1954 Buick Century Convertible
Issued by Motor City USA in their American Models Series. It is 1:43 scale and crafted in white metal.
The model is finished in Matador Red.
MCU AM-2C
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1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Hardtop Sport Sedan
Issued by Brooklin Models in 2020. It is 1:43 scale and crafted in white metal.
It is from the Pink Collection: The Pink That No One Can Resist.
The model is in Salmon Pink & Silver.
BRK 221p
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Sean honestos , sin encintarse, ustedes que harían?
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1962 Cadillac Coupe de Ville Hardtop
Issued by Stamp Models in August 2024. It is 1:43 scale and crafted in resin.
A Limited Edition, # 045 of 199.
The model is finished in Olympic White.
STM-62602
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Mira by Solido
Un modèle tout particulièrement exotique pour les militaires SOLIDO de 2002 :
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Encuentra Los mejores promocionales y Popcorn buckets! No te pierdas nuestras SUBASTAS EN LÍNEA BY @CollectorsGroup, te traemos las mejores y más exclusivas piezas de colección, con nuestras subastas ¡EN TIEMPO REAL!
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Hotwheels Super Treasure Hunt Collection FORSALE
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxakZ4lP1TeZT4LMueZtsjRR-Q3RaPI8Yi?si=nJXUFWtser5vyOcM
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Corran a Pepeganga Toys, por que llegó el loco de la ganga con muchos descuentos! #SomosRealCollectors #RealCollectors #Ofertas #Batman
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February, Part 2: Cars
While I’ve got my hands on more trucks than usual this month, I also scored several great cars, including three new releases and a definitive version of a hypercar. There are a couple of great fantasy cars in there too, but they are for discussion in part 3.
Before that, a car which for 99.999% of us might as well be a fantasy but in fact is not: the Bugatti Bolide.
Supposedly this car is the last application of the infamous Bugatti W16, and they’re making 40 of them only, for €4,000,000 a pop. This is a track-only hypercar equipped, of course, with the W16 engine and quad turbos making a ludicrous 1600 PS, an amount of power beyond even the Veyron or Chiron’s ability to deliver, that can push it to (an electronically-limited, assumedly for the sake of not exploding the tyres) 311mph.
I just don’t know how to react to this car, none of that information really has space to land, it’s all so preposterous. Awesome? Stupid? Real? Imaginary? Inspiring engineering? Literally disgusting use of €4,000,000? All of the above, I suppose. What I do know is that the previous release in black with yellow based on official Bugatti paint failed to stir much in me, but this is a different story. I still don’t find I love it, but it is very cool with this paint and livery, much better than the official Bugatti colour scheme.
I hope this settles any misunsderstandings about the admittedly knotty nationality of the marque; one might imagine Bugatti’s consistent use of Bleu de France would make it clear, but there are those who claim it should be counted as Italian since Ettore Bugatti was an Italian and/or because of the resurrection of the company in an Italian factory to make the EB110, or German for its period of VW ownership, or Croatian for its current merger with Rimac. A French tricolore livery seems pretty conclusive (wait for someone to claim it’s a Dutch flag…).
From one sports car (kind of) that I’m conflicted about to another, albeit a less vanishingly rare one: A Porsche 911 Carrera T, newly cast for this year.
I make no secret of the fact that while I respect the 911, I have never loved it. I prefer the 928 and 924/944 if I’m required to go for Porsche, and would choose a 935 or 959 ahead of a 911. But the 911 is a fact of life if you like sports cars, and must be engaged with if you, for example, curate a collection focused on design evolution, as I try to. I read that there are 26 different flavours of 911 presently offered for sale, and while I have a 992 (current-generation) GT3RS, I realised I didn’t have a current-generation 911 in road car form.
The soapy smoothness of the 992 generation is even more evident without the track aero, which is not really for me, but it has certainly looked worse across the car’s history. Visually, the 911’s status as a sort of default sports car/statuswagen for the unimaginative is entirely in keeping with a ‘millenial grey’ (myself, I prefer the term 'landlord grey’) paintjob, although I wasn’t into the black roof so I deleted it.
The well-executed stripes with faux-Porsche 'hot wheels’ script are simultaneously pretty cool and uncomfortably cringe. The interior has an easter egg, too, a pair of teddy bears in the passenger seat; the wiki claims the car is based on one owned by Hot Wheels’ generic bigwig /global head of design Ted Wu, which explains that; cheesy, but it brings personality to a car that I find honestly lacks it.
Really, I’ve got to wonder if Wu’s is landlord grey with Hot wheels decals too? is the FPY86 licence plate accurate? I wouldn’t put it past an exec VP in charge of scalpability (or whatever) to use stock-keeping codes for number plates. Still, glad to have this anyway.
Another one I’m glad to have found is this Mini.
The classic Mini remains enough of a cult vehicle that it consistently demands a premium on eBay, and while Hot Wheels have released the van and pickup versions not that long ago, few appropriately scaled versions of the iconic basic car exist. I almost pulled the trigger on a Siku pizza delivery version (anything pizza-adjacent is welcome in my collection) once, but hummed and haahed for too long and lost it, and Hot Wheels’ rather large Morris Mini casting had a “Pop-offs” version that could be disassembled by unlatching a catch on the base, a great feature which naturally makes it even more sought after, and hence costly and scarce. All of which meant that I couldn’t find an affordable good one, and so I am ashamed to admit I’m only now getting a classic Mini, 1120 cars deep into a collection.
This is an Austin Mini Cooper S, not that it makes any difference at this scale, and although the car is not dissasemblable (at least, not officially), it too has an easter egg: gold bars in the boot! [insert Michael Caine impression of your choice here, in lieu of impossible to photo gold - I have no particular desire to dismantle it]. The use of a slightly yellowy shade of 'institution green’, a supposedly calming shade of desaturated but mid-toned and rather herb-like green often used in mental hospitals for its grounding effect (and as a result the title of a Suzanne Vega song), is a perfect colour for a post-war British car, and the white roof and bonnet stripes are accurate details. The white blank roundels are apt too for a car with such a storied racing heritage; those three mysterious white triangles are a more idiosyncratic touch we’ve seen on Jaguar Mk. I’s lately, although I haven’t seen these on real cars before. My guess is it may somehow connect to Fraser Campbell, the designer of both cars. The scale of this Mini is superbly judged, feeling smaller than many castings but in precisely correct-feeling proportion, and my feeling is that it’s a great casting, realistic, detailed and charming.
Lastly, three wishes were granted at the same time. I previously expressed a hope that more Maserati castings would be be released, and separately for classic racer castings to be released with the new but specialised WWIM (“wire wheel in motion”) wheels, and alongside this, I’ve always wanted to see more late 50s and early 60s sports car racers made as diecasts, this period of design produced some of the loveliest, most elegant yet savagely capable cars ever built as cars transitioned from handcrafted workpieces to industrial products. The 1959 Maserati Tipo 61 is all of these things and more.
My knowledge of Maserati is generally less than other Italian marques, but I have heard the name “Birdcage” used around racing Maseratis many times without knowing what it was; one of those “hmm, must look that up later, but anyway… [does other stuff, forgets]” things. So, it turns out the Tipo 61 is in fact the best known of the Birdcage Maseratis. The name comes from the unusual chassis, made in the pre-monocoque era from unusually short steel rods welded into a lighter than usual, complicated yet rigid space frame that gave the car a significant racing edge over conventional tubular frame cars, one of those minor yet groundbreaking innovations that is another step in the evolution of racing cars overall.
It weighed just 600kg but made 250 hp from a 2.9 litre straight-4 mounted at a diagonal to keep the weight low down, not much power by today’s standards but a pretty great power/weight ratio and set of driving dynamics in any money. The Birbcage also had another feature I always enjoy: a not-quite-cheating feature that games the rules, in this case the windscreen, which Le Mans rules at the time specified had to be of a specific minimum height, is recessed into the bodywork, reducing its aerodynamic profile while still technically adhering to the rules.
The Birbcage was notably driven by Stirling Moss, Caroll Shelby and Dan Gurney, among others, and campaigned by Briggs Cunningham, but this livery is partly a pastiche of the one used by the Camoradi team’s 1960 Nurburgring 1000km winning #24 car, and partly one worn by a car with just this specification - given the coachbuilt nature of cars then, the aero behind the driver’s head is not present on most of these and several had a different windscreen design, making this specific car distinct - that is owned by Nick Mason, Pink Floyd member and owner/lover of many more amazing classic cars.
This casting reproduces the birbcage-style construction on visible areas of the cockpit. The chrome interior is great for the side exhaust and cockpit structure, but the seat really requires paint to look right.
As I hoped, the WWIM’s look great, particularly with the new silver hubs, and capture the characteristic look of sports racers of the era nicely. I wish the striping followed the bodywork better, but generally I am delighted by this casting and can’t praise it highly enough.
Stay tuned for chimeras in part 3.
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February, Part 1: Trucks
Having been denied government funding for a couple of months my eBaying has necessarily been paused and I’m on new stock only at the minute. Still, got some neat stuff going on, for no particular reason consisting of an unusually high proportion of trucks of one or another type.
ALTToday I was lucky enough to encounter a new-for-2026 Matchbox 1980 Jeep J10 Stepside.
Like seems to happen often, this Matchbox is a ‘normal life’ version of an amped-up Hot Wheels release; last year we saw a couple of J10s in the guise of Baja racing vehicles, tricked out with fat wheels, cooling fans, spares and a big roll cage, so it’s nice to have a more everyday incarnation of this truck.
The overall style, with stripes apprpriate to the J10’s top-level “Honcho” trim (linguistics aside: for many years I thought this was a Mexican Spanish word, but it’s Japanese! 本庁 means 'main government office’ or similar - hence “head honcho” as a key authority figure…) and a rollbar in the bed is very period correct. Love the white wheels. It reminds me of the Dodge D-100 Dakota that Matchbox made in the late 80s, although the Dodge did the rollbar a lot more pleasingly.
Until the Hot Wheels version I had no idea this truck even existed, but especially seen next to the grey and black 1988 Cherokee from a couple of years back it’s plainly visible that this shares the SJ chassis and some bodywork, not unlike the Chevrolet Blazer and C series.
On the subject of the Chevrolet C series, I finally caved today and got an example of a classic Hot Wheels casting, the '83 Chevy Silverado, an SWB C10 of the era.
ALTMe being a boxy '80s car afficionado and the Silverado being an iconic truck of the era, and this having been made about 724 times, you might reasonably expect I’d be all over this. However, I’ve always avoided this truck for what all comes down to the same thing: I hate the low stance.
I like trucks to be trucks, not hot rods or lowriders, and I don’t like the effect lowering it has had on the bed, pulling out the bed lining and wheel arches for the space to lower the body, nor the usual liveries this results in the truck being given. I have no interest in an off-roader modified to become useless. Then again, it’s always been on the cards that I could lift it again, so my intent with this was always to do just that.
I drilled it open, removed the axles, modified the base with some lateral grooves below where the axles go, drilled some holes either side, placed the axles in the grooves and the plan was then to use wire loops to keep the axles in place. However, when testfitting the body on the axles it immediately became clear the original wheels were ridiculously small, so I had to raid the wheel box to replace them; these work OK, they are definitely road wheels, not offroad as I would prefer, but they are a decent size and proportion compared to the body and the arches. From below it’s not super elegant, but it looks fine once viewed from most normal viewing angles.
Another Matchbox truck that hit recently Ridge Raider II, which a little atypically for recent Matchbox is a fantasy desert racer. However, it’s wearing a livery that the first Ridge Raider, another fantasy desert racing truck, wore in only its second release in 2008.
I have an eye on getting hold of the 2008 versions once I have some money to throw at ebay postage, but not quite yet. R.R.II is a fairly handsome, stubby and aggressive little creature, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that well. it received only two tampo passes and therefore it was down to me to detail the front and rear (the J10 also only got two tampos, but the chrome base forming the bumpers, grille and lights covers a multitude of sins).
That’s one issue, but the most troublesome is the spare tyres. There are two visible in the back, cast into the zamac, and two visible through the open top, moulded as a part of the interior… but geometrically they can’t be the same pair of tyres. Either they are stored squashed, which seems daft, or one has been sawn in half, because otherwise they would have to clip through each other like bad game CG. It’s a weird casting detail fail that clearly was done to accommodate the rear rivet, and the solution seems obvious: delete the cast back ones and leave the back open, where the moulded ones can be visible from both sides but have the rivet running through the middle. There must be a reason why this happened, but this is another tale of diecast design we’ll likely never hear. It doesn’t wreck the casting, but it’s a distraction from what ought to be a really good car.
The Matchbox Gritter King is another 2026 new model with issues. It’s a quite nicely sculpted snowplough and gritter with a minor gimmick, namely that it has a functional grit hopper with small openings in the bottom so it will actually dispense small quantities of grit, or salt, or sugar, or rat poison, or cocaine, or whatever powder or fine granule you favour most.
I’ve not tested this function as I don’t tend to particularly favour any powders or granules, but that’s a nice feature for play. For display, the main issue this car presents is immediately obvious: no glass, with the cab windows represented by glossy faces of the interior piece that forms the hopper. This is a new sibling in the ’[something] King’ european-style utility cabover lorry family, joining a road stripe painter, a concrete mixer and a dustbin lorry, and sharing its lack of cab windows with the road stripe painter. It’s cool enough and looks good in MBX Construction livery (especially with added hazard stripes on the plough blade) but even though I do freely admit I don’t have a lot of practical experience at managing budgets for multi-billion dollar toy companies, I still can’t help thinking this is a bit unnecessarily cheap.
The next one was an instant buy, though: a 2023 Ford E-Transit Custom, Ford’s latest electric incarnation of their bestselling commercial.
The Ford Transit Van is to the UK what the F-150 is to the USA or the Hiace is To Japan: something driven in a variety of forms by tradespeople in hundreds of different professions, from skilled construction trades to delivery to taxi driving; cops drive them, and so do bank robbers. They are a common sight all across Europe too, although VW, Mercedes Renault, Peugeot and Fiat vans compete more strongly on the mainland. And so because it’s so overwhelmingly common, people have them as personal vehicles, customise them in millions of ways and generally go bananas over them. For over 60 years this has been a ubiquitous vehicle across the UK, and across the world.
This is ultimately why my neighbours spend the greater part of the warmer months of the year sitting with their mates on the pavement performing mystic rituals on a revolving parade of Transits, taking pieces off, banging them with tools or each other while singing and shouting magic spells, and in the end putting them back together better, or at least it sounds like that’s roughly what they are doing out there. Their eldrich Transitmancy rituals have raised my awareness of the cult of Transit, and thus like an assassin with a copy of Catcher in the Rye, I was unable to stop myself buying this attractive blue oblong on wheels when I enountered it. See how it glitters! Ia, ia, Transit fthagn!
ALTThe next truck I’ve harvested from the winter crop is this Matchbox 2016 Chevy Colorado.
Since Chevy is barely present here in the UK at all and pickups are only ever close to common in very rural UK traffic (although there are now markedly more around in urban trafic than they used to be in 2013) this is another model I am unfamiliar with, but research reveals this is not a fully US model truck either, and it exists here in the UK in the form of the D-Max, branded with that most forgotten yet still extant Japanese kind-of-GM marque: Isuzu!
The Colorado is sold in the US, where it replaced the chevy S-10 series as the smaller (but still damn big) GM pickup chassis, but for most of the rest of the world, the Colorado was built in Thailand. This particular truck is the Z71 Colorado Xtreme (misspelled by Matchbox as 'Extreme’, or rather officially misspelled by Chevy as if it were still 2003 and that was still cool, and then erroneously corrected by Matchbox), which is a concept model built to display at a Thailand car expo in 2016 by GM Thailand as an indication of what a top-trim performance off-road truck might look like, were they to build one. Supposedly it was also meant to be an indication of GM’s commitment to the Thai market, which is odd as they pulled out of Thailand in 2020, and the factory now only produces this truck as a D-Max.
The casting has mock mud in a pale tan, along with pale tan wheels. I like the concept, but the execution I don’t reckon much, the pale mud just doesn’t work that well, so I felt I had to add a contrasting shade, and the mud pen appeared again, along with more black on the snorkel, roof rack and rear rollbars. Things were looking pretty bad without any front detail either, so that had to be done too. I’m still not quite convinced by the wheels, but it’s better overall, I feel.
Finally, the welcome return of one of my newest faves, the Kei Swap.
This customised kei van with a Civic Type R K-series engine transplant gets a new livery, and it's…all right. I don’t hate it, its decent. But also, I don’t love it, and it’s not a patch on the absolutely glorious livery I named a runner up in the Best Deco category for the Main Line Diecast Awards 2025. Not really worth preserving, to be honest, so these are the 'before’ images.
Crucially, the body paint is white, which I hoped we’d get sooner or later, and I have some acetone just over there. Also, I’ve recently been practicing my rust effects on decrepit old Matchbox castings, plus making primer grey body panels is nice and simple with the grey paint pen. Plus, the award-winning sculpting on the newly black bumper/side skirts/interior piece are still great…whereas the pink version has a white bumper and skirts…black looks nice with pink, doesn’t it? And so the chance for me to make the most disreputable Kei van you’ve ever seen comes gradually into view. As my personal folk religion, the Secret Cat Policy, tells us, the shot will resolve. Just need to dismantle it, plus the pink one, despite it breaking my 1.8mm drill bit off in its rear rivet. But I can do it, my right hand strength is improving gradually, or at least I want to believe it is.
In part 2, another bunch of new acquisitions, but this time, cars. And in Part 3, the chimeras, including the 'after’ version of that Kei Swap custom.
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“With the trump hand puppet, whose fist is larger, Netanyahu or Putin?”
“Stephen Miller knows.”
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1978 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz Coupe
Issued by Stamp Models in January 2022. It is 1:43 scale and crafted in resin.
A Limited Edition, # 047 of 199.
The model is finished in Ruidoso Saddle w/a medium brown top.
STM-78002
