![]() My advice for every collector is to find out what you really like about the vehicles and start with that. What advice would you give to someone interested in starting a Hot Wheels collection? A woman was selling cars that her husband owned from his time at Mattel. I discovered the story about the process through eBay. They were used in advertisements and given as corporate gifts. The barrel-plated vehicles sell for $10,000 to $50,000 each. The process wasn’t efficient for mass production so there aren’t many cars like this. Mattel didn’t just want the cars to roll down the track, they wanted them to sparkle like Christmas ornaments. That was accomplished through barrel plating. It was the same with Hot Wheels: the original advertisements made the vehicles shine. You know how when you go into a McDonald’s restaurant and you see the hamburger posters on the wall? The hamburgers never look like that when you actually get one. Then there are the Queens of the hobby, which I consider to be the barrel-plated vehicles. The King of the hobby is the rear-load Pink Beach-Bomb #1 prototype. What do you consider to be the Holy Grail of Hot Wheels collectibles? I started with my most valuable items, documenting what they are and the provenance of each item. All the knowledge is in my head, and if I passed away tomorrow my wife would be mad at me for that. ![]() I just recently started a project to document my collection and the history behind each object. The warehouse is air-conditioned and heated to prevent temperature and humidity extremes. Some of the objects never see the light of day because I don’t want them to deteriorate. There are over 3,000 objects in addition to the vehicles. The warehouse contains much of the memorabilia - display cabinets, blue prints, molds, advertising. In fact, you walk through it like a museum. It looks like a gallery - my own miniature museum. When my collection went beyond cars, I bought a 4,000 square-foot warehouse space. That number changes by a few hundred cars each month, up or down depending if I’m buying or selling. I have about 3,500 Hot Wheels vehicles in my collection. I have Carney display cases hung on the wall and professionally framed. My home office is lined with my collection. I’m there now! I also have a separate 4,000 square foot warehouse space. How do you display and store your collection? Not all my collections last but it’s personal with Hot Wheels. I’ve always been a collector I’ve collected Tucker automobile memorabilia, and as a college student I collected political memorabilia. My company had just handed out bonuses and many of my colleagues bought tech stocks I bought a Hot Wheels vehicle, though not for the rumoured price. Six months later I saw an ad for the rare rear-load Pink Beach-Bomb #1 prototype for $72,000. I began running ads in the National Post newspaper offering to buy people’s collections. He said, “I’ll give you a couple of hundred bucks for those.” I said no and started collecting Hot Wheels. I was with a friend that afternoon who was a collector. I put the cars away in a cigar box in about 1970. The only toy I remember well is Hot Wheels and taking that orange track and whipping my brothers with it. When and why did you start collecting Hot Wheels? I am the Indiana Jones of Hot Wheels: still in search of the Ark but not knowing where it is or exactly what it is. I also have original sketches, molds, master patterns, and original store displays from 1968. My collection includes an internal Mattel memo about the yet-to-be-named “toy car project”. If I was a burglar and broke into the Mattel design centre of 1968, this is the stuff I’d run out with. My collection specializes in the history of Hot Wheels, including Hot Wheels vehicles - but more importantly for me, the memorabilia associated with the earliest days of their creation. Here, he dishes on details about his massive collection and shares his dying wish related to the hobby. Bruce Pascal has curated the rarest Hot Wheels collection in the world and wrote the book on Hot Wheels prototypes.
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