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Hi please can you check pictures for glue on the front, also red paint on the plastic. The front rivet diameter does look to small to me, maybe thats just my eyes. J

Why would you bother the front rivet when all that's repainted is the bed? You wouldn't, just pop off the bed, repaint, reinstall, done.

Because the front bumper is held in place by a tab which is part of the front cab casting Joe, the front rivet post on this Spreader Truck is actually located behind the rear of the truck cab. This rivet post is cast onto the bottom of the very front of the spreader body's base, and it passes through both the chassis and the rear of the unpainted cab base to secure all three together after painting. To have this Rivet remain unmolested and very tight on Mark's truck was my first indication that his model was never taken apart after it left the factory. The question now will be what is under the odd color paint on that rough looking spreader body. If it is a bare metal untumbled rough casting as I suspect, the model is important because it is in fact an early factory produced 'Special' using a leftover pre-pro or color trial bed. Mark's close inspection in hand seems to indicate the paint is even and uniform in well hidden areas a brush could not reach if the model were not apart for re-painting.
On the other hand, if stock factory yellow bed paint color is visible on that bed in any hidden crevice or chipped area, someone went to extraordinary lengths to simply lighten the color a bit on a Toy's rear bed for what purpose? Someone asked that question in an early Post, and I cannot imagine any reason for a bed re-paint done so carefully, but leaving that ugly scaley mess still on it?? Cheers! kwakers

Dick, you are absolutely correct, the bed rivet posts/rivets are what hold everything together. I seldom handle this model and never do any resto or customs using it (too boring for me) so please forgive me for not remembering how it was assembled.

My opinion has not changed on how easy it is to tamper with many of these models. Everyone thinks that by the late 60's Lesney really had everything together and down pat with regard to assembly and with consistency in assembly. Not so, and many of these late manufactured models were just as bad as the early ones.

I went to my beater box and picked out seven of these grit trucks. I chose one which had similar rivets to the one discussed in this thread. Only difference was that on my truck, the front rivet looks funky and the rear rivet looks nice. Neither rivet has been touched or tampered with in any way. Here's the base showing the rivets:



What I want to do next is to show you how easy it is to tamper with the base on so many of these models. That thing on the right of the above photo is a spring loaded center punch. This will pop apart the body and base in as little as one "punch." In the case of this model, I was surprised when that perfect looking rear rivet popped apart in one click of the center punch. The strained looking front rivet separated the cab base in two clicks and the body and bed on the third click.



In the next photo you can see the model is disassembled. The rivets have not been drilled nor altered in any way. The base and body has not been altered or touched in any manner either. The model was simply separated by the direct force of the spring punch and all of that force was directed down inside the vortex of the rivet.



The model goes back with similar force and I've made a small wooden tool to perform that action. Here is the model snapped back together and the rejoined parts are secure and will pass the pry test. If there was any weakness (or the base seemed loose) a couple drops of super glue (on the interior contact points) would make it tight. Here is a photo of the same model all back together:



All I needed to do was paint the bed a different color while I had things apart. Then I would have a nice pre-production or color trial. That's how it's done and that's one of the many ways the bad guys tamper with models. There are tons of other tricks of tampering and I might have left out a few key points of this particular job, but you get the idea how easy it is to fool around with the model and defraud the average collector.

What is interesting in the above is that Tinman's example has no paint to the underside of the hopper whereas Mark's does, even down to the rivets. is there a clue here?

I had this pic saved from Befora.
numi

Nice demonstration by "Tinman" but', this is not the sort of information we want everybody to see.

GHOSTHUNTER.

GHOSTHUNTER wrote:Nice demonstration by "Tinman" but', this is not the sort of information we want everybody to see.

GHOSTHUNTER.

The issue is that all the bad people already know all this stuff (and more). It seems that, more often than not, my words of wisdom about tampering fall on deaf ears. A few of the more vocal members here are some of the doubting Thomas types who seem to ignore my warnings. How do you think all those fakers and fraudsters get such nice looking rivets on many of their models? This is how!

People go on about pry testing, glued rivet posts using cut-off rivet heads and all manner of other complicated methods that are just that, way too complicated for most to bother with. That's because most of these models just pop apart if you know how to do it ... and go right back together again just about as easily. It took someone like Nik-Stil to come along and wake everybody up. Someone doing very accurate casting of their own plastic parts, someone doing what looks like untouched rivets, someone doing axle ends that pass muster!

These are not some deep dark secrets known only by Free Masons or Skull & Bones members and shared in secret meetings. These are common modeling and scratch building techniques and they are the subject of countless magazines articles, detailed in numerous books, on web discussions and in Youtube videos. How do you think I learned all this stuff? There's no Fakers Academey, but then again, there is a virtual wealth of information on modeling, scratch building and all manner of assocaiated hobby "how-to" information.

We are now in the age of real time discussion, where nearly anything you want to learn about is right at your finger tips and where billions of dollars in selling and trading is done via the keyboard. This has also become the day and age where nothing can be accepted at face value. Nothing should be considered real until proven so! Yep, that's right, I consider all unusual and rare models/variations Guilty until proven innocent!

Think about it, If I decided to go over to the dark side ... I have no doubt that I could flood the market with some seriously good fake models. Good enough that many of you would never think twice about them. This is exactly what Stephan and a few others have done. Think about how much money these guys made over the years before being outed! One member even wanted to continue to use Stephan as a resource for Brazilan models in the course of spotting fakes?????!!!!!! How many good fakers are churning out stuff that is passing for real and no one is the wiser about? How much of Nik Stil's stuff is already accepted into collections as real?

Some of you really need to wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak. Because the real talented fakers are stealing you blind and you are none the wiser and unable to spot their work. One has to know how easy some of these things are in order to have the right mindset about what you buy, how you buy and from whom you buy.

OK Joe, points taken, but I've only just renewed my subs for the 'Fakers Academey', damm it...!

Ghosty.

Take this business with Paul Carr and his buddy's for example. How many years has this been going on. How polluted is the pool of pre-production models and, color trials? This greedy fakery goes back for years and years. Who knows how many of these fakes now pass for real. Who knows how many of these fakes are in your collection? Yet no one is willing to stand up, in public and clearly state that Paul Carr and his buds have been faking these rare models for years ... literally YEARS!

Everyone wants to dance around these issues and seems content to play the ole game of spot the fake. Everyone wants to hide how utterly simple and easy it is to fake rare models and pre-pros. Well, it's simple stuff for a good modeler. It's also a simple fact that many of the people you trust in this hobby are stealing you blind! This allows the actual honest and decent sellers to jack-up the prices on the things they sell and now collectors are paying four and five times as much for models that are, at best, slightly hard to find.

Even worse, there's the good ole boy's club method of authenticating some rare models. Three or four respected people look at the model and if the axle ends look OK, the base rivets look OK, and the casting seems correct ... then it's authentic! No paint testing, no thought to how easy it is to pop apart these models No consideration to someone being good at redoing the axle ends or making their own plastic parts. A simple verdict handed down at toy show by two or three well known collectors is often all that one gets.

Now that I've shown you how easy it is to pop apart a model and put it back together again, now that some of you are lying awake at night about Nik-Stil's handy work ... do you still want to place such high confidence in the good ole boy's all looking at your model and telling you it's authentic? Seriously, there is no way any of these guys (including myself) could look at some of these well crafted fakes and not think they were anything other then authentic!

There's a war going on and honest decent collectors are losing the battle and the war. Sure, Numi and a few other vocal collectors can spot the obvious and clumsy fakes. But those are NOT the fakes that worry me and some others. John Houghton has spent plenty of web space denouncing my recreations of rare models. The fact is, I make all my restored and recreated models so easy to spot it's not even worth discussing! John and nearly everyone else is completely silent about the real threat to the hobby and the years and years of silence have already cost collectors millions and polluted the inventory of collections all over the world.

Time to take a stand. People can continue the silence and pretend honesty and decency will prevail while the hobby becomes further polluted by these fakes or we can shed some light on what's really going on out there. The old saying comes to mind; you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.