1969; Waterloo Highland Infantry, S35 / 1735 / 01735 / 01735-2 / 901735 - HO:OO

A timeless set that still holds its own today against the subsequent sets from Esci/A-Toys and Italeri. A whole bunch of mostly useful poses, the standing firer was a tad odd, but painted-up it wasn't that awkward, and a lot of people don't like the stabbing-down pose, which is seen as a waste of box-space for something more useful.

As a kid I thought maybe they were just cleaning the fresh sorry; French blood off their bayonets!

 1980 catalogue, this was also one of the little 'thumbnails' (as we'd call them now) on the 'Long Box' box type.

1982 catalogue image gave us two of the thumbnails, these make for nice painting guides.

 Sorting!

 In the Crimea, the whole regiment was layed-low by a bug that went round...hey; old jokes work!

Hermitage Dairy tea-leaf collectors cards - Black Watch 1800's, officer on the left, private on the right.

Prince/Prinze August painting guide

One of those weird throwbacks to that point in print-history where commercial art was giving way to full-colour photography; yet some editors continued to use artists, to convert what were obviously photographs! Think also; Hamlyn's Wargaming book (David Nash) or Usborne's model guides.

On this card model of a castle from Dawson & Co., we see the Highland Infantry have been used to illustrate the scale of the fort (and its play value) which the artist has rendered beautifully - even down to their bases, or the shadows of the drawbridge where it stands slightly proud of the table after folding and/or gluing.

All bar the 'stupid' poses from what must be one set, although one 'stabbing-down-guy' has got into shot and you might have expected the piper and standard to be used? Either the bases were painted to match where they were to be positioned on the finished model, or they were posed unpainted and the artist added colour? I don't suppose we'll ever know!

1969; [WWII] Russian Infantry, Patt.1735 / 51453-8-1735 / 51453-8 / 51553-7 / 51553 - 1:32 (54mm)

Breakdown of a complete set's contents, 29 figure box

A mint set needs to contain one of each of the figures above, with the equivalent number (where hard to discern) for each pose as given to be properly 'Mint'; otherwise it's just a 'made-up' set  in both meanings of the word!

The three colours of Airfix I know of, the grey ran for the longest time; from day one, in the late 1960's and with the odd faint shade variation between production-runs remained unchanged until 1980'ish, when the 14-figure boxes contained the orange ones I think. The Khaki examples are a more recent re-issue/CTS thing I've - so far - paid scant attention to.

Some Hong Kong copies; mostly generic junk, but the lighter-brown ones (top six and left of mixed shots) seem to be the Rado Industries (Ri-Toys) shots, although of poor quality they match the small-scale versions for colour.

Best copy on the left, poorest on the right. As mentioned above Rado seem to have manufactured their larger scale copies in the same colours (per nation/subject) as their small scale ones, which means you should find these in silver, green, blue and the orange (below) I think, as well as this chocolate brown (the commonest - in both scales), which has been dutifully followed by the bottom-feeding sub-pirate!

Ri-Toy's standing firing in orange, the kneeling firing compared with Airfix's original and another kneeling figure, who has the look of a good-quality copy, sent in by Chris Smith and seen over on the 'Home Blog' the other day (2019), but he's not as well detailed.