It was just supposed to be a “quick little trip.” Ya know, to just get a couple of things I’d seen before and passed up. $40 or $50, $60 at most…nothing crazy, right?
Dear readers, lemmetellya: any time and every time you walk into Colorado Diecast, you’re going to get more than you bargained for! So this time around, maybe I did go a little crazy-again-buying an irresistible (but very expensive) RLC out of one of their locked glass cases…but on the other end of the price spectrum, your humble blogger hit the jackpot!
I was there for a lot longer than I planned, walking the aisles with my basket for over an hour picking things out and mulling them over when I bombed myself by looking into the glass cases. Now, normally, the stuff in those cases is selling for hundreds of dollars, so its usually stuff I’m not going to buy anyway…but this time I saw some thing for $40 that I just could not pass up! So I made the mistake of asking for the case to be unlocked, and after I grabbed that jewel, I had to walk the aisles again and put some stuff back, since otherwise I was gonna break the bank!
I was just reaching satisfaction with my haul and getting ready to walk to the counter to settle up when one of the boys came in with a 5 gallon Homer bucket full of loose cars and dumped them into the 50 cent bargain bin! HUNDREDS of cars just dropped in front of me, mere feet from my very face! Needless to say, I swooped in on that pile like a vulture…and just look at some of things I got!
Now of course, there’s a reason why these cars are in the 50¢ bin: they’re usually not perfect, either showing some playwear or other minor paint damage, or some sign of a factory defect. Though I swear I’ve often picked some cars out of this bin that I can’t find a thing wrong with, most of this drop were slightly flawed in some way, showing some discoloration on some of the plastic like some gray patches on the wheels or the windows, as if they had somehow been exposed to some type of chemical. But the flaws were so minor as to be almost insignificant, and though they may have disqualified these die-casts as perfect collector-grade pieces, they were 50 CENTS, fer crissake! What’s to complain about???
I scooped up two armfuls of them, some for Jason and many for myself, and bore my basket up to the register with a smile on my face! Due to that pricy RLC, my bill still just broke 3 figures, but I got 3 TIMES the number of cars I thought I’d get! I left COD a happy kid indeed!
There are several great cars in this lot, including high(er)-end releases of the Toyota 2000GT and the BMW 2002, both with 5-spoke wheels in great racing liveries, a Matchbox printing of a ‘69 Mustang Mach 1 in black and gold with a hood that opens to reveal an amazingly detailed Boss 302 V8 painted the correct shade of Ford blue, and I got what may be the nicest issue I’ve seen of the Brazilian Dodge Charger in yellow with R/T-style stripes. And this was all in addition to what I actually went there to get, a trio of premium Matchbox “Collectors,” at least one of which is bound for the diorama as well!
One of the scores that needed a little TLC was a Matchbox MGB GT in yellow-orange, a color I hadn’t seen before, which had clearly never been played with but was nonetheless covered with a film of grime, as if it has sat on a kitchen counter while someone was frying bacon. I was sure I could clean it, and I did, with a bath of Tri-Sodium Phosphate and then a gentle workover with the buffing wheel on the Dremel @ low RPM before a good hot water wash. It came out so well that I actually placed it on the diorama on the freeway replacing another, earlier version of the same casting, a red one I bought back in 2020. Comparing them side by side there are some slight differences between them in the inkjetting detail, but the section of the freeway where the red car was had a little too much red, I thought, so I believed the orangey-yellow one would “pop” a bit better. I daresay I was right!
Another really interesting piece I picked up for a remarkably low price was a 2007 Treasure Hunt of a casting I had never before seen, even though its apparently first went on the market back in 2005. This is a “fantasy car” and as you know I rarely buy those, but this one was so cool looking I had to have it, and reading the details about its development on the HW Fandom Wiki made it all that much more interesting: this is probably the second best version ever of the “16 Angels,” a really cool all-metal heavy-weight (later converted to plastic, sadly), second only to the “Super Treasure Hunt” version, which is identical to it except for having “Real Riders” wheels and tires.
Round that up with another “HW Garage” premium issue of the ‘68 Mercury Cougar in a gorgeous silver with red detailing and another “Classics” pick-up – a “Spectraflame” purple version of the ‘58 Edsel – amongst a couple of others, and I would say that made for a great haul!
I’m telling ya…no matter how old you get, there is nothing like a load of new Matchboxes and Hot Wheels to bring a smile to a gearhead’s face…especially when you get them at bargain basement prices! Happy Sunday, everyone!
For being loose, it looks like they were in pretty good condition! Some great and super cool finds! 🙂