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Reply from Gary

Yes Maylow is a small maker and included in Roberts great book

Here are some links as I don't have a lot of photos of Charbens
https://www.lilliputworld.co.uk/product ... aper-boxed
Robert shows one on his site as number 36 but has slight differences to the one in question. This is the one I have - https://picclick.co.uk/Charbens-Toys-Ro ... id=1&pid=1
If you search 'Charbens - Images' there are many more garish colours they use although not in this combination apart from the dump truck which uses them.

Moyboy wrote:Here are some links as I don't have a lot of photos of Charbens
https://www.lilliputworld.co.uk/product ... aper-boxed
Robert shows one on his site as number 36 but has slight differences to the one in question. This is the one I have - https://picclick.co.uk/Charbens-Toys-Ro ... id=1&pid=1
If you search 'Charbens - Images' there are many more garish colours they use although not in this combination apart from the dump truck which uses them.

Thank you for the links and for pointing me in the direction of the site dumper. Having studied the images, sme thoughts:
- Charbens seems to have used slightly more muted tones than the paint seen on the road roller. The shade of green is particularly striking in this context.
- The design of road roller has a toy-like quality to it, especially the 'Minecraftesque' driver. This sits incongruously with the rest of Charbens output.
- Charbenss produced passable models of both steam and diesel road rollers. Why would they have manufactured this aberration?
- This particular model seems to be relatively rare (and significantly less common that e.g. the early Lesney roller. Given that Charbens continued to manufacture diecast until 1967, this scarcity is difficulty to explain if it is accepted as a Charbens product. I would suggest that its rarity could be seen as implying that it came from a small, probably short-lived producer(e.g. Condon).
It will be extremely interesting to see what attribution we finally end up with for this model, and on what basis that attribution is made.

My moneys on Charbens .......Could the one with the flywheel on the wronge side be a reversed image?...

misterpop wrote:Could the one with the flywheel on the wronge side be a reversed image?...

IIRC, there are actually two diesel rolers. One is a completely different casting and is similar to the large Lesney diesel roller, whilst the other is this one (image lifted from Rob Newson's excellent site):
but that is a different casting (although admittedly generally similar in outline).

Update 1: thinking about it, the misattribution of this roller to Charbens (if it is indeed a misattribution) could conceivably have been the result of someone seeing a photograph similar to the one above but then not taking the time to make a detailed comparison.
Update 2: On closer inspection, I now believe the two roller types to simply be the standard Charbens diesel roller with and without the canopy rather than two separate models.