Karl AKA Stroget is an active curator at HobbyDB of many of the 1/43 model car brands. He has been adding model cars to the DB since 2014; some of his favorites are Alfa Romeo and obsolete Tekno from Denmark!
Further to Kevin Bailey’s Mini-Dinky article and Robin Godwin’s response relating to the Mini-Dinky Construction range and the possible parentage.
Kevin lists the following construction vehicles:
The following images are from a Mercury catalogue circa 1959.
Mini-Dinky 97 Euclid R-40 Dump Truck = Mercury 505? Length 85mm
Mini-Dinky 98 Michigan Scraper = Mercury 503? Length 103mm
Mini-Dinky 99 Caterpillar Grader = Mercury 504? Length 60mm
The Mercury Construction series went under the title of: Model Serie 500 Machine Stradali. Two of the Mercury Italy dump trucks are shown in this blog post from Fabrizio Panico.
BTW with reference to Robin’s response I am not aware that Mini-Dinky were available in the UK when Tri-ang were trading. Here in the UK Mini-Dinky suddenly appeared in 1972 after Tri-ang’s collapse. The only one I found was in 1972 in a newsagents. I have never seen or heard of a British version of a Mini-Dinky catalogue. I was an avid comic reader in the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s and the first thing I looked at were the toy adverts! Matchbox, Corgi, Dinky, Airfix, and even Lone Star Impy’s and Husky appeared. But I don’t ever recall seeing an advert for Mini-Dinky. Looking at the Mini-Dinky catalogue in Robin’s article Tri-ang were doing TV promotions in the States so if the range was available in the UK surely Tri-ang would shout out! And the cheapest promotion would be via comics.
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