The days of the year are numbered, and it has been a good 2 years to hide in my basement playing with slot cars! Sadly, however, this journey’s days also appear numbered: I am revisiting the choice I made 3 years ago to stay put and build my toyland dreams in my basement, and will probably seek to relocate to a different part of the county in the coming year, which is a massive undertaking that will require the whole of my resources to accomplish. This won’t leave much room for hobbies. This is part of the larger issue I have already mentioned: that my previously ample expendable income to support Drag City has been largely eliminated by “Bidenflation,” as well as my winter heating bills likely to be double what they have been; it appears that circumstances are only going to keep getting worse. But hey, at least there’s no more of those embarrassing “mean tweets,” right? And on a more positive note, maybe its time to come out of the basement and look into the possibility of rekindling at least some actual human interactions.
So, here we come to the end result of a great deal of “fleet shuffling” I’ve been doing which has resulted in several cars that were once in the Ultra-G Muscle Car racing fleet migrating out to The Road Crew, leaving me the ability to build that racing fleet back up to it’s cap of 64 cars. The final one of these was just built yesterday: this fluorescent lime green 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A just may really be “the last muscle car.”
This body came in an original early series jewel case on an early Auto World chassis with no traction magnet. It has been mounted on a brand new out-of-the box Ultra-G chassis and fitted with a set of Vincent “Fuchs” mags, a style I have up to this point used on only 2 other cars. She rides on the last remaining set of Road Race Replicas RWL Goodyear silicone tires I had in reserve, and I was saving them for just such a car! No body mods were required for fit-not even a shim-and she makes the circuit fast, true, and smooth!
Named “Vanishing Point” in spite of not being painted white, this is the 2nd of the very rare and desirable 1 year only 340 powered Challengers built for homologation of the Dodge E-Body for Trans Am racing that has appeared to face off against the timers and the competitors at Drag City. She is run by Dequan “Comanche” Dunmore, a fitting nickname for a man who was raised on a reservation and now plies his trade on California soil. Being a newcomer to the track, “Comanche” starts with a blank slate, so he’s tach’ing up, pistol-grip shift lever in hand, waiting for the flag to drop!
The question now is, where to from here, both with all my fleets of cool slot cars and with this here blog. I have two projects in mind that I may work on in the coming months. One is a new page with a complete fleet roster with 2 photos of every T-Jet along with a grid featuring its facts, figures, and a mini-bio. The other is one I’ve already mentioned; embarking on a neglected aspect of my diorama, landscaping and ground cover. This will require the temporary disassembly of sections of the track in order to work on them, and in some cases those construction zones may last for several days.
Hopefully I’ll be back at some point to report some progress on one or both of these projects, and who knows what else might come up. I will post from time to time when something worthy of discussion comes up that I think might be of interest to fellow T-jet enthusiasts or other slot heads. However, due to a combination of a lack of interest from without and the need to devote resources to other pursuits within, thunderjetheaven.com is going on “semi-hiatus,” and posts will be event-based rather than on a regular schedule.
I remember that movie and let me know what plans you have for the diorama and I’ll help and offer my vast expertise (really just winging it)! Ha Ha!