Define FUN: / noun / 1. See toy swap meet @ Colpars basement! The Road Crew Grows Again!

Well, your humble blogger just returned to home base from a little jaunt across the urban jungle to a place south of Denver where, nestled discretely in the corner of a little strip mall, sits a deceptively large hobby store. I don’t make it down there often because its definitely off my beaten path, but I do have a history with this place. In fact, there are 2 Colpar’s Hobbytown locations in the metro Denver area, and if you were to go allllll the way back to the very first post I ever did on this blog, you’d see that the smaller store in Lakewood, which is much closer to where I live, is where I bought my first ever Thunderjet! (it was a red ’70 Nova SS with black stripes).

The location in “Saudi Aurora,” however, is much larger, and as I said, deceptively so; when you first walk into the place it seems big enough, but then you find the stairwell and realize it has a basement! That’s where the big 1:32 scale slot track for racing Scalextric and Carrera cars is located, along with some other sporting equipment and some meeting areas for gamers to gather to play D&D, Warhammer, or any number of other old-school RPGs. It’s a really cool place with a good vibe, but due to the inconvenience of the location, I usually need a reason beyond just a desire to browse to go down there. Well, this weekend, I had such a reason!

Doug and Cindy of Performance Slots & Hobbies were one of the vendors with table space for this weekend’s toy swapmeet. Colpars generally does these 2x a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, and this event on June 1 marked their spring affair for 2024. So I grabbed some cold hard cash out of one of the machines when left the office Friday afternoon and headed out there bright and early Saturday morning to see what kinds of cool stuff I might run into!

I am happy to say I did very well! I added 3 new T-Jets to my collection which I’ll profile here, as well as grabbing an obscure Matchbox-or part of one, really-that I need to do more research on. Now, you’ll note that you see 4 cars in the pic above, not 3. Well, that last one is going to be the subject of a longer and more in-depth post, coming up in a month’s time. and I suspect you already have an idea which one I’m talking about! For now, here’s a look at the newest additions to The Road Crew!

Aurora Tuff Ones ’69 AMX

Its no secret that I’m fond of AMC’s, so its no surprise that between the Auto World Ultra G fleet and the Aurora originals, this is now my 8^th AMX! This is an original Tuff One from the early 70’s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the body is still screwed onto the chassis the car came out of the package with! There’ll never be any way to tell that, of course, but the tires are clearly as old as the rest of the car because after I warmed her up with the 9V battery and gave her a little oil and introduced her to the Model Motoring track for the first time, those rear tires spun right off! No matter, since I have boxes full of tires. You can see this is a very tidy car showing very little wear. Its not a rare or HTF model but its one I didn’t have, so I’m glad to add it to my collection. Even though I plan to keep this on the chassis I bought it with, I do think I’ll probably change out the wheels to the older, standard T-Jet type for consistency. I don’t know for sure, though; for now she’s staying just the way she is; I’m in no hurry!

MEV ’62 Chevy Impala stocker

Note that this is an Impala, NOT a Bel-Air like my MEV ’61 “bubbletop,” as shown by the 6 tail lights. She’s done up like a model of a real dragger from back in the diz-ay, although I note with some irony that the real “Old Reliable II” was, in fact, a Bel-Air! 😛 Well, who cares? She looks great, she’s got slicks on the back and runs like a champ on a T-Jet 500 chassis that looks NOS and hardly used! I think I will probably upgrade this one with a set of 5-lug wheels, although I’d really like to get them in white if it were possible! Other than that, I don’t see much here that needs changing!

MEV ’55 Jaguar D-Type

How funny, I was just saying I’d like a set of white 5-Lugs for that ’62 Imapala! Well the last of my 3 T-Jet scores @ Colpar’s basement swap meet was this cool early (as noted by the “short nose”) Jaguar D-Type. It is also sitting on a nearly unused and great running original Aurora chassis, although for some reason a previous owner decided to fit it with Tuff-Ones-sized MEV 5-lugs and then fit the wide back wheels not with Tuff Ones tires, as you would logically expect, but a double set of standard tires. Interesting…what was the idea behind that, I wonder? Well, I don’t care for the look since it makes the car look like a truck, so for this one I will be replacing the wheels with your standard plain’ ol early T-Jet chrome discs.

Now, what I would really like to do is turn this car into a member of my racing fleet, but I’m almost positive that’s not in the cards; like most MEV bodies, this one is very small, and almost surely will not fit onto an Ultra G chassis, or at least, not without a lot of grinding, which I’m not keen to do on this body which I believe is now out of production. It is a beautiful shade of blue, a color that almost resembles Aurora “slate blue,” and it also came with a previous owner-installed decal featuring your HB’s “lucky number,” so while I will be changing a few things up on this one, the chances of it become a member of the racing fleet are slim. In which case, it will run with the road crew as a street-driven old race car, as a homage to the more liberated days when that kind of thing was perfectly legal.

On top of all that, I got a couple of other goodies: a new Hot Wheels “Car Culture” release that was just irresistible even though I have no room anywhere on the diorama for it (unless I choose to remove something already there, which, for the sake of variety, I may do!) and I also scored a tool that I think will be very useful for the workbench, a little jeweler’s hammer with several changeable ends that may help me with wheel and axle removal and installations, and those few times when trying to squeeze a new field magnet into a chassis pan that’s just a hair tight! I’ve been thinking about getting one of these for a while and since I saw one there and had some cash to spend, here it be!

HIATUS AHEAD: SLOWER SPEEDS ADVISED

I wanted to let you know, dear readers, that I will be absent from me blog for the next 3 weeks or so, as I wrap up some things at work and then head off on a jet plane for a trip to see old friends. Yes, believe it or not, I’m “Going back to Cali” for a week long visit, and I think its very likely that this may be the last time I set foot in that once-golden state. I don’t expect to go back there again, because it breaks my heart to see what has become of it…the same thing that’s becoming of Colorado. Which is why, shortly after my return from CA, I’ll be having an out own town visitor, none other than my buddy from Arkansas, who’s coming to see me to discuss plans for my relocation to “The Natural State.” His visit should be followed by another trip for me to go out there sometime this fall, likely in late September or early October.

I should have one more post coming if I can squeeze it in: my next installment of Theatre of the Less Obvious should post next week while I’m winging my way west, because the next flick I want to review is a really cool and really obscure one from “the golden era” and I’m anxious to share it with you. After that, however, expect the track and the blog to be quiet for most of the rest of June, as I log some new travels and new adventures, and when I come back to it, you can look forward to all kinds of stories from afar about the things I’ve done and the places I’ve seen!

So have fun racing, dear readers! I shall return!