Tonka Turbine Power

The superhighways of my future world would always be full of sleek, streamlned supercars. As a child I always assumed that carswould follow the Hot Wheels style and when I grew up, I'd be driving some low slung, metallic coloured landshark that hissed along the road with a whirr of nuclear turbines. Reality never matched my expectations, so now I like to visualise that future on a smaller scale. Besides Hot Wheels and Matchbox, the other vehicular constant in toys was Tonka. Every childs garden or backyard seemed to have at least one yellow truck left out on the lawn in all weathers, or covered in sand or dirt in a corner, waiting to be picked up and driven again like there had been no pause. Personally, I always found them a little too heavy and chunky for my tastes, favouring the smaller scale cars that I could easily team up with Airfix soldiers.

 However, before Tonka was swallowed up by other companies and began to produce less solid metal models and veered into plastic, the seventies produced several futuristic looking looking models such as the Scorchers. These simple models have an exagerrated, powerful look about them, with big thick tyres edging out to cling to the road and chrome pipes poking out from an unseen power source.

 Of the three models I have managed to find, the red vehicle has a turbine style fan at the rear, suggesting an unusual engine and power source, the cabin on all three leaning forward with a design aesthetic that gives all three models a look of speed and inherent power.

All three toys have been played with, hard and are battered and scratched, but Tonkas robust and simple construction means they are simple to take apart. Inside is a spring based engine, so that drawing back the car winds a clockwork engine, making it roll forward under its own power. The other good thing is that its a simple job to sand down the scrapes and dents and re-spray with car paint, to give a good finish.

So far, the green car has suffered the most ill treatment and I have repainted it with standard enamels, but the orange and red cars, having more complex stickers, must wait until I can make replacement decals.

An earlier and simpler Tonka car is the six wheel ATV. A slightly different scale, but a rather nice model too.
A bigger model that I am keen to find is the Crater Crawler, a chunky moon buggy that I often ran into in toy shops as a child.