In honor of the upcoming 1st Anniversary of Live and Let Diecast! I’m going to run some memorable articles from the past year. Where better to start than with its history? -Jeff
Hola fellow die-cast enthusiasts. I would like to thank you for stopping by, posting your latest hawl, showing off your new custom, writing enthusiastic comments, and/or just giving an article a read. LaLD is less than 6 months old, but for many of us the beginnings stretch back as far as one’s childhood.
For me, I’d like to go all the way back to when I was 11 or 12 years old. Our attic had begun to overflow with boxes and soon my whole family would pick up stakes and move cross country to Washington, D.C. where my dad had a one year assignment. It was decided to have a garage sale. An ad declaring this was placed in the newspaper (yes, it was that long ago) and my sister and I produced signs on florescent orange poster board pointing the way to our humble garage. We’d advertised the hours to begin at 9, but even half an hour before that people began showing up. The bike I’d outgrown, my baby clothes, my action figures like Exo-Squad and He-Man (including Skeletor’s castle) everything sold so fast. We actually started looking for more stuff to sell. I grabbed my die-cast cars (which were being housed in a box for an electric waffle maker) and was just about to put them up for sale, when my mom intervened. She told me to keep them and wouldn’t let me get rid of them. I reluctantly put them back.
On October 24, 2007 my son was born. He immediately inherited the waffle maker box.
A couple of years later, his mother and I separated. Basically I got him 2 weekends a month. For fun, I would buy him a new Hot Wheels/Matchbox car and give it to him when he arrived. Trying to buy my son’s love? Maybe, but it was also about this time people started seeing through my ‘I’m just buying a toy for my kid’ semi-facade. I was buying cars I liked. For instance, my son would be very unlikely to pick out a Mazda2 made by Matchbox when there were so many other cars available....
I regret nothing!
It was also about this time that I discovered Oppo through the Jalopnik front page. When I found out about HWEP, I started trading immediately.
My first trade was with Volvosaurus Rex who just offered to send me some cars after he was less than impressed with what I had to trade.
That’s a 70s Dodge Monaco police car from the Hot Wheels “Gleam” series (1992). Also a boy who is growing up way too fast.
It was about this time I started searching Oppo for more diecast articles. I came across a series entitled “Chasing Die-Cast Cars” authored by Let’s Just Drive is Mkolabin. I noticed that he hadn’t updated the series in awhile (he was taking care of his own child, an infant at the time) and asked if I could author a post. He graciously agreed and I published my first “Chasing Die-Cast Cars”
It got bumped to the Front Page and collected 8000 views. Suddenly diecast cars weren’t just a small division of the Oppo community. In fact, some Opponauts (well, one in particular) began to complain that Oppo was filling up with ‘useless hot wheels posts’.
Shortly after that post GameCat325 set up hwep.kinja.com and gave me ownership. Even though I certainly wasn’t the originator of HWEP and not even the most prolific poster I think my article getting posted to the FP made me a de-facto choice. On April 14, 2014 we went live with our own blog.
The original 3 HWEP members: SN210, Type-S, Mycarneverruns87, and El_Uly all became admins. They suggested the name Live and Let Diecast! Later I would add Frosted and Philipilihp Spelled Backwards as admins as well.
It quickly became apparent that the blog was going to become much wider in scope than just Opponauts mailing each other Hot Wheels. I bought the domain name liveandletdiecast.com and had it re-direct to our current destination liveandletdiecast.kinja.com.
We’ve had posts by Truck Yeah! author Andrew P. Collins, received shoutouts from Hooniverse Jeff and The Lamley Group, pictures featured on matchboxporn.com, and grown a passionate customization following. The site continues to grow and amaze me with different perspectives and content everyone posts.
So thank you for following us on this journey so far, I can’t wait for what comes next!