Over the course of recent weeks there have been a couple of threads that have surfaced within which meaty conversation has occurred detailing our beloved 69b Hatra Tractor Shovel.
There was this thread within George's Casting Show:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1731
And then this thread that came up here in the 1-75 forum at the tail end of last year. It began as a discussion of #72 Fordson Tractors but worked its way ultimately into the discussion of a particular red-wheeled yellow body 69b Hatra Tractor Shovel.
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1154&hilit=differential%E2%80%A6
This all surfaced during a stretch where I really wasn't visiting the forum with any regularity and unfortunately my absence ended up contributing to a bit of inconvenience.
During the most recent time when Charlie offered this model on ebay I made the purchase. I've made a number of purchases from Charlie across the years and in my mind I believed if something was offered up from Charlie it was beyond question authentic. Based on my previous purchases and Charlie's general reputation within our collecting community I assumed he was both trustworthy and knowledgeable.
Now that I've had the model in hand and have taken some decent photographs I felt compelled after communicating with Idris to share my experience to add better clarity among our wider collecting community. So here are some photographs.
First of all, I had no questions whatsoever with regard to the authenticity of the yellow body paint or the base rivets. In fact I didn't even photograph the base as I didn't see anything noteworthy there.
It was the rounded axle ends that raised a red wheeled red flag for me. With the naked eye the axle ends seemed reasonable but with a little magnification I had some concerns. I had four other Hatra Shovel models on the shelf for comparison and all of them have rounded axle ends with a central flat or concave spot. Most but not all of the axle ends have a linear sunburst pattern radiating out from that center. In looking at the red wheeled pictures you see that these axle ends lack that linear sunburst pattern radiating our away from the center. But then when you look at the picture from the common yellow-wheeled model you'll see that some of those also lack that sunburst pattern.
The real kiss of death for my confidence came when I compared axle ends in the profile view.
Both red wheel axle ends lacked a well-defined crisp sharp mushroom cap profile while even my playworn common models had that sharpness and definition.
In the end I concluded that in my opinion this was a modified model.
The good news is that Charlie was very responsive to my opinions and concerns. He agreed to and has indeed followed through with a complete refund of both my purchase price and shipping expenses. Charlie told me that he's had the model for some time and had always accepted it as authentic. Based on my previous purchase experiences with Charlie I'm willing to accept his word. But..... based on this experience with this red-wheeled 69b my faith in Charlie's assessment skills has faded. I would NOT hesitate to buy from Charlie again but in the future I would want to examine any rare or hard-to-find examples in hand before pulling the trigger.
I'm aware there has been discussion of how this model was offered multiple times on ebay and there will those among you who will insist I'm naive or in denial here. I understand that quite often where one sees smoke there is often a fire and it is largely because of those concerns that I wanted to share the photos I captured to better alert the collecting community with regard to my concerns with this particular model.
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