Trapped Weekend! Customizin’ and Junkyard Doggin’

Are ya dug out yet???

Well, that last weekend was no fun! Not for your humble blogger and friends, and not for at least a million other peeps across the land! The Weather Channel has apparently named the monster that just past “Winter Storm Fern,” while NOAA/NWS just called it “the January 2026 winter storm.” I bet there a lot of other people calling it far more choice names. I shouldn’t complain; despite Colorado’s reputation for occasional spectacular blizzards, we got very little snow-not much more than a couple of inches in my neck of the woods. What we did get, though, was icy temperatures that plumbed depths not seen since X-mas of 2022!

For all these reasons, I spent the whole weekend safe at home, for the most part wrapped in a flannel “union suit” (where’d that name come from? Its like Long Johns that joined the Teamsters) which was mighty comfy, so while the temps plunged and the snow blew outdoors, I was surrounded by antique electric heaters and a monster gas furnace and made the best of it, getting’ all warm and fuzzy with some music and some good food and my toys! And on top of that I even had a couple of visits from friends who braved the cold! So, what does a slot-head and die-cast collector do when trapped at home on a weekend? Here’s a few highlights!

Junkyard Pickin’s!

My buddy Patrick dropped in on me again bearing gifts: one was a cool checkered flag with a 76 logo on it that he had in his garage for years. Origin unknown, but I grew up with that orange and blue logo and remember it from my youngest days. I don’t see it anymore, although I understand that even after several ownership changes over the years (through Chevron and then Phillips) you can still find 76 stations doing business in CA (though for how much longer only the state government knows for sure!) Makes a nice wall decoration beside the “jumbo-tron” above the track!

The other item he gifted me was a big bag full of die-casts he had found sitting next to a dumpster somewhere up in his mountain environs. He had been meaning to give them to me for years but always forgot until this weekend. Unwrapping those plastic bags revealed a motley mess that needed a lot of cleaning with strong dish soap and hot water, but once the grime was removed there were a few things in there of moderate interest.

There were no fewer than 6 Mc D’s Happy Meal cars (in the past I had been led to believe these were highly collectible, but Colorado Diecast always throws them into their 50¢ bin, so, maybe not) and one of these piqued my interest in that it looked like a super-streamlined dream car from the 1930’s, like something out of a comic book. Probably another Batmobile, then, although there were no markings indicating such.

Several of these cars were beat up and junked but a few were in pretty decent condition; There were 5 or 6 Hot Wheels that were definitely worth keeping, including a decent ‘67 Camaro re-press in Hot Wheels livery and a Toyota Supra I’d never seen before, a couple of Lesney-era Matchboxes as well as several of the awful “late Universal era” cheapies, with the rest made up of the usual south Asian throw-aways.

The one car in this pile that did catch my attention was the lone Ertl casting of an ‘80 Chevy Caprice. This beat up budget 2-door had the name “Hawaiian Tropic” on the side, which rings a distant bell though I can’t say why. It was probably a NASCAR promo, but I liked the distressed look of it enough that I actually bothered to put it in an out of the way spot on the diorama, over by the storage shed near the pile of wrecked racing cars sitting alongside the abandoned French Majorette pickup truck.

I doubt I’ll leave it there for long, but it sort of looks right sitting there, like someone’s forgotten demolition derby project! So nothing earth-shattering about this-no super rare “barn find” gems here!-but on a weekend trapped indoors by the weather, fun is where you find it!

“Project Mo-Stash.”

This one is a little more interesting. In 2024 Hot Wheels released one of their more “whimsical” fantasy cars called the Mo-Stash. The looks like an open-wheeled racer from the early 19-teens, but is divided down the middle by a piece of plastic, hinged at the front, that opens out into a moustache comb. Cute, I suppose, but I never bought one…until they released a yellow, orange and brown recolor in November of ‘25. I really took a shine to the way that release was presented, and got it into my head to “improve” their design a little.

So I acquired a few of them at Wally World – more accurately, Jason acquired them for me! – and hacked the moustache comb in half, carving out the section that ran through the interior and fixing the back of it back in place with some epoxy and filler. I then salvaged a tiny steering wheel out of a destroyed Lesney Matchbox in the junkyard and carefully adhered it to the now exposed dashboard inside the cockpit, and then hand-painted one of my sitting figures to fit behind that wheel.

With a racing number change and the addition of a few old my dwindling stash of Road Race Replicas decals, I turned it into a “resto-mod” that just may be worthy of a place on the diorama as well…although exactly where I’d put it, I can’t imagine right now.

Let The Wind Howl!

So, as you can see, nothing too exciting here, but it was a relaxing weekend under terrible conditions where I again found myself feeling grateful for what I have. It was also the calm before the storm, as this week marks another nasty and difficult job in the field. Fortunately, the storm is over! I know a lot of you out there might still be digging out, and for me it’s back to work on another high-visibility, high pressure project, so I shall return this weekend once I have a chance to relax again and show you some more cool new additions to the Thunderjet collection! I mean, even in the deadest of winter, there’s still action at Drag City!