My forgotten Scorcher finally comes good.

**PLEASE READ THIS** for anyone looking at this model displayed in my showroom and wondering if I will sell it? PLEASE DON’T ASK!!! I get numerous requests from TC members wanting to buy cars displayed in my Tamiyaclub showroom, and to be honest I get very annoyed when people ask to buy something that is clearly NOT FOR SALE!! This car is part of MY COLLECTION and as such I want to KEEP IT!! So please don’t Email on the off chance that I might sell it to you, if I want to sell any of my cars I will put them up for sale in my TRADE ROOM, so look there to see what cars I am prepared to sell otherwise don’t bother asking cos the only answer you will get is NO!!! thanks for reading this disclaimer. Regards wldnas.

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I was planning to update my ancient Sand Scorcher showroom entry sooner, I had made preparations by taking some new pictures, sorted them all out on the desktop ready for posting and only had to find the time to re-write the obsolete description when in a twist of fate tinged with a hint of Irony, I bought another more complete Sand Scorcher kit which practically made all my previous work on my first Scorcher redundant.

You have no doubt seen my post for Scorcher #2 which I bought for a song quite recently but this isn’t really about that car, its about my other Scorcher which I’ve owned for quite a while now, its taken a back seat in my collection for quite some time but I feel its story is just as important as that of my latest additions so here is the much needed update that I have delayed for so long.

My boss at the job I was in this time last year used to be into RC’s when he was younger and his friend also had some as well, when I found out that I had started to collect RC’s He remembered he used to have some, he looked around at home but could only find a few hop-up spring set for a Hotshot that he had back then, but when He asked his friend, it turned out he had a whole bundle of old cars and I was told that one of them was a Hilux, so finally after a month or two of constant badgering he finally managed to sort them all out and bring them into work for me to have a look at.

What met my eyes was a tatty but mostly complete Hilux, a semi-dismantled but Boxed with spares Bigwig, the remains of a Martini lotus F1 car and amongst the pile of other various bits and bobs was bits of a Sand Scorcher, This was a serious find and I was ready to offer £250 for it but my boss said the guy only wanted £200 for the lot so I gladly paid up and the deal was done, I had taken a load of pictures of this cars lot, but unfortunately they were lost when I accidentally purged all the saved digital camera off the photo Record :( however out of the other cars the Bigwig and Hilux can be seen elsewhere in my showroom and I sold off the F1 to a friend for next to nothing but as for the Scorcher its restoration had hardly begun.

This Scorcher was little more than a stripped chassis but I managed to piece it together bit by bit and I soon discovered that the majority of the car was actually there, however, many vital pieces are missing or broken and it will take a lot of time, effort and (MONEY!) to get it back to anything like running condition. but then I likes a challenge and after some delay I started to fix up the Scorcher, and it wasn’t gonna be cheap, I’d spent about £170 on it so far and that has bought me, a NIB gear set, a new nose cone and driver set for a Monster Beetle, a used front bumper and front suspension parts, some Shocks, front Springs, Motor, Rear Guard, Tie rods and another Used Body in reasonable condition.

After seeing someone else’s restored scorcher and being more than a little envious at how shiny it was I started to clean up the parts on mine, starting with the Radio box and Transparent Gearbox casings, and after a good wash they came up surprisingly well, but that was about as far as work on the car had proceeded until other more pressing concerns moved me away from it, I did get yet another Scorcher body though, in another cheap vintage Tamiya car lot buy (which is also in my showroom), that body was green and apart from a few extra holes drilled in it was actually pretty good.

Time moved on and my Scorcher sat and festered while I built up my collection with other old cars, when I started restoring the Ford Ranger I needed some steering rods to make it a runner, I had none spare so I borrowed the ones off the Scorcher, but they never went back, later still when I started to construct my Rough Rider from spares so I borrowed yet more parts IE: front bumper, rear roll bar and complete radio box, now it was starting top look a bit forlorn as a car and was slowly being forgotten… That is until I got the 2nd Scorcher.

Now its all stations go, my interest in my Scorcher is rekindled but the second scorcher chassis did not come with a full set of parts so I was unable to make it into a complete chassis, but it did have the parts I needed to restore my original car so I’ve now managed to construct one complete runnable chassis from the two, and from my stock of 5 Scorcher bodies I’ve semi-restored one of them in original blue and white livery and replicated the decal layout from the Box art using Netsmiths aftermarket specials.

The restored runner is now going to be my Scorcher #1 and I’ve put it in the box with the printed copy instructions set and Radio. The rest of the stuff will now go back into storage until I find the parts to rebuild that one, so its funny how things turn around ;)