A short history.

Matchbox was a brand name of the British toy company Lesney Products & Co. Ltd. The company was founded in 1947 as an industrial die casting company, it launched Matchbox as a brand name for its (toy)die cast cars in 1953.

Around 1972 Lesney bought the American plastic kit manufacturer AMT Corporation. With the AMT resources, Lesney began it's own plastic kit division in the UK and started to produce the well known Matchbox plastic kits. The majority of models Matchbox put out were from the 1/72 (military) aircraft and 1/76 (military) vehicles ranges.

In 1982 Lesney went bankrupt and the company was taken over by Universal Holdings/Universal Toys, renaming it to Matchbox International Ltd., AMT itself was sold to Ertl. Later on the moulds of the 1/72 and 1/76 scale military kits were taken over by the Revell group who produced Matchbox kits until mid 90's. After that it was done with the Matchbox branded model kits (the Matchbox brand name is still carried today by Mattel for its die cast toy cars, so the brand name Matchbox didn't disappear).

From time to time, Revell digs up the original Matchbox moulds and releases some of the military models under its own name. At the time of writing this, Revell is releasing some of these kits

Matchbox kit collection

My collection of 1/76 and 1/72 Matchbox scale models. When I was a child I build a lot of these kits and strangely, they all ended up in fire or got blown up by fireworks (who doesn't recognize that :D ). As I got older I switched over to 1/35 scale models and forgot all about the Matchbox kits, I didn't even know they went bankrupt back in 1982.

A short while ago I crossed path with a Matchbox Stuart Honey kit and I had to buy it for old times sake. I was hooked immediately and had the idea of collecting the whole range of military vehicle kits. At first I thought there was only a limited amount of kits but as I found out that the military kits were produced from 3 different owners, I started to realize that there also were 3 different kinds of packaging (5 actually, not counting the recently released series from Revell).

I found this a bit too much and concentrated only on the kits produced by the Lesney Company itself (the pre-1982 kits). While hunting for these kits, I still obtained a lot of the other kits and the idea crossed my mind to also build the whole range of military vehicle kits.

Because I don't have all the time in the world and scanning and editing the files takes a lot of time, the kits will appear one at a time on the site. Also, I still have to start building the kits (I'm terribly slow) so that section will have to wait a while.