LS kit guns

http://cgi.ebay.com/Thompson-Model-1921AC-Sub-Machine-Gun-LS-1-1-RARITY_W0QQitemZ290337022871QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item43996f6397&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14#ht_1306wt_909

Did anyone else grow up making these LS Japanese model gun kits.

I guess I was at high school in Maidenhead in Berks, in the 1980's, and there were a couple of toy shops that sold these and we bought everything they had (at least at a rate that pocket/lunch money would allow), Nambus, S&W's, P38's, 1911's - they broke easily, but they were cheap'ish.

I used them in movies I shot on a Betamax camera, remember a lot of Car-15 xm177's and Ar's that were nearly all wrecked.

I saw this on Ebay and had a flashback.

Am I the only one?

Back in the 80s just about the only places that advertised mail order militaria were Exchange and Mart and Gun Mart.Problem was with Gun Mart is that you had to pay for an expensive magazine full of shotgun crap etc only to have around 10 pages of militaria and replicas etc.

Anyway,there was i believe a company from Devon selling these LS kits and at the time they were AMAZING.Here you could build a model kit that actualy worked and i spent many an hour plinking in the house with mine.

Ive not that long ago binned the instruction sheets that i kept for every model but pretty sure i have their original price list somewhere.

Considering i was still at school they werent cheap at the time but then again where could you get a full size replica AK47 and M16 for £50!!!!

What i bought were an M16A1,"woodstocked" AK47,Colt 1911,Beretta 92F and an 8"" Dirty Harry Magnum.

Believe it or not i still have the 92F as a wall hanger and still have the Magnum stored away somewhere as well.

Great,great memories

Vague memories returning, the ones I collected did not fire pellets, but were made by LS.

I was brought up at least a decade before you guys, and the only toy guns we could get besides water pistols, were the hand guns which used the rolls of caps. I don't know what these were officially known as, but I don't think you can get them any more.
I remember I had a Luger, but that's about it.

This might be of interest too if you haven't seen it already


https://mp40modelguns.forumotion.net/modelgun-general-discussion-f1/ls-models-t192.htm?highlight=ls+models

Yep,the LS kits i owned were definately plastic low powered Airsoft kits but were great fun for plinking around the house and at the time there wasnt any other choice other than expensive deacts realy to get full sized replicas.Battle orders at the time did stock some of the metal replicas but they were very expensive for me starting off working full time in a crappy job-come to think of it nothing much has changed-still working full time in a crappy job













Still have a Dirty Harry Magnum somewhere but cannot find at the moment.

I built a ton of those LS modelgun kits (not the airsoft versions) i really enjoyed building them and i learned a lot about the functioning of fireamrs in the process.

Too bad they were of such low quality, they didn't survive very long in my eager hands

I did find one some year ago at a Swedish eBay-type site, a Nambu kit. Very fun to build and i really appreciate the odd/different design of the Nambu pistol. (Will, someday, buy a zinc replica of it)

If the were available i'd buy a few just for kicks!

Ozguns wrote:

I was brought up at least a decade before you guys, and the only toy guns we could get besides water pistols, were the hand guns which used the rolls of caps.  I don't know what these were officially known as, but I don't think you can get them any more.
I remember I had a Luger, but that's about it.

I think every boy in England had a "Lone Star" Luger - the fake "safety catch" was the latch for the spring loaded cap compartment. "Lone Star" had a rival in the form of "Crescent", who also made a Luger, but unlike the Lone Star one (which in my memory at least was full-sized!) it was rather smaller. The Lone Star lugers were sold in cardboard boxes printed to look like a wooden crate. If you google "Lone star luger cap gun" you'll see what it looked like.

I wonder if the molding machines for these are still around? Would be pretty cool if somebody
started to remake these?

Sommarkatze wrote:

I wonder if the molding machines for these are still around? Would be pretty cool if somebody
started to remake these?

Improbable, and under the UK's current legislation, the resulting toys wouldn't be playable-with in the street or park anyway. I seem to recall (aside from the two makes of fake Lugers) that Lone-star also made a 2/3 scale Mauser c1896, complete with clip-on skeleton shoulderstock, telescopic sight and silencer, which they sold as a "Man from UNCLE" gun. Crescent's "UNCLE" gun was the Luger from their range. Lone Star also released a 2/3 scale Walther P38 with "gold" plastic grips as a "James Bond" gun. Pretty much every cop/spy TV show or film that featured firearms would result in Lone Star or Cresent releasing a tie-in cap gun (more often than not, of completely the WRONG gun!) Dean Martin's jokey "Matt Helm" films were never particularly popular in the UK, but Lone Star released a 2/3 Webley revolver with a LONG ("Buntline Special") style barrel as a tie-in. The two other capguns that I recall as having pretty much universal ownership were Lone Star's "Beretta" (where the cap compartment was inside the grip, where the left side grip hinged forwards around a rivet to reveal the compartment.) And an elaborately "engraved" Remmington "Deringer", sold as either "The Dandy" or "The Gambler".

The one thing that ALL of these toys had in common was that they were made from die-cast zinc alloy. I doubt very much that the molds still exist - as the "capgun" phase of my childhood came to an end, Lone Star released a rather good, not-quite-1:1 model of the Beretta 1934, made principally from PLASTIC. Curiously, pretty much ALL of the cap-firing mechanism was housed inside the (zinc alloy) removeable magazine. I think that pistol marked the end of an era. (The era where toy guns were routinely made from die-cast zinc alloy.) The new plastic era had arrived.