Father's Day

 

Harvey and The Boy found a place that made custom packaging for Hot Wheels® cars with a picture of me and him and a personalized message on the back!

He had her order one, the '69 Chevelle wagon.

A few days later, the '05 GTO showed up.

"Odd, but cool," she thought.

A couple days after that, she gets an email apologizing for how long it took them to get the order to us.

Talk about under-promise and over-deliver!

I'm pleased as punch with these little cars.

Three Inch Scale

I've been playing Car Wars for a while.  A long while.

It didn't take us very long at all to notice that our Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars would be perfect game pieces.

That led all of us to repaint our battered cars!

One of my favorite cars was the Hairy Hustler.

I'd had that car since I was three or four.  It was not in as good of shape as this image I stole from ebay.

I don't know what nostalgia bug bit me to try and recreate my old car from my middle school days, but...

OMG, that looks like shit.  That might even be a 100% accurate recreation of what it looked like for reals, but my mind's eye says it looked better.

So I gently pried it apart and stripped the brushed on enamel paint off with acetone.

Where it sat for more than a month waiting for a rattle can of the color I wanted to arrive!

It came out a lot better with a spray can than brushing!

 

I intentionally left the paint chips from the old paint intact because I had them on the original car.  The color looks far better in person than my camera is capturing.

Reassembly went smoothly.

 There's still some painting left.  I had some small numbers on my AutoDuel car and I painted in the tail-lights.

How it compares to the original car:

 The OG example is in far better condition than the one I repainted.

Matchbox Commodore

Matchbox released a model of the Holden VF Commodore SSV in 2022.

As a South Australia Highway Patrol car.

In 2023 they rereleased it in metallic orange.

This year in metallic black.

The Commodore is a close relative of the Caprice.

The VE Commodore, lengthened, is a WM Caprice; like The Beast.

A VF Commodore, lengthened, is a WN Caprice.

Most of the differences are under the skin and in Matchbox scale, you can't even, really, tell a Commodore is too short to stand in for a Caprice.

The only VE Holdens Matchbox made were of the Ute.  It's like an El Camino. 

 

Matchbox

Only five years after it left production, Matchbox has made a Holden Commodore VF SSV.

The Caprice PPV is a lengthened variant of the Commodore.

The VF series is equivalent to the WN Caprice, and mine is a WM which corresponds to the VE series, so this model isn't quite The Beast in this scale.

It's likely as close as I will get.  The only WM/VE car they made was a Ute (read Aussie El Camino).

I found several for sale on ebay and bought two.

The one pictured above came on a blisterpack card, like you'd see at the local store.

The other set off a wave of nostalgia when I saw the listing.

The Matchbox box!

Back when I was a little kid, getting a new Matchbox car was something of a deal.

You didn't pluck one off a rack in the toy section.

You went to the photo counter of the local Osco/Jewel and there was a display case of, maybe, 12 cars in it.

You asked the person behind the counter to get you the one you wanted and they handed you a little box, like the one above.

It seemed more formal than today.

Hairy Hustler

 

This Matchbox car was a personal favorite of mine as a child.

I, despite my hoarder pack-rat tendencies, I don't have any of the Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars from when I was a kid.

But this car keeps coming to mind because it was also my main counter when I started playing Car Wars when I lived with my dad in Minnesota.

Mine was in about this shape when I repainted it dark blue to better represent my car in the game.

Sadly, I can't find that car's sheet.  I think it was with my AD&D books my Mom shipped to me in Germany and only 3 of 4 boxes made it.