The Chrysler Airflow

Sunday, January 17, 2016
Partly sunny, -10 Celcius  (14 F)

The Chrysler Airflow

The Ford Edsel is always described as a "dud" and failure. It was a nice car, but never succeeded in the marketplace,and was eventually removed from production. Few people of ever hear of the Chrysler Airflow, but this was also a beautiful car, doomed to fail and be written up in the history books. It was a marvellous car for its' time, but alas, the time was wrong for the car. 1934 was still the Great Depression time, and the public for whatever reasons, aside from money, never were inspired by the car. It was produced for a few years, and sadly laid waste to the scrapheap, and made to be a simple footnote in automobile history.

Below are 3 fine examples of the Airflow made by the Kingsbury toy company (New Hampshire, USA). The Kingsbury company existed from the 1920's-1950's and eventually went out of business. It reincarnated into an ultramodern, state-of-the-art company that is still in business in 

Keene, New Hampshire, USA).

Some of the models  had battery-operated headlights, and as well wind-up movement (clockwork movement), and nickel-plated bumpers and grilles. As well, the cars are quite large for their time, considering that most toy companies produced smaller cars. As well, being the 1930's, cast iron toys of the Chrysler airflow were still being produced.. However, the glorious era of cast iron was soon to be replaced by pressed steel, and  eventually lithographed tin. 

Although the Kingsbury toy company (USA) made many of the cars, the Cor-Cor company also made a few as well. Both companies existed in the 1930's and later, and produced superb pressed steel cars with nice features such as wind-up mechanical movement and electric lights.

Below:

Another fine pressed steel toy made by the Cor-Cor company.

If you do an Internet search for the "Chrysler Airflow", you will bring up many fine photographs of this car. It's too bad that the timing was off in the production of this car otherwise perhaps, and wishfully so,  it might have been more successful.

Thanks for dropping by,

and as always,

have a great part of the day or night,

wherever you may be,

Stacey Bindman

Toysearcher@gmail.com

Land Speed Record Toy Cars

Tuesday, January 7, 2014
     (Cold, sunny, and strong winds)

Land Speed record Toy Cars

   With the news reporting a phrase that I never heard before (Arctic Polar Vortex), and also reporting record-breaking and dangerous temperatures, the word record entered my thinking for today. I'd written before about these beautiful cars, but I decided to reintroduce them.  

   From the beginning of  the) invention of the car, sped records of course had to be broken.By the 1920's cars were becoming strong, bigger, and faster, and of course, so were the cars build for speed. If you lived in those times and could afford a newspaper, or a radio (no TV's them), you'd have heard about Malcolm Campbell, a British racing driver. One of the places that racers and cars would go to was Daytona, Florida (USA) where there were flat, dense and wide sandy beaches to race cars. And this was where Malcolm broke several records.  Each year, cars would come back to Daytona to break the previous year's record. When I was growing up in the 1950's , Malcolm's son Donald continued the tradition by also racing, but I'll stop here.

Please click here to visit Bertoia Auctions fine website

 Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

The Kingsbury toy company was located in New Hampshire, USA), and produced lots of wonderful toys.Sadly the company closed as a toy company but continues to this day in success with other manufacturing endeavours. If you look at the undercarriage of the golden race car below, you'll will see their "trademarked" wind-up mechanism.Almost every one of their wind-up toys can instantly be recognized by this design, and most work to this day!

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

Malcolm Campbell's record-breaking car was in fact painted blue.

Those silver-painted rectangles on each side of the driver are (I believe) radiators to cool the huge engine. WHen you look at the scale of the driver in proportion to the car, you can get a sense of the size of this racer!

Thanks for visiting, stay bundled warm,

and have a great part of the day wherever you may be.

Stacey

toysearcher@gmail.com