StrokerBoy

Welcome. My 30-year-old Pumpkin is still happily running the original MSC and radio gear I bought with it back then. But I've built a new one recently with modern(-ish) kit. Get a basic Tamiya ESC and discard the MSC and its servo. Don't bother with LiPo batteries, just get a NiMh one for now.

Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. You have lots of options (not all out of the box) to get the eventual look/stance right, depending on whether you want it to drive nicely or just look good on a shelf. I built a Lowride Pumpkin but spent ages tweaking it to get the non-standard look I wanted, various sets of wheels, hubs, spacers, springs, uprights etc.

If brand-collaboration adds 'value' and desirability to a mainstream product, why does this one look like a 15 quid Chinese rip-off from the pound shop ?

The point I was making is that you think you missed it by "a couple of pounds", but you might have been miles off. You could have doubled your bid and still lost. You'll never know.

I thought I was pretty good at maths, but my brain has just melted.

How do you know the winning bidder didn't put a Max Bid of a million pounds ?

...and lopping about 3 feet off the body posts.

Buggies. Meh.

A mate texted me to say he'd seen I was into RC's via Facebook. He said he was moving house and chucking lots of stuff out, did I want his old RC gear ? Without knowing what it was, of course I did. A couple of weeks later, he turned up with this Skyline and Hi-Rider-2, plus a box full of wheels, chargers, radio gear, catalogues and spares. I tried to force beer money on him but he wouldn't even take that.

Neither of 'em are my cup of tea, and both would be easily replaced if necessary. However, it comes down to personal sentiment here. Imagine you've sold 'em both. Which one causes the biggest pang of regret if you saw it drive past or came across an old photo of it ?

'55 Heavy.

A Hot-Wheels Honda City turbo. Actually it wasn't the postman, I picked it up in the supermarket. And it was yesterday. And this isn't even my photo...

Blimey. I was lucky enough to get a model kit (or the money to buy my own) at christmas, my birthday and maybe once or twice more a year if I was lucky. And I considered myself lucky too. We're talking a small Matchbox or Airfix aircraft kit by the way, I was allowed to look at the massive Tamiya boxes in the toy shop on a Saturday but I had as much chance of owning one as I did of living on the moon. I never felt in any way deprived, but it certainly wasn't me keeping these businesses going.

Did you film it ? There are some very odd people out there, and videos of women squashing brand new car bodies by sitting on them might be exactly what someone has been waiting for all their life. Not me I hasten to add, not even with my hatred of lexan shells.

Walking into a shop and swapping the price labels over so you pay £5 for a £40 item, is that "smart shopping" too ? What about buying something from that furtive bloke in the pub, no questions asked, overlook the bolt-cropper marks ? Some people are able to justify that too.

Here I am doing a spot of hoovering in my 'man-cave' recently. It's just a single garage with some useful storage space in the pitched roof. It contains the 2 motorbikes you can see, 2 bicycles, lots and lots of bike parts, all my tools and accessories, crates of stuff I need for my bike club/shows, the obligatory cupboard full of half-empty tins of paint etc, 3 sets of ladders, and various oddball things we've collected (eg. the No Right Turn and Kawasaki illuminated signs). Hanging from the ceiling you can see my 10 RC's and there's a pile of boxes of unbuilt ones stacked on top of the cupboard on the left. There's a small workbench at the end. There are a few pin-up girls on the cupboard, and my various karting and bike-show trophies. Entertainment is limited to an old radio. There's also a professional alarm system with an ear-splitting siren from an old factory. What you can't see are the other 7 motorbikes that also live in there, that have been temporarily moved out just so that I can tidy up. That makes it difficult to do any work in there, as you can imagine. A shed you say ? There's a shed behind the garage, it's got 3 more motorbikes in it and lots more weird stuff my missus brings back from salvage yards. Our house is currently on the market and a need for more garage/workshop space is one of the reasons for that.

"The Model Shop", Hull, England. Above the door was signwritten "The most exciting shop in town" and they never had any arguments from Trading Standards about that. Opened in 1962, it was tiny, yet it sold everything. A narrow central door, and a window display either side crammed with beautifully finished models. There'd always be people stood outside admiring the display. Inside there was a central unit with a small train set permanently running round, surrounded by accessories and rolling stock. All the walls were floor-to-ceiling boxes : RC kits, static models, die-cast cars, Hornby trains, Scalextric, plus paints, materials, tools, catalogues, everything. If there were half-a-dozen customers in the shop, you had to wait outside - it was that small. I still don't know how they did it, if there was something you wanted, they always had it in stock somewhere, the old chap that ran it knew exactly where it was. I bought my Pumpkin kit there in 1989, and countless static model kits before that. The owner retired in 2006 and it was taken over, but it changed direction (to compete with ModelZone, HobbyCraft and Toys R'Us ?) and was never the same. It finally closed in 2011 (see pic) and is now an office for a local coach-tour business.

Looks fine to me. I'm gonna pop down the model shop in my genuine Countach and pick one up...

Seen people using dishwashers to clean parts before, never occurred to me you could use the toilet for it too...

Always thought the 959 was gopping in all its variants. This bloke has the right idea.

Now you just need an original blue one, plus Will Hoy's silver/black one.

It's definitely an original Pumpkin QD. 1) because you've had it 25 years, and 2) because they never re-released the QD version. QD was a simpler, cheaper version, more of a toy than the kit version you have to build yourself. Some people collect QD's. Much harder to find than the kit version, but much less desirable too. The other ones you've seen are the proper kit version, like the original one I've had since 1989 or any of the various re-released versions since (black, metallic etc).

Brilliant job. I love the BTCC Laguna's, as you know. Sounds just like I remember in that video clip above. Not sure how he found the time to swap from blue to gold front wheels and back again during his sprint... 😆

Mine's still on the to-do list...

3.0 CSL Batmobile : RS3100 Cologne Capri : TG500 :