Time again for something out of the ordinary. I have noticed vintage Japanese lithographed tin cars receive a lot of love here. This is one of my more unusual pieces with a story behind it, a (1958) Corvette:
The story behind this is fun. A few years ago, I went to a yard sale in the small town where my mother lives. The sale was mostly a lot of junk in a garage and some stuff in a house. I was digging through a box of junk in the garage and found a neglected tin toy car. It caught my eye as being shiny and a classic shape, so I assumed it was a repro item. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but it was so well detailed that it stuck in my head. I looked it over closely, and decided it was probably real, so I bought it. It was a quarter, I had no change, so I paid a dollar and said they could keep the change. This is it. It’s a roughly 1:24 scale friction powered model of a 1958 Corvette, by the old Japanese toymaker Yonezawa. Like most Japanese tin toys of this era, it has considerable detail, especially for this material, and for the timeframe. This likely would have been made only within a year or two from 1958, as these toys tended to be updated with the real cars. As one can see, it is pretty accurate:
Front and rear have similarly good detail:
The interior is really charming, very colorful and detailed. Here you can see the condition issues with this model - the steering wheel is missing, and the windshield is broken, and the frame bent a little. Easy repairs, I tell myself, but I have had it for several years, and haven’t fixed it. It’s good enough as-is, for now:
The base is pretty basic, and the friction motor still works:
Here’s the maker mark, it is stamped in reversed. This is what clued me in to it being an original piece, Made in Japan and the logo:
I am definitely glad to have this in my collection, it was a good rescue - if I hadn’t found it, it might have ended up at the dump or something.
A 1:1 1958 Corvette (easy to distinguish via hood louvers and trunk strips) from oldcarbrochures.org:
That is all.