Bargain of the year!
The starting point of this little endeavour was a guy called Felix who used to work in our international sales team – a big petrol head with a serious Tamiya-collecting habit. He’d picked up ,on the tamiyaclub.com trading area, a very ratty, but ready to run, Tamiya Bear Hawk buggy for about £40 and this gave him an idea. A challenge (not unlike those on the TV show Top Gear) to buy and race 1/10th scale RC cars, for under £40...
The news of this spread among the car-enthusiast grapevine and reached me through my then-boss. I’ve already posted about the various micro RC cars I’ve bought over the years, but where my heart really lay was the bigger hobby-grade stuff. In my time I’d owned two “proper” Tamiya RC cars, both on-road, front-wheel-drive cars. The first was a British Racing Green Mini Cooper I bought second-hand from a short-lived model shop in Worcester in the summer of 1996. I loved that Mini, but my ownership of the car was as short-lived as the shop's existence, and only had it for about four months before it got stolen, along with pretty much everything else of value I owned, in break-in of my student house. Second was a Peugeot 306 Maxi bought with the first bonus I got from work. This was new, and I spent a very happy couple of evenings putting it together in my cramped flat in Leamington. That car got sold in order to fund my short-lived foray into being a motorcyclist in 2002.
The Bear Hawk that started it all
Both of those cars cost me over £100, so the thought that I could get back into the hobby for under £40 was seriously appealing and the sort of cars floating around at that price point; Hornet, Grasshopper, Falcon, and so on, were the stuff of pure ‘80s nostalgia. I headed, as did my friends, to eBay and office conversations turned to discussions of the cars we’d found, the deals we hoped we’d get and so on. There was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that we wouldn’t compete for the same car.
Even with such an agreement in place, I kept my find strictly under wraps. It was too good. Seemingly unseen, listed by someone who clearly didn’t know what it was (from the looks of the eBay seller’s other items they were selling stuff from a bankrupt gadget shop), with no description text, was a brand-new Tamiya Gravel Hound “XB”, the car pictured at the top of this article. this was a pre-built version of a car also available as the traditional kit, complete with radio gear and charger. The photo wasn’t great, and buying anything so lacking in description off eBay is a risk, but the potential reward here was so great that I had to take it. I waited, I sniped, and I got the car for £28.77, plus £20 shipping. To say I was excited the day the parcel arrived would be understating things somewhat. On inspection, it was clear that the car had been removed from the box and displayed on a shelf, but not run – not a scratch anywhere. It was missing a receiver crystal so I substituted one from my Xmods Corvette. The box still had a price sticker on it for £150.
Of course the thing with electric RC cars is that you have to wait (what feels like a very long time) to charge the batteries for that first run, so it wasn’t until the following lunchtime at work that I got to drive it…
To Be Continued….
