My First Ever Toy Soldier Molds.

These days I do some occasional casting from rubber molds but I didn't make them and I use melted pewter cups.

But just now I had a flash back to the 1960s and some adventures I had as a boy in Melbourne. My long time friend Peter and I had many wargames with plastic toy soldiers, on lawns, bedroom floors, garage floors and in sand pits. All manner of projectiles were hurled at these brave little soldiers.

One day, though, possibly under influence of a borrowed library book on model soldiers we decided to make our own. It was not a complete success but it was exciting at the time.

Not far from where we lived in East Bentleigh was a mysterious plastics factory. It adjoined the.then, common paddocks, places to play hide and seek with our dogs, look for frogs in flooded ones and run from imaginary snakes).

Anyway this factory was a large building, very imposing to us youngsters but it had something very attractive - dumpsters and containers full of plastic bits and pieces, presumably left over from some molding process or perhaps destined to be used. Well, on the back of my trike, or maybe bike - I forget which - I had connected a painted wooden wagon which Pete and I filled with lots of strongly smelling plastic beads.

Suddenly a 'New Australian' (probably Greek or Italian migrant) loudly yelled at us from a window. We took off on our vehicles at high speed, my little wagon bouncing around and dislodging a great many of the green beads as we sped down the dirt track, through the paddock and towards Peter's home. There were many furtive glances behind us to see if we were pursued. I guess we felt we were guilty of some horrendous crime which would make us hunted fugitives but we wouldn't give up our remaining haul.

Having arrived at Peter's place and his backyard kid's hut we decided to lay low and not go back into the street for some time. Presumably the police were patrolling the streets looking for such terrible criminals!

So how does this relate to toy soldiers? I think it was Pete's idea - he was an ideas man. We made Plasticine into a block and embedded a Lone Star Afrca Corps figure - the hand grenade guy I think, and possibly a few others in other blocks. Then we melted the plastic and dripped it into the mold. There was a strong hypnotic smell of melted plastic as we waited for the plastic to cool and then removed the strong smelling, pale green figure. It looked great on one side but was flat and formless on the other side because there was only one half of the mold, which being only Plasticine didn't last long.

I still have my childhood Lone Star Desert set but not the copies we made. but we did avoid the long arm of the law which hunts down little boys who pilfer plastic bits from factories.