I’ve been sitting on these for a while, trying to decide what to do with them. This is what I’ve decided to do with them:-)
If you are reading this you probably know what they are, if not they have real paint, real carpet and real interior samples in them. They have cars that you can put over the colors to see what they would look like.
Some are in better condition than others, I’ve decided not to do anything to restore them. Some of he plastic combs are old and brittle, they shouldn’t be too hard to replace, but I’m going to leave everything as is.
I’ll post each year below along with pictures, the synopsis here is that the 1973 cars are terrible, 1975 has some water damage, 1976 is the only one that is not complete. It does not have cars or paint samples and is missing one carpet sample. It is the only one missing anything. You may see blank spaces in the carpet or interior sections, that is because they are blank. You might see some dark spots, that is because they were folded shut and a sample on one side discolored the paper on the other if there was not a sample there, nothing is missing. Nothing is missing in any of them except the 1976
Back to the 1976 - No promises, but I’ve moved these from box to box over the years and I remember one time seeing a loose carpet piece, I’m trying to find it. It still is missing the cars.
1977 looks like neither was ever opened, maybe same for 1979 and 80, 81 it looks like the glue holding the carpet samples on leeched through to the cover, 82 might have as well, and someone wrote on that cover. 1983 binder is torn a bit at the bottom. All cars from 1975 up are great, no damage. The 1973 and 1974 cars sit in the binders correctly, but most of the plastic where the comb goes through them is either gone or torn. The 1974 cars look a little funny in the pictures, the discrepancy in the color is a reflection, not the color. I wanted to use red to make the cars really visible.
I at one point borrowed some 1973 cars and scanned them, I actually did 1974 and 1975 as well, and had someone Photoshop them to look exactly like the originals. He did it, but when you print them the opaque background comes out kind of green. To use them one would probably have an artist paint the opaque part, that’s not me, but it wouldn’t be all that hard to do. I’ll include the files with them, if you want.
They smell fairly musty, I’m not sure if it’s all of them or some of them, they’ve all been boxed together indoors for at least the last 20 years, but as I said the 1975 has water damage, I got it that way.
$15K for the set, at this point I really don’t want to break it up.
My email is cs8815 at aol dot com
1973
This one has the problem that the cars stuck to each other and to the light ivory slide behind the cars. I wish I’d have thought about putting rice paper between the cars and the cars and paint long before I did.
Example of the left edge of the 1973-1974 cars
One of my photoshopped cars, 1973