Can Anyone Help Identify My Old Rc Toy?

[stevo123]

Hi. I have been a long time viewer of the club forums and find them very helpfull and entertaining. I have been trying to identify my 2nd real rc car circa 1985. It was a red Toyota Land Cruizer, quite detailed body I remember 4x4. The 4x4 was acheived by a steel hex driveshaft that ran through the centre of the car and could be seen from the battery case when changing batteries. I beleive it ran on aa batteries, 4 or 6, i am not sure. It had a stick type controller and I am pretty certain had a manually selected HI and LO gearbox switch. Working light on the front possibly?

Also, if you are feeling up to it my first car was a radio shack dune buggy in yellow. plasctic tyres and 1 wheel drive on the rear axle. We are speaking early eighties here now!

Many thanks all.

[Hibernaculum]

I have that yellow Radio Shack Dune Buggy Near new in box. It was released in 1979 and came in both red and yellow - with a pretty nice hard plastic beach buggy shell. It's 1/10 scale, slow, with barely any suspension, and drives one of it's two hard-wearing-plastic rear wheels. But it's a pretty thing to watch, gliding around on a nice smooth floor. Fully Digital Proportional. It's slow speed made it seem quite scale. It was made by Nikko, who sold it through Tandy as the Dune Buggy, and it was the first Digital Proportional toy ever sold at Tandy - impressive at the time to most Tandy customers, because R/C cars were not yet quite mainstream. Nikko sold it in countries where Tandy didn't exist (e.g. mainland Europe) under a number of other names, such as Roadstar G2 and stuff (which is in fact embossed on the underside of the chassis).

Your red Landcruiser might have been a number of different models. Did it have a winch?

It might have been Matsushiro's "The Winch", which was a stocky little red Landcruiser from the early-mid 80s...

Or the Nikko Big Ranger from 1982, which was a bit bigger and had a working winch and headlights...

While Tandy also sold a red Toyota Land Cruiser toy (also made by Nikko) from 1984-1985, which can be see in this catalogue scan...

Not sure if the latter was actually 4wd.

Or if it wasn't a Landcruiser at all, but a Hi-Lux, then the Nikko Hi-Lux was very popular. No winch, just headlights and 4wd, and came in blue, silver, or red....

Or it might have been none of the above. Hope that helps though.

cheers,

H.

[stevo123]

That's great!!

Thank you very much-you are very knowledgable in our hobby.

The car was infact "the winch". Also you have a dune buggy in box as well-what a coinsidence!

To fill in a blank my younger brother had the "red Toyota Land Cruiser toy (also made by Nikko) from 1984-1985" and it was infact 2wd as you suspected. It was quite speedy for it's age and had great battery life too. We had many hours of fun with that

Thank you again for your effort. As you can tell you have made my day

[Hibernaculum]

No worries, glad I could help

Now you can start looking for them on eBay etc. Once you collect all the ones you used to have, then you might start collecting all the ones you wanted etc etc. (that's what I did anyway )

FYI, I've seen The Winch get as much as $60-$70 on eBay (or as little as $10-$20)

cheers,

H.