Recovery in progress: Your H.B. in the Toy Room under the watchful eye of my team of intrepid dream catchers
As I continue my slow recovery from my recent bout of a nasty bacterial gut infection, thunderjetheaven.com can return to our regularly scheduled programming. I was able to muster up enough strength this weekend to put up my little “pop-up X-mas tree.” I did a li’l post on this last year, when I mentioned that ever since my divorce many years ago I have never put up a large x-mas tree in my house, since the big tree and all the decorations associated with it bring back memories I’m not really interested in cultivating. So instead I use this little “personal tree,” which somehow seems more appropriate than ever in this age of forced austerity. Thing is, I have enough space for a big tree, and there is a part of me that would like to put it out, because I think it would be really cool to put a simple Model Motoring track around the base of it, power it up and run a couple of cars around for a gearhead’s variation on the traditional X-mas train. But, my little tabletop tree doesn’t allow for that, sitting as it is on the end table next to my sofa, so I will have to be content with my usual display of Matchbox cars, and for electrified movement, focus on the goings-on downstairs in the toy room.
This is the first year I’ve used this set of vintage mini-bubble lights that a friend so graciously found for me last year. Once commonplace, these are now rare and hard to find
No X-mas tree in my house is complete without a compliment of toy cars!
So, to the toy room! And down here we find several new additions to The Road Crew!
First up we have a beauty which isn’t as old as it looks! This yellow ’68 El Camino sure looks like one of those rare original Aurora pieces, but its actually an Auto World copy, albeit an older one from roundabout Release 4. It cost me a fortune too, since the old AW El Caminos seem to be being snapped up by collectors, which I guess makes sense now that the originals are so astronomically expensive that most mortals are priced out of them now. I thought it looked particularly good in yellow, so I mounted it on an early Playing Mantis non-trac-mag Johnny Lightning T-Jet 500 chassis and away she went effortlessly!Next up we have another ’70 Chevelle, in purple with white SS stripes. Although this body has also been copied by Auto World, this one is an early Model Motoring version, which is not the same body, the MM version being slightly smaller and carrying some distinct detail differences from the Auto World offering of the same car. This is the 2nd copy of this body I have acquired (in addition to the black one with gold stripes) and it got mounted on a Tuff Ones chassis just like that older version. Due to their increasing scarcity I opted not to fit it with the 5-lug wheels and instead went with stock T-Jet 500 wheels, but with a set of Jel Claws 2031 tires on the back, it has the traction it needs to put that low-geared power down for fast getaways across the “HO Highway.”This McLaren Elva was a happy accident; I was shopping for a new addition to the sports car fleet (more details on that are coming, rest assured!) and I wound up buying two of them because, after finding the one I really wanted, I happened upon this one at such a bargain price that I snapped it up. Turns out it was even more of a bargain than I realized because it was in near mint condition! It had been mounted but couldn’t ever have been played with since it bore no signs of road rash. It is also an abnormally rich shade of red! It was such a cream puff that although I did mount it on a nice open rivet chassis, I won’t run it much since I don’t want to scuff it up, but it sure looks purty lined up with the other LeMans-style racing cars on this side of The Road Crew!OMG, another Charger?! Yep, and this is going to have to be my last one because there are no more colors on the Johnny Lightning copies that I want! Unlike the Challenger, the Charger was never available in “Panther Pink,” yet here’s one now, complete with the RT tail stripes and signature black vinyl top! This is the only one of the now six JL Chargers in the road crew that doesn’t run with 5-lug wheels, since the stockers seemed fine for this more “demure” colored version, but even at that, she runs just fine on her Playing Mantis JL T-Jet 500 chassis and can smoke most other muscle cars in the ‘Crew that try to laugh at her! As a side note: this color appeals to me because it reminds me of so many early ’70’s Matchbox cars!And finally we have an addition to the ‘crew that isn’t new at all; this is a recent retiree from the muscle car racing fleet, the “Ko-Motion” ’67 Corvette hardtop roadster. I’ve been shuffling a lot of cars around the muscle fleet lately trying to make room for at least some of the many newcomers I keep piling on with my never ending buying and building, and since the chassis that Ko-Motion was sitting on was at the end of its lifespan, I figured it was time to put the chassis out to pasture and give the body a new lease on life on an original Aurora T-Jet 500 open-rivet chassis, which it fits only perfectly and looks great on besides! This is a nice addition to the sports car section of The Road Crew!
And so there’s the latest from the HO Highway offshoot of Drag City, where the cars drift the days away sans magnets and relive the old days like they were new again! Hey, it’s almost X-mas, and there’s no better time of year for an adult to be a kid again!
Below: probably the best vintage X-mas music playlist I’ve ever heard; far afield from “the same old thing” and interspersed with poignant live radio clips from WW II, this is a compilation which-unlike so many of the thousands out there-is really worth your time!
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