Back to the 1980s

When I hit the age where alcohol and girlfriends became my top priorities and playing with toys was considered very uncool, I had a huge carboot sale which I will absolutely regret until the day I die. Classics such as my technical lego cars and big trak went for peanuts. Although I was happy with the £60 I made that morning, I'd probably just sold around £500 worth of toys. I'd so love to have handed them down to my kids, who are now into some of the same things that captured my imagination during those precious childhood years. How cool would it be to play with the same toys your Dad played with when he was 10?

Recently my son re-discovered his Tamiya Dual Detonator. He was probably a little young for it when he got it as a present, but when he saw our neighbour playing with a Tamiya RC car in the drive at the front of our house, he asked me to charge his up and was soon out there racing his friend.

After he'd exhausted both batteries (the second one being from my Tamiya mini cooper that I built while working in Belgium - but that's another story) I told him about my Super Champ which was a pretty cool RC car in the early 1980s. I couldn't remember at the time what happened to it. I knew I'd sold it, and assumed it was another victim of the car boot sale.

One morning after I'd arrived at the office early, I grabbed the ritual cup of coffee and settled down to check my facebook and email messages before starting work. It came to me in a flash. I'm not sure what triggered the memory and I'm constantly amazed how the human brain can squirrel away such information and recall it at the right moment. I had a vivid memory of carrying it in the original box round to my next door neighbour's house via the front garden and exchanging it for £50. Those kits costs several hundred including the radio gear, even back then when you could buy a bag of crisps for 12p and still get half penny chews.

So I'd worked out what happened to it, and assumed that in time the new owner would have outgrown it and passed it on, sold it, or even worse, it was at the bottom of a landfill site somewhere.

Luck was on my side. I'd recently (well about a year before) got back in touch with my old neighbour JT and linked up with him on facebook. I dropped JT a message, really just to verify my memory and have a chat about it, but was delighted to hear that he remembered seeing it fairly recently in his parents loft.

Several phone calls and a few weeks later its existence was verified and he kindly agreed that I could have it back for nothing. He liked the idea that my son would be playing with one of his Dad's toys. I popped back to my hometown to collect it last Saturday.

This is the story of a full restoration of one of my childhood toys with the goal of giving to my son (aged 10 and 3 quarters) so he can enjoy the toy that I built from a kit over 20 years ago and spent so many hours playing with. I was only a little older than he is now. It was released in 1982, so I'm making a rough guess that I bought it when I was around 11 or 12.

Thanks to JT and his parents. Seeing it and holding it again was awesome, and I look forward to restoring it to its former glory.