Grey Bucking Bronco

Sande sold me her great Bucking Bronco at Happy Trails.

It's my second one, but they are variations. This one has grey hooves while my other one has pink ones.

Grey Bucking Bronco, #191, 1966 only, $$25, Sande Schneider at Happy Trails 2, 6/2019

Tornado - Bucking Bronco

I also bought this bucking bronco. It's a vintage mold (which is the focus of my collection) and I wasn't sure what he was. I left him behind, but then, like the Clydesdale, went back and snagged him.

Tornado, #750104, 2004, SR Walmart, America's Wild Mustang Series, 2004, $12, Sell It Here, Lafayette, IN.

He came with a cougar, but I did not know that at the time nor did I see one near it on the shelves.

I had to rearrange my shelves a bit to make room for him!

Painted Over CAF

In her post, When a Chalky isn't a Chalky, self-styled Breyer historian Andrea Gurdon writes that the grey Bucking Bronco was discontinued early and painted over into black ones. No white basecoat was added; the pieces were simply painted on top of the grey.

Clues to look for in the black Bucking Broncos are a bluish cast in the transitional areas of stockings and the bald face, and shorter stockings and smaller bald faces (which makes sense - they were trying to cover up all that grey paint.)

I have two black Bucking Broncos, and naturally I pulled them out and checked them for any signs of that over-painting. Lucky me - both fit the description.

She also mentioned that the Classic Arab Foal had undergone a similar repainting. I checked mine, too - I've always thought it had an odd paint job.

It was very hard to photograph, but if you look at the knee on the left front leg, you can see a black line where the black paint stopped very abruptly and not very cleanly.

There is a black paint smear on one hind leg, and some of the blue-grey tinge.

Some overspray on the other leg - another sign.

See the thick, black paint and how it looks like someone took a paintbrush and only tried to cover the paint, not edge it nicely? More evidence.

I'd say my Classic Arab Foal is also one that has seen a second coat of pain!

Chalky Black Bucking Bronco

(From Breyer History Diva, July, 2012. A post about BreyerFest, 2012.)

A Chalky Black Bucking Bronco! I had never seen one before - and judging from the reaction I got from everyone I showed him to, nobody else has, either. The fact that I found him at all - in this white-hot Chalky market - is absolutely astounding. (And so was the price!) 

He’s pretty darn close to mint, for a Chalky. He’s a "White Plastic" Chalky, too, which means that there have to be more than just a handful out there. They might have just run the one batch of that plastic, but I’m not sure quite how many Bucking Broncos a drum of Tenite translates into. (A hundred? Maybe two?)

(From Breyer History Diva, September, 2011)

I finally found a little time yesterday to clean up the office a bit, so here’s a photo of a few of the weekend’s findings:


The Fighting Stallion is going to be a restoration experiment, the Bucking Bronco is a keeper (near mint, and just super!) and since I already own that particular variation of the Gem Twist, he'll be heading to the sales list after a bit more work.

The Gem Twist is from the first year of production (1993) and though you can’t see them in the photos, he sports the long, fully painted braids. The second version had the same braids, but with "ribbon dots" instead, and the third version had remodeled ribbons with similar dots. I don’t own the second version, but that’s more a matter of a lack of will than a reflection of its rarity: I have no idea which one is the rarest, to be honest. Haven’t bothered to do the research, though I probably should.

Aside from the ribbon remodeling, there was another significant, but invisible, change made to the mold: it was made less tippy. The earlier examples of the Gem Twist mold are extremely unstable; that glorious Moody tail made him exceptionally bottom heavy. You’ll find some that are "weighted" correctly, but it’s very hit or miss, and the guy I picked up Sunday is definitely a miss.

(He’s in otherwise pretty nice shape, other than a light scuffing and yellowing, so whoever owned him previously didn’t play with or display him much.)

Later models made with the Gem Twist mold tend to be less tippy, so Reeves was evidently aware of the problem, and took steps to correct it. I suspect some work was done on the interior surfaces of the mold (some areas shaved, others built up?) to even out the weight distribution. He’s still not the most trustworthy model on the shelf - none of mine are currently on display, mostly because of "Hurricane" Vita - but it does take a little bit more than a sneeze to knock the later examples over.

Fakes or the Real Deal?

(Breyer History Diva, 2010.)

One of the items I picked up this past Sunday was a passable Black Bucking Bronco. He was nothing special - a later piece with some paint skips and flaws. He was cheap, he needed rescuing, and I harbor a strong fondness for the mold, simple as that. (So strong a fondness that once upon a time, when the prospect was presented to me, I asked for a test color Wedgewood Blue Bucking Bronco. I didn’t get it, though: it’s another one of My Long Stories.)

As I was cleaning him up, some of his paint flaked off. Since he was already in not-collectible shape, it wasn’t a big deal. Some black paint jobs from the 1970s have a tendency to do that; I tend to chalk it up as either the consequence of poor prepping and cleaning, or the heavy-handed application of the paint, both common occurrences back then. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a bad batch of paint, too.

He is genuinely OF - fake black paint jobs used to be as common as fake gloss jobs are now, but there was nothing here to indicate anything amiss. No weirdness going on over or under the paint. Just bad paint, period.

I’ve seen enough model horses in my time that I hesitate to dismiss anything except the most obvious of fakes, as fakes, especially if the only evidence I have is a low resolution JPEG on the Internet. I’ve seen genuine OF models with flaked paint, handpainted details, acetone touchups, bad trim jobs, smudges, drips and fingerprints - all the usual giveaways of fakeness. My SR Solid Black Mustang has a gigantic drip, and I bought him straight off the Bentley Sales Discontinued List!


(He was one of the last ones they had, so I couldn’t get a replacement. I prefer to think of it as a beauty mark.)
It wasn’t the runs, drips and errors seen on some of the models involved in the (still ongoing) Gloss Nokota business that made them dubious in my eyes. I’ve seen those kinds of flaws on genuine OF models, and it’s not the "tell" everyone thinks it is. I’ve gotten a lot of good models by taking long second looks.

A greater indicator of fakeness is the behavior of the seller involved. If it looks like, walks like, and smells like a con job, it’s a con job. After all that’s happened, the minor involved in that deal still has Internet access and is still attempting to wheel and deal. Whether the models involved are real or were somehow legitimately obtained is irrelevant.

The fact that some hobbyists are still debating whether or not she’s even worth dealing with is the strangest, saddest part. Is the prospect of a Gloss that no one else has or has even heard of so tempting that some hobbyists are willing to throw common sense out the window?

If any good comes out of all of this, it’ll be to cool off the overheated Gloss market, and maybe - just maybe - have Reeves reconsider the whole Glossy Prize Model idea in the first place. While it’s mostly hobbyists to blame in this whole mess, Reeves really ought to be stepping up to the plate - to make their Glosses a little less easy to fake, at the very least. (A decal, signature or numbering?)

Chalky or Not?

(Breyer History Diva, 2009.)

Why the Gray Bucking Bronco was so abruptly canceled at the end of 1966 I have no idea. Did he really sell that poorly, or was there a problem with the paint job? Even though he was technically discontinued, he appears to have been available for at least another year through some mail order dealers. And when those didn’t sell, the remainders were probably repainted and sold - as Black Bucking Broncos.

These former-grays are not chalkies: the new paint job was simply sprayed on top of the old. There was no white basecoat involved. For lack of a better term, I call them paint-overs. And the Bucking Bronco was not the only model to get this particular painting treatment, either.

While the chalky technique was known and used before the Bucking Bronco’s release, it was a spotty and relatively rare occurrence - Breyer was probably salvaging pieces from the cull bins to finish orders and avoid reloading the mold back in the molding machine (a costly and time-consuming effort.)

One of the creative ways Breyer tried to limit culls was through planning. They’d try to release a mold in several different colors simultaneously, with at least one very "light" color and one very "dark" color. The light colors would get painted first, and if you messed up any of those, some of them could be painted over and "salvaged" with the darker paint job.

This paint over technique was used primarily in the era just before - and during - the official "true chalky" era of the early to mid-1970s. It was just one of several salvage techniques in Breyer’s arsenal. They did whatever could to get the job done - and keep costs down.

Didn’t you always wonder why there were so many Black Classic Arabian and Quarter Horse Foals? A lot of those popular blister-card releases were paint-overs. Dapple Gray Proud Arabians with darker than average manes and tails may have started out life as Alabasters. That may be the case with some Gloss Dapple Gray Running Mares and Foal, too: every once and a while I spot one with an exceptionally dark mane and tail, and wonder...

I don’t believe the technique was completely abandoned after the Chalky Era, either. I have some reason to believe that the late 1970s Special Run releases of the Family Arabians and Semi-Rearing Mustang in solid black were paint-overs of flawed production models or warehouse overstock.

The Bucking Bronco never received the USA mold mark, so it can be difficult to distinguish a potential early black-that-used-to-be-gray Bronco from a later always-black one. There are a few physical clues.

Even though the original gray body color is similar to the oversprayed portions of the black overpaint, it is not identical. The gray paint has a distinct bluish cast that can be distinguished from watered down or oversprayed black, and it can sometimes been seen in the transitional areas around the edges of the stockings and bald face.

Since the difference was noticeable, the painters would slightly overpaint these edges, shortening the length of the socks and shrinking the extent of the bald face. So while it’s usually the case that older models have higher socks and more extensive bald faces, in the case of the Black Bucking Bronco, it’s exactly the opposite.

And there’s absolutely no way to distinguish between one that was painted over for flaws, versus one that was painted over because it didn’t sell.