This tractor seems very unusual to continental europeans. Anyway, the toy produced by the Liverpool Dinky factory is a very true to type reproduction of the OPPERMAN MOTOCART.
Launched in the december 1949 Meccano Magazine, the toy has the catalog number 27G, in the agricultural range. It remained in production until 1960, receiving the catalog number 342 during the 1954 renumbering.
The toy was during the whole production fitted with all-mazac wheels including the tyres, and did never receive rubber tyres as the MUIR-HILL dumper or the MASSEY-HARRIS tractor and trailers that shared the same parts. The driver remained also in mazac during all the production.
The only casting modification of this models is visible under the chassis, with two recorded variants : the one without reference, and the other with 27G casting.
On the left, the very first unrecorded version of the 27G Opperman Motocart, compared to an usual one (intermediate version without 27G not shown here)
The very first casting
I was lucky for a few years to buy in a lot an unrecorded version of the toy, which must be the very firs one, as on this model the initial MOTO-CART engraving was not modified. This was later modified with MOTOCART engraved on a rectangular box with rounded ends, and this remained unchanged on all models until the end of the production. No book or magazine, as far as I know, did ever mention this variant, which is very scarce (I only came across two examples, one of them being now owned by a very known collector, the other being in my own collection)
The colors
It exists only one color variant, having the chassis painted in dark green. As many collectors, I considered it for a long time as the first version, but this is wrong. This is in fact a more recent version, as it bears the 27G casting. This has probably been produced in a paint shortage period, or belongs to a small batch produced for the Opperman constructor, as this color matches the one of the real tractors... On a few models that I have seen, bearing play rubbing and chipping, one can clearly see that the dark green color has been applied over the usual green paint. This should confirm the second explanation, but without any document, it remains an unsolved question...
The both known color schemes of the Motocart
Post initially published : Aug 22nd, 2016
Version française ici.
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