HANDS up if you’ve ever made an Airfix kit. Everyone at the Dunsfold Collection certainly has. That’s probably why they were so pleased when Airfix called to say that it wanted to make a 1:43-scale plastic kit of a Series I and asked if it could scan the museum’s 107-inch pick-up. Needless to say, the answer was yes, not least because it would be interesting to learn more about how a life-sized vehicle gets turned into a collection of injection-moulded plastic parts.
Everyone’s heard of Airfix, but not many know the history of the company. Remarkably, the story goes back to 1939 when Hungarian refugee, Nicholas Kove, created a company in the UK that manufactured inflated rubber toys. He named it Airfix, apparently inspired by the process of ‘fixing’ the air inside the toy. After the outbreak of the Second World War rubber was needed for more important things, so Mr Kove had to look elsewhere for his inspiration and shifted the company’s focus from ‘air’ to ‘hair’. By 1947, Airfix was the largest manufacturer of pocket combs in the UK.
In 1949, the company was commissioned to produce a pre-assembled promotional model of
