JUNKYARD WARS! Almost every collector has these piles…and they just keep growing…

For vintage die-cast collectors, buying lots on auction sites can be a great way to get some of the cars that you are after for less money than you would have to pay for them individually. Often you can find lots with more than one car in it that you want. There is a downside to lot buying, however, and that’s all the ride-alongs. Sometimes these can be interesting in and of themselves, and sometimes you can get additional bargains you were never even after, but inevitably you’re going to wind up with some common, sub-par pieces…in other words, junk. And if you do this for years, as I have, chances are you’ll wind up with quite a large junk pile…like mine!

Of course, the smartest thing to do is collect all the unwanted cars until you have enough of them to do a lot sale of your own and pass them on to the next collector to deal with, but as I have occasionally said, I am at a stage in my life where I am buying, not selling. I probably should rethink that in the next few years if space becomes a premium, but right now I have an abundance of space and thus have no trouble keeping even stuff I won’t want…especially stuff this small.

My “unwanted cars” are divided into two categories; if they are in rough shape around the edges with playwear and some paint loss but still overall in-tact, I deem them savable as-is or good subjects for either restoration or customization. These are the cars that someday I probably will sell, or even give away to a budding collector should I meet one. They go into a large high quality cardboard shoebox I’ve had for years. A lot of the cars in this box still have a lot of play value and while they may not be worth much from a monetary perspective, they are definitely not worthless.

If, however, I wind up with ride-alongs in really bad condition, they go into the scrap pile: these are the cars that have body damage, broken parts, missing wheels, busted windows, and significant paint loss. And believe me…there’s a lot of them.

In a previous post in which I introduced the “Get-Backs” Project, I showed you my own junk box that I’ve had since I was a kid that contains the remains of all the cars that didn’t survive my childhood. There is a second box, similar in size, that contains all the really beat up cars that have come my way via lot buying over the last decade, since I started collecting again in 2014. Between the two of them, there are enough ruined cars and pieces of cars to make one hell of a junkyard. And, dear readers, that is what I have intended to do for years. In fact, way back in 2014, I decided to a test run of this concept set up on the top of a workbench long before I got into the slot car hobby! I took several pictures of that to get an idea about how such a thing might look. There’s no proper landscaping here, of course, just the cars, but here is a hint of the idea…

Cast your mind back to the earliest entries in this blog, written when I was just finishing building the tables in the main room in my basement and was just beginning the migration from my Tyco track out to my new massive Tomy AFX track. I bought a lot more wood and materials than I needed to build the table you see in nearly every post on this blog; the reason for that is that the original plan was to build wings on the table, and expand my trackside diorama across those wings to the walls of the room. To stand at the short end of the table looking toward the Jumbotron on the wall, the layout would have been shaped something like a capital letter ‘M.’ Here’s a quick drawing of the concept:

As you can see, the areas shaded in gray represent additional tables I bought the materials to build but never proceeded with. The question you are likely asking is, why?

Well, there’s a lot of answers to that. The first was that I wanted to build the new track and diorama and get that all going. It took a while-a good year-and its still not completely where I want it; I never have done any real landscaping around the track, so there’s still a lot of work to do. But it’s also something psychological, and it has to do with how anchored I want to be to my house. I know that eventually I’m going to have to move; I no longer want to live anywhere near a big city, and Colorado has changed so much in the 25 years since I moved here that it has now become “Cali-rado” and has the exact same issues I ran away from years ago. It’s hard to think about starting over, especially at my age, but at some point I’m going to have to, because I can no longer tolerate the expense, the crime, the crowding, the civic corruption, the cultural decay, and the political insanity that this state has so tragically succumbed to. It’s already going to be an expensive and stressful nightmare to move from this house, and the more detailed my diorama becomes, the more weighed down here I will become, and the harder it’s going to be to tear it all down when that time finally comes.

Thing is, I’ve been saying this for a long time, and I haven’t been able to walk away from my job; every time I think I’m finally ready to go, they give me another raise! Dash it all!

And so, here I remain…and this summer, I’m thinking that maybe I will finally build those table extensions and start working on the diorama in earnest to realize the whole layout the way I originally planned. And if I do that, at least half of that 12 foot extension on the east wall of the basement’s main room will be dedicated to the biggest 1:64 die-cast graveyard you’ve ever seen! It will be complete with several outbuildings which will, of course, include a creepy old caretaker’s house, multiple cranes, a part pulling area, and even a functioning crusher: a desktop vice mounted on its side. Oh yes, I have plans! You should see the diorama that exists in my mind! 😛

So this is part of the reason I hang on to the contents of the junk boxes. A sane man would throw it all away and get the decent cars left up for sale in lots and take the money. Maybe someday I’ll come to my senses. But I haven’t yet! So there just may be some major construction at Drag City come this summer…or perhaps I’ll go the complete opposite direction and close up shop at the track and get ready to migrate. I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen since there’s a lot of moving parts to these decisions, so we’ll see! Stay tuned!