Toy car restoration is just as satisfying as the real thing
YouTube has established a devastatingly effective strategy to suck viewers in, making them watch far more videos than they’d bargained for. That’s pretty much the only way to explain how I went from watching car tech tips and restorations like our own Redline Rebuild series to seeing a 1970s Tonka race car get fully restored to better-than-new glory. I’m not mad about it.
The channel, Cool Again Restoration, has tackled all sorts of projects, but somehow this toy car resto is the first one to come across my feed. The video hits a lot of my interests: ’70s race cars, paint and bodywork, and observable restoration progress, even if it isn’t my car—or a real car, for that matter. It’s also cool to see STP used to restore a toy that wears STP contingency decals. I can’t say I saw that coming.
David, the one both on and behind the camera, obviously has lots of experience in this sort of work and makes the entire process seem so simple and easy. Of course, the experience belies all of the chances for even a project of this scale to go wrong. It doesn’t help that I watched this video in my living room, from where I can see my project car … right where it’s been parked for the last three months since the last time I drove it. If it only had 50-odd pieces in total and could be bead-blasted, masked, and painted in one day, I’d have one less excuse as to why it still looks so crummy.
Hopefully, you find this restoration as entertaining as I did. If you stay until the end, you’ll get an extra payoff that definitely makes it worthwhile.
