The haul from my latest trip to Performance Slots & Hobbies yielded some real gems! I’ve already done a post on half the haul, a quad of Faller slotties that were great finds, even if I am seeking a replacement motor for one. But the rest of that haul were T-Jets, and ¾ of them are featured here. There is one last one which is extremely special, and that one will be getting a close-up feature of its own, but this trio highlighted here are still pretty damn special! Skeptical? Well, take a look!
’50 Nash Airflyte 2-dr sedan by MEV
How was an AMC fan such as yours truly supposed to pass this up?? The “bathtub Nash,” as its always been called throughout my life, may be mostly unloved today, but they were quite successful when they were new; their appearance that seems so odd to us now was futuristic on its introduction in 1949, and the car featured a lot of innovations, including unibody construction, which was uncommon in the American industry in the era. The moment I saw it at PSH nearly a year ago, I knew I wanted it, and I asked Doug & Cindy to set it aside for me months ago. On this recent trip out there, I finally grabbed it!
While yellow wouldn’t have been my first choice of color (I’d have picked mint green if I’d have ordered it myself), not waiting 6-8 months for delivery (and even longer waiting for those increasingly brief periods when MEV is even taking orders) was sure appealing!
I got a bonus with this one, too, since it was mounted on an almost unused and virginal orginal Aurora T-Jet chassis, one of the late-production open-rivet models with the green/white field magnets, and with just a little oil it runs like a top; in fact, it may be one of the best runners in the Road Crew!
Mind you, there was a challenge with this car, the same kind of challenge owners of the real things faced: fitting the tires under the bizzare envelope body design! Because the car appeared never to have even been run, the front and rear wheels were rubbing against the body. I was able to get the rears to clear by compressing the wheels on the axle as far as they would go, with the backs of the wheels almost rubbing the chassis, but for the fronts I needed a fraction of a millimeter of extra clearance. I got that by using a set of very old and dried out tires from one of my junk Vibrator chassis; these earliest of the Aurora slotties had tires that were even thinner than the original thunderjets-literally no wider than the thickness of a man’s fingernail-and although they have absolute zero traction, you don’t need traction at the front! Using a pair of those provided just the last bit of infinitesimal clearance I needed, and this little “bathtub” is now one of the fastest cars on the HO Highway!
The grille pattern marks this as a 1950 model 2-door sedan. Its not a pretty car, to be sure, but its funky styling and historical significance made this a must-have for this “greaser!”
’63 Plymouth Belvedere Max Wedge Super Stocker by MEV
Another irresistible acquisition for obvious reasons! Though I’ve always liked the look of this car, the looks were nothing compared to the motor-vation for the real thing: the top-of-the-line 413 Max Wedge was the terror of the track in its day, the dominator of the strip that everyone was gunning for before the race Hemi up’ed the ante even further in ’64!
A previous owner had simply blacked out the stock chrome wheels with a black Sharpie, and though I admit it didn’t look bad, I wanted more, so I dipped into my stash of custom-ordered MEV 5-lug wheels and picked a set of pale gray ones to replace them. Initially equipped and run with stock tires, I later re-discovered I still had a few of the Jel Claws 2031 “mags” in stock that I hadn’t used, which got it running even better! This classic dragger is now ready to challenge the white ‘62 Impala bubble-top super-stocker I picked up from our PSH folks at the last Colpar’s swap meet last summer!
The chassis on this one was also a low-milage late NOS Aurora with the green/white magnets; it made quite a racket at first, but a generous helping of my Super-Lube PTFE “miracle oil” was all that was needed to quiet it down and get it launch and run like a champ!
’67 Corvette hardtop roadster by Model Motoring
Here’s one that’s well established in my collection; I have no few than 3 of these in my numbered Ultra-G racing fleet, but there’s only 1 in the Road Crew, one which-ironically-used to be a member of the Ultra-G racing fleet! This bright blue one with the white hood flash was so appealing that I couldn’t resist buying another one. I just showed this one in last Monday’s post, but the subject there was not the car itself, but rather some remarks about the original Motor Motoring chassis that it came on. If you read that post, you know that chassis is now in the junk pile, and while I considered mounting it on a good used Aurora T-Jet I have in reserve, I decided instead to see if I could get the body to fit one of my early non-trac-mag Auto World Ultra-G’s without doing any “grinding” on the underside of the body; the 3 copies of this body on the trac-mag AW Ultra-G’s in the racing fleet all had to have a little material removed from underneath to fit the slightly enlarged chassis, but with very careful planning, including slightly deepening the slot at the rear of the chassis and bending the very upper tips of the pick-up shoes inward with a carefully placed pair of small needle-nose pliers just enough to clear the front bumper, I was able to get it to fit!
As for wheels: for this baby I decided to do something no other sports car in The Road Crew has, and fit it with a set of chrome 5-Lugs (MEV rather than Vincent, although I find the difference between them indistinguishable). Now that its’ done, it looks magnificent, and with the Auto World chassis, it’s so fast that I can’t run it at more than 1/3 throttle on the HO Highway!
Thus, The Road Crew’s crazy expansion comes to an end for 2024, but don’t think for a second it will stop for 2025! It is true that I’m slowing down on my slot car acquisitions because I have so much of what I want, but there’s still gems out there; there are some new MEV designs I’m looking forward to getting (although I’d be lucky to have them by summer if I ordered them the 1st week in January!) and there’s always those rare original Auroras out there that I’ve deemed too expensive to pursue, but you never know when I might run into a bargain!
There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays!
And so, dear readers, thunderjetheaven.com is going on X-mas break! Your humble blogger is jetting off to Arizona to go “home for the holidays,” not to return until the day before New Year’s Eve, so these pages will be quiet for the next 2 weeks, while I leave the homestead in capable hands. For my holiday farewell, here’s this years version of my traditional “Mr. Christmas Insta-Shape Tree,” which is decorated this year with a ring of 1:43 Corgi and Dinky cars! You know I change this up every year: sometimes its T-Jets, sometimes its vintage Matchboxes, sometimes its modern Hot Wheels, I even did “Models of Yesteryear” one year! So this year its “the big cars,” because I’m kinda into that right now and have been buying a few, as you saw in this recent post, and this one, too!
As you’ve heard me mention: I’ll be making some pretty big changes to the look of thunderjetheaven.com for the new year! I paid the signifcant cost to do the upgrade to my site, and for 2025 I’ll be choosing a new theme which will hopefully have better navigation which will allow readers to access every post I’ve ever done going all the way back to the very beginning – over 600 of them now! There’ll be some new features as well, where I’m going to try to double-down on my tech related articles, as well as a further expansion of interest in other vintage toys, and even an increase to some thoughts and discussions about 1:1 scale cars! So be ready for more slot racing action, more diorama updates, more nuts and bolts details, and more classic car musings when we return for 2025!
Merry Christmas to all my fellow gear-heads, slot-heads, racing enthusiasts, and toy collectors!
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