The Story of ACTION MAN Custom VAM figures

Custom Falklands War SAS Trooper

Custom SAS Dress Uniform

More of my customs

And a few more

SAS SILENT ATTACK

They are some great looking customs my friend!! Love the use of the polar explorer boot tops in your UN guy! Also really like your Falklands sas custom! My uncle Nick is a falkland islander and still has the droopy tache that seems to befit all the best falkland conflict era Vam customs I've seen. Great stuff.

Amazing Sets....

Thank you for the posting mate!!

Great Work
Len

Great looking custom sets!

Damn nice stuff!

Rick

Fantastic set of customs, awesome. That is one serious kayak.

Wow. Amazing. Jaw droppingly great figures. Impossible to name favourites but I do love the Aussies and the Brit infantry with the Lewis Gun. I'm also partial to German mountain troops, see I said I couldn't choose a favourite. Great upload. :-)

Fantastic stuff, truly inspirational bashes !! looking forward to seeing more !

Fantastic customs mate , so great to view these.

Lovely stuff more please,great stable belt on the SAS fella.

Some very nice bashes there, the Germans look superb.

Actually they all look superb, great pics mate.

thestoryofactionman wrote:

This one is unbe--friggin'--lievably Cool!

Too bad Palitoy never made an Enfield No1 Mk III.

Some fantastic looking figures here

Wow Truly amazing bashes

Fantastic bashes ! I really like the modern police man, great use of other vam stuff. Thatts not to say that I do not like the others they are all awesome !

Wow, fantastic. Blown me away Tony. I can say with hand on heart I've created a monster. Just what I'd set out to achieve. Thanks for taking up the mantle. Please can I just explain to the few on here who may not already know, how this came about and apologies to those who already know. Tony was persuaded by Bob Brechin to visit and interview me for his film, as Bob told Tony that "this guy had carried the Action Man theme where he and Palitoy had left off". So out of obligation to Bob, Tony paid me a visit. As I opened the door to this guy, his first words were "Look mate, I'm not in to customs, I'm a purist collector. I'm only here cos Bob asked me to take a look". After 5 minutes, Tony had changed his mind and just look at him now!! There's some there I'd be really proud of mate. I get a real buzz from seeing your stuff and it's a real pleasure to have you on here Tony. Thanks for coming over.

Here you go Vaughan, this is copied from my response to my welcome to the forum;

"Up until recently I was considered an Action Man "Purist", only collecting Palitoy outfits and displaying them exactly as they had been released back in the day. I wasn't against Action Man customs, they just weren't for me...

... Well that all changed two years ago when I first met Vaughan. I completely understood and appreciated his perspective on customising; using only original Palitoy accessories and a little imagination his customs stood out from the crowd. I think the key reason they appealed to me so much was because they still looked like toys and NOT models. Again, I'm not against the customisers who utilise Dragon Model accessories but for me the hobby had always been about a nostalgic love of toys. I didn't have models as a kid and my Action Man's rifle never had so much detail that it could be stripped for cleaning, so sticking to Vaughan's Guidelines I started customising Action Man figures about 18 months ago and I've never looked back."

It's interesting how attitudes change over the years, when I was first making customised figures similar to this as much as 20 years ago I was often treated with anything from mild amusement to outright disdain as a heretic by many of the "serious Action Man Collectors". That being said most of those Collectors are no longer collecting so I'm not sure what that says about them or me?

Winch wrote:

It's interesting how attitudes change over the years, when I was first making customised figures similar to this as much as 20 years ago I was often treated with anything from mild amusement to outright disdain as a heretic by many of the "serious Action Man Collectors". That being said most of those Collectors are no longer collecting so I'm not sure what that says about them or me?

And thankfully they all stuck to one site before they stopped collecting