Help required with ALTA kit

Ebay strikes again!

I recently won an old metal racing car kit. It was advertised as 'Dinky Toy sized' but in fact has proven to be somewhat larger. It is made by a company called STAMOID, in England, but I have no idea as to it's age. I think 'OLD' would cover it!

Here is the main body...


It is about 110 mm long.

The things I need help with are twofold. Firstly, what sort of green would it have been painted, (any pictures?).

Secondly, and more important, unusually, there are no solid axles to fit the wheels to. There are 4 'S' shaped rods (like cranks) with 4 little wire springs that have holes in which would appear to fit over the axle and also over one of the little protrusions that you can see near the wheel positions on the above image.

Is this an attampt to reproduce the actual Alta suspension system? If so, how was it fitted?

I await comments etc, with some interest.

Barry - just polish it....

DCN

Really? Fair enoughski!

The maker is Scamold and it came as a "factory" built up or as a kit. A factory built up in mint condition is worth about $150 today...

The "factory" built models were a medium green, kind of like ERAs.

Looks like you'll have to pay another visit to a VSCC meeting, Barry. AFAIK the green Alta Paul Jaye races is a "correct" colour - and it also has its suspension fitted

George Abecassis ran his bst-known example in bare aluminium pre-war - as when he adopted twin rear wheels for Crystal Palace and wiped the smug smile off R. Mays's face in the ERA.

DCN

Barry ,

Do remember to put this all up again with a photo of the finished model, - it already looks pretty good!

It's a Scamold, a small British model making company located in Brooklands. They produced, as far as I know in very limited runs, the Alta, a B-Type Era, a 6C Maserati.

The models are of outstanding quality, with wind up motors acting on rear wheels through two gears, very delicate piano wire front and rear suspensions, separated exhaust tube by polished metal, cast driver (only the upper section to fit into the cockpit). The metal is good and without fatigue: they are die-cast.

They were usually sold as kit, yet I do think that they were also sold either fully built or with a painted body. I've never seen the box. Two of the ones I have are too perfectly done to have been assembled from a kit.

They were rather expensive in their days (apparently in the late Thirties and again immediately after the war) and are today very very valuable.

I'm not good enough to attach photos here, yet if I can e-mail the file to someone able to post the photos here, I'll be happy to take and email the photos of my models.

Thanks for that, Aldo.

Sadly, my kit has no motor or driver but certainly does have this strange suspension system.

Please feel free to e-mail any images to me at
brucebook48@tiscali.co.uk
and I will gladly put them on this thread.

Here are 3 images that illustrate what Aldo referred to earlier.








It would appear that my kit is lacking in a number of components....

90% of the ones I have seen are missing the driver, so I wouldn't be too concerned about that