157 Jaguar XK120

[Riverman]

I have dozens of Dinky toys from my 1950s childhood. I am now selling them to a good friend of mine who is an avid collector with several hundred Dinkys. One of my Dinkys is puzzling both of us. It's a 157 Jaguar XK120. The puzzle is that its colour is sage green with matching sage green hubs, but Ramsay doesn’t list that combination and we can find nothing on the internet about a sage green model with sage green hubs. Is anyone aware of such a combination? I must have owned the toy from new and I'm sure that the hubs have never been repainted. My friend has examined it very carefully and is convinced that the hubs haven’t been repainted.

If this colour combination has not hitherto been recorded, a possible explanation has crossed my mind. I can't remember who gave me this particular Dinky, but my uncle was the works director of Meccano and sometimes gave me Dinky toys as presents. Could this Jaguar have been a rejected test model which Meccano didn’t want and which he decided to give to his nephew?

Assuming the car is totally genuine, does it have a rarity value?

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Welcome to the forum Riverman. The Jaguar is a very nice model with many paint schemes used over it's long production period. It would be nice to see a picture of your example, but in these recent times there are more and more unusual models turning up that had previously not been in the reference books.

Here is One Green version, but with contrasting wheels (Mustard!), but if another model in the range had Sage Green wheels, there is every possibility they could have found their way onto your model.

Dinky Toys #157 Jaguar XK 120.jpg (51.53 KiB) Viewed 1691 times

Before you post a picture, make sure it has been re-sized so it does not fill the screen when posted here, this you can do in the 'Paint' programe on your computer, or possibly the picture hosting site if you use one.

GHOSTHUNTER.

[johnboy]

It would be good to see a photo. I have had a couple of Dinky's from the same era with odd coloured hubs. One was a Commer Wreck Truck which had different coloured hubs on the front axle (factory fitted and a colour not used on that model) and a Ford Fordor with four odd colour hubs for the body colour (although the hub colours were used on a different Fordor body colour). I discounted these as factory errors at the time and of course yours could be a simple error, a shortage of the correct colour hubs or something more interesting

[Riverman]

Here's a photo of the Jag. In real life its colour isn't quite as dark as implied by the photo.

Ghosthunter: Thanks for the tip about re-sizing the photo.

XK120.JPG (47.03 KiB) Viewed 1667 times

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Hello Riverman, thanks for the picture of the model and looking at it from a non-experts point of view, it looks OK, but the wheel was in darkness, so I have saved the image and added some lightness to bring out the detail and re-posted below.

XK120.JPG (43.38 KiB) Viewed 1660 times

This now looks even better and convinces me it is genuine and presuming the rear wheels are the same colour (they should be because the rears are very hard to change!), it fits-in with other known colour-matched models like the Bright Yellow model with Yellow wheels and the Dark Red model with Red wheels, both shown below.

Bright Yellow, Yellow wheels.jpg (66.92 KiB) Viewed 1660 times

Dar Red, Red wheels.jpg (73.38 KiB) Viewed 1660 times

So on that basis, a Green model with Green wheels sounds plausible and would be expected.

Values are difficult to asses, its worth as much as a collector is willing to pay to secure it for his collection, I suggest a look at what is floating around the Ebay type websites to get some idea of values, thanks for showing here.

GHOSTHUNTER.

[starni999]

Hi all,
Very interesting, not one I've seen before either. Looks good from here.
Chris Warr.