Little Wheels News

18 Mar

Collecting Police Vehicles

Posted by Andrew Wood in Diecast models, Police

Model Police cars have an enduring appeal, when I was a kid the Corgi Riley Pathfinder Police Car got much more respect in the playground than either the freewheeling or even the friction-powered civilian models. It was always fun to set up a chase and pretend you were Z Cars with your Corgi Police Zephyr chasing something disreputable like a stolen Jag Mk1.

From the Adult collector's point of view putting together a cabinet full of Police vehicles gives focus, if not limits, to a collection. You can refine it down again by being specific about what type of Police vehicle you collect. I have customers who collect Police cars only from one country - pretty tough when the country is New Zealand as there aren't that many, or one from every US State, both of which customers of Little Wheels are doing.

I've added a number of search tags to the items in the Little Wheels shop, Police being one of them, so that when you search on 'Police' you get all the Police related vehicles currently on sale. The same works for Ambulance & Fire too and a whole host of other search terms - so why not have a go?

12 Mar

Models of Yesteryear - are they coming back?

Posted by Andrew Wood in Collecting as an investment, Diecast models, Fowler, Little Wheels, Models of Yesteryear, Thomas

0 Comments

There was a period in the 80s & 90s when diecast collectables were very much on trend as an investment as well as a hobby to build value over the years. Old Dinky toys were selling for significant amounts of money, a Foden 8 wheel truck with chains made over £12,000. So lots of people went out and bought new diecasts to put in the loft to mature and become very valuable in 20-30 years or so.

The obvious choice at the time were Matchbox Models of Yesteryear. They were cheap and plentiful and there was a fashion at the time for everything 20s & 30s - remember The Sting, Great Gatsby etc?

So many Models of Yesteryear were carefully salted away that the collector market became over-supplied with very good boxed examples and over the last few years values plummeted. A couple of years ago I was dumping good, boxed items at toy fairs at two for £5.

Towards the end of last year I noticed a change. I'd always done well with the early yellow box MOYs and the much later highly detailed series such as the fire engines and Beers of the World trucks. The problem had been with straw, woodgrain & maroon boxes from the 70s & 80s.

These items have now started to gain some traction, a lot of it coming from Eastern Europe & Russia, although. now it is becoming more general and I'm pleased that these models, for which I've always had a great affection are being appreciated once again. As a child I owned and loved a blue Thomas Flyabout and I still have my battered old Fowler Showman's engine, treasured members of my toy box in the early 60s.

As I was adding more MOYs to the on-line shop this morning I was surprised to see that I had got over 70 of them currently on sale - a year ago this would have been few or none. The woodgrain & straw boxes are still a bit slow but maroon boxes and the 1960s pink & yellow window boxes have really become popular once again.

I'm glad to see a well-deserved return to popularity of an old favourite.

03 Mar

First Post

Posted by Andrew Wood in care, Diecast models, Little Wheels, service

1 Comments

This is Little Wheels' new on-line shop. Little Wheels though is not new. We opened for business in October 2011 and since then have shipped over 10,000 diecasts to 6,500 (ish) customers in 70 countries - as soon as I type that it is out of date!

Let me introduce us, we are a two-man father & son team based out of Harwell in South Oxfordshire in the beautiful English countryside. I'm Andrew & my son is Phil. We both love cars, big and small, and we hope that comes through in the care we take with our models and service we give to our customers. I'm a Jag man, on my third one now which is an old shape XJ with the all-alloy bodywork. Phil still has to drive his Mum's Citroen C1 (shame), but wants a Lotus Elise very badly indeed.

To date we have traded from our old website at little-wheels.co.uk, from eBay and from Amazon. We have (at the time of writing) 6,820 positive feedbacks on eBay. We've launched this new site because our old one is getting too hard to buy from. It was originally set up as a resource for collectors and to make it as complete as possible I leave diecasts on there after they are sold to build up the reference library for collectors. This is great in one way as there are 200,000 pictures - but it makes it impossible to see what is for sale and what is there for reference.

So - we continue to sell on eBay and Amazon and have added this smart new site. The old site will be kept in an adapted form and will continue to grow giving a free place to go to research your diecasts.

Welcome to our new shop & blog and be sure to come back and see the new models added every day and for more information, views, opinions & insights into the world of vehicles both models and full size.

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