Mystery Composition Beaver

Hello, I just got this excellent condition composition beaver from eBay. At the bottom I show it with the Elastolin one. I have looked up Lineol but all I see from them online is one with the head up more and no branch. Is it a later Elastolin? Tipple-Topple or some other less known maker? It is a great looking model, very much looking like a North American beaver such as Maple YouTube Video Link.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Thanks for any help :)
Tim

Wonderful model!!

It is a fantastic model !!!
What a great find

All I can say is that it is not Elastolin or Tipple-topple
Actually I would say it is not one of the German brands....

Very, very exiting

A beauty, but i can not help

For a couple of years before they switched their Elastolin animal production from composition to a smaller-scale plastic, Hausser made a few experimental lines, using new moulds. They were made to the old composition scale, but cast in hard plastic. Soon after, they opted for smaller-scale plastic animal production, and these larger beasts were no longer produced.

A few boxes of them were lying around in the factory storerooms when a friend of ours visited Hausser to do some research in the early 1970s. He was given several, and passed a pair of Beavers and a pair of Shetland Ponies on to us.

Our Beaver, shown below with the Elastolin composition version, is hard plastic. If your Beaver is composition, it looks as though Hausser tried out both materials in the new moulds.

So your Beaver is definitely from a Hausser Elastolin mould, dating from around 1960.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Sue & Lesley
castlerigg

So this is a REAL, 5 star rarity

Hurraaayy, what would we do without S&L ?

That's then a model that only the most efficient detective could find what it was. If it wasn't S&L, we'd probably never find it. Thanks also Susanne for linking this topic to our ultra-expert ladies!
So, this beaver, more than a collector's figure, it is a Museum piece!

Thank you, Susanne and Roger!

We do not know how many models from this mould might have been made or sold, there could be many of them about!

Sue & Lesley
castlerigg

castlerigg wrote:

For a couple of years before they switched their Elastolin animal production from composition to a smaller-scale plastic, Hausser made a few experimental lines, using new moulds. They were made to the old composition scale, but cast in hard plastic. Soon after, they opted for smaller-scale plastic animal production, and these larger beasts were no longer produced.

A few boxes of them were lying around in the factory storerooms when a friend of ours visited Hausser to do some research in the early 1970s. He was given several, and passed a pair of Beavers and a pair of Shetland Ponies on to us.

Our Beaver, shown below with the Elastolin composition version, is hard plastic. If your Beaver is composition, it looks as though Hausser tried out both materials in the new moulds.

So your Beaver is definitely from a Hausser Elastolin mould, dating from around 1960.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Sue & Lesley
castlerigg

It looks and feels like composition, but... I will perform a scratch test on the base tonight and find out for sure. Thank you so much Sue and Lesley for this info.

Congratulations Sue and Lesley. The mystery is solved

Valuable information of those models

Having examined the beaver closely and done a scratch test on the bottom, I think it is indeed plastic like the one owned by Sue and Lesley. It looks in style and paint as if it is composition, and is perhaps very slightly lighter in weight, but it scratches in a way that is like a plastic item. I stand most corrected on the material. I have a composition style plastic beaver in my collection now.
Thanks to all for you help!

Tiermann wrote:

Having examined the beaver closely and done a scratch test on the bottom, I think it is indeed plastic like the one owned by Sue and Lesley. It looks in style and paint as if it is composition, and is perhaps very slightly lighter in weight, but it scratches in a way that is like a plastic item. I stand most corrected on the material. I have a composition style plastic beaver in my collection now.
Thanks to all for you help!

A composition style plastic beaver

This topic has indeed turned out as exiting as any Agatha Christie novel