BAYKO Instruction Manuals

This section shows, in chronological order, the various Instruction Manuals, Booklets and Leaflets which were included with BAYKO sets to help young modellers to get started.

The Instruction Manuals generally have up to 5 main functions : -

Introduce people to the names and descriptions of all the parts.

Provide a general "how it's done" training section.

Provide a graduated range of plans from easy to expert.

Provide other information like set contents and, sometimes, prices of spare parts.

Fire the aspirations for a larger set!!!

The way this was done varied significantly over the years. Some documents fulfilled all the roles but sometimes BAYKO used more than one document to cover everything e.g., during the 'New Series' period just before the war, the larger conversion sets contained a number of instruction cards for further models which could only be built with the larger set.

I'm only going to show the front cover and one other page from each manual on this page, just click on either if you want to see the entire document.

I hope you find this section useful and interesting.

I am always interested in expanding the range of documents on the site, so if you have anything that you don't see here and are happy to sell or lend it to me then I'd love to hear from you...

There are some BAYKO collectors who believe that there were limited sales of pre-war product after the war and therefore also of the later pre-war manuals...
...personally I think it is much more likely that everything saleable would already have been sold long before the war was over, though that doesn't make it impossible.

I accept that the distinction I have drawn is a little artificial, but this is where I draw the line between the immediate post-war period and BAYKO's peak period.
I justify the distinction partly on the standardisation of manual's size and format from this point onward, and partly on the fact that Plimpton's post-war experimentation with different colours for both parts and set boxes was largely behind them.

Well, that's finally that, as far as this particular section is concerned, at least for the moment!

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