a car owner who has cars that looked like this (not teeny tiny, but obviously old and battered to heck), I'd hate to think what these would look like inside.  My W reg golf (old W, Scipio, you do the math) was never clean, it looked like one of those awful Topgear experiments.  IRL, these toy cars are full of dirt.

Now call me sentimental, but these cars are a link to a very happy childhood now long gone.  So they'll be lovingly hidden away in the loft.

And these plastic men were all dug up from the flowerbed in the few years after my grandfather died - when he was still gardening, he left that shady corner alone.  There's a shop in the town I grew up in which used to sell models and toys as well as art supplies (it only does the art supplies, the last time I was back there).  It was a brilliant place and I have fond memories of going there with my dad.  All of which leads me to think that there are about 200 airfix soldiers in the ground there somewhere where my grandparents lived.

And finally a confession - I was on ebay and there was an Elysian army advertised.  I put in a bid, not expecting to score.  But incredibly I did win and it's a not insignificant dent in my resolution not to buy more stuff.  Oh well, at I now have something to put in my Valkyries.