Just so everyone is clear: I do not consider myself to be a “serious” scale modeler; I’m not cut from the same bolt of cloth as model railroaders, who strive for accuracy and realism in their dioramas and layouts. Much of what I am doing will seem cheesy and even childish to you if you are all about making sure every piece of foliage and ground cover is accurate and every building is properly weathered. Childish may be dead-on: I’m not making museum pieces, I want to have fun: I’m just a big kid playing with his toys. As a results, my primary goal in creating the diorama surrounding my slot tracks is to show off some of my prodigious 1/64 diecast collection. Please keep this in mind before commenting that “the trees are wrong” or “the angle of that bridge isn’t realistic.”

Having said this, as things progress you can see I have made an effort to blend the HO scale and 1/64 scale to best of my ability, including the use of “forced perspective” where possible. I think I’ve done a decent job but I am always open to suggestions.

As you can see from the images and vids above, I am primarily a collector of Lesney-era Matchboxes. I do have many others, including Hot Wheels (naturally), Tomica, Johnny Lightning, and of course POST-Lesney Matchboxes, but the British-made Matchboxes of the 60’s and early 70’s are my main field of interest, and it is a topic on which I am quite knowledgeable.

Always up for interaction with others interested in this hobby.

Everyone has their opinions and their tastes. A lot of the slot car enthusiasts I’ve met are hardcore racers. Talking to some of the guys in the local HO club here in the Denver area and reading posts on sites like HobbyTalk, its clear that most people who are into this hobby are very competitive; they run in tournaments, and their primary area of interest is tuning and performance: their goal is to squeeze that last 1/1000^th of a second of out of their lap time, and their concerns are balancing magnets and reducing weight.

I am not that guy. Speed and performance matter, but what interests me most is not just the lap time on the clock, but how the cars look and feel; their presence, their attitude. I’m sure I don’t have the fastest, best performing Thunderjets around…but I bet my fleet is one of the best looking out there, because my primary goal is to make my cars look as realistic as possible.

I love vintage sports car racing and can watch Goodwood Revival and Silverstone Classic videos all day and all night long. There’s a lot of performance and mechanical expertise to admire there, but the real thrill is in watching those beautiful historic cars doing what they were meant to do. I feel the same about vintage drag racing: I love to see a straight axle gasser doing wheel stands like back in the day. For fans of these types of vintage racing, just enjoying the cars for what they are is usually more important than who wins.

When it comes to real cars, I’m a cruiser, not a racer. My ’56 Chevy sedan is scalloped, striped, and lowered; other classic cars I’ve owned in my past paint a picture: a 1957 Cadillac Series 62, a 1963 Lincoln Continental, a 1986 Jaguar XJ6; all big, stylish cars designed to make a statement rather than smoke tires. Those cars had something in common with a vintage Ferrari 250GTO or even a straight axle gasser: they are all very different from one another, to be sure; but they all have some special magic, something that, once experienced, is not easily forgotten. That’s what matters to me, both at 1:1 and at 1:87.

I like to tune my cars, to improve them and get more speed out of them, but I do it for the satisfaction of doing it rather than the goal of victory. I’d like to race against similar cars, and against similar people, and if I found such folks I would probably join that club and run in that tournament. For the time being, I’m largely ignorant of what rules govern most slot car tournaments, knowing only what I’ve read. I’m sure I’m violating all kinds of rules that would get me disqualified from the types of tournaments most commonly seen for T-jets, but at the moment this blog is not concerned with that; I’m blogging to share the skills I’ve developed, which are exclusively in making my cars what I want them to be. Of course, there’s always room for improvement, and I’m always learning!

There’s a happy medium between being the fastest and being the coolest, and hopefully anyone who wants to interact in discussing this hobby can get something out of my experience as well as sharing their own.

 Been a GEARHEAD since I left the womb. No idea where it came from; it sure didn’t run in the family! A fascination with motion due to hyperactivity, maybe.  I am a lifelong diecast collector; started collecting toy cars probably before I could walk and never really stopped. Sure it slowed a little in my teenage years due to the usual partying and angst but even then I still picked up a Matchbox or Hot Wheels that caught my eye when running errands. By the time my “declining years” began I had thousands of them filling my home. 

In 2014, thanks to the mixed blessing/curse of ebay, I “rediscovered” a hobby that never really went away and started collecting in earnest again.

In spite of this lifelong interest I had never been that interested in slot cars; childhood race set notwithstanding, the slot car craze of the 1960’s was long gone by the time I was a kid and I didn’t have a whole lot of exposure to the electrified version of the hobby.

That is, until 2020…