In a previous post I revealed some of the details of my trip to an amazing shop in the middle of nowhere packed with thousands of original Vintage T-Jets. Seeing all this has got me thinking about all the original chassis that I have acquired that have been sitting in a box unused for over 2 years. I’ve bought almost 150 slot car bodies since January 2020 to build my muscle car and racing car fleets, and several of them came on original chassis-some running, most not-that I had no interest in; I only wanted the bodies to mount then on my Ultra-G’s, so all these originals just got thrown in a pile to be sold in a lot on ebay at some point in the future.
Sometimes its good that I never get around to selling things, because I’ve decided that maybe I’ve been missing something: I’ve always had a handful of originals around just for the fun of firing them up and drifting a little, but due to their slowness I’ve never really found them all that exciting. I think the problem is that I was trying to race them when the real fun is in just cruising with them! Drifting around the corners, slip-sliding through sweeper turns and spinning out from time to time are all things you can’t do with the Ultra-G chassis with the traction magnets. And another thing I’ve noticed is that, as the prices on these old toys just continue to go up, people are now paying amazing premiums for these original chassis: they are quite valuable in mint condition, but even old used ones are worth more than I expected if they are running.
More importantly, there are a lot of HO scale bodies made for these chassis that are too small for my 1:64 diorama but are so beautiful that its hard not to own them, so, since they can’t co-exist with the 1:64 die-cast collection, what I need is a whole new track, a whole new layout-all geared to 1:87 instead of 1:64!
Before I start working on that, though, I better find out if I can get any use out of this stack of chassis I have so I can start mounting some of those bodies on them! So after returning from my business trip on which I found “Aladdin’s Cave”, I decided to take out that box of old wrecks and see if I could bring them back to life. Turns out I’m either a better T-Jet mechanic than I gave myself credit for, or I’m very lucky! Have a look at the process and then give it a try yourself!
That was an epic find at the mom and pop shop you came across! I think it is really cool how you can reuse these chassis that you initially didn’t use. It’s always good to keep those spare parts!