Collecting die cast toys is a very popular hobby and collectors carefully organise their collections, catalog them and proudly display them. Collectors vary in the type of die cast vehicles that they collect, often focusing on subtopics within their collection or collecting specific kinds of die cast vehicles. For example some collectors will collect all die cast farm vehicles while another collector may focus only on John Deere farm vehicles or, even more specifically, John Deere farm tractors. Every collection then is as unique as the individual doing the collecting.
Collecting die cast toys can be like travelling back in time to the early days of the twentieth century when vehicles, and then toy vehicles, were first produced. Tootsie Toys in the US and Dinky Toys and Corgi Toys in the UK were the first manufacturers of die cast toys, which are toys produced by the casting method. The first models they produced were small vans and cars that did not have plastic windows.
Later plastic was incorporated into the vehicles and an alloy of zinc and aluminium used to produce cars, trains and airplanes although cars were, and continue to be today, the most popular types. Many manufacturers produced die cast toys including Matchbox, Johnny Lightning, UT Models, Racing Champions, Tekno, Tomica, Vitesse and many more. In the UK Dinky Toys and Corgi are the largest collectibles companies. Dinky Toys were produced by Meccano Ltd, well known for their toy construction equipment,in 1934. Corgi Toys introduced diecast toy cars in 1956.
Diecast toy collecting, in common with most other types of collecting, is a never ending hobby. There is always another unique or rare toy to find, or another sub collection to start. Even though a collector may specialise in a single marquee they may collect models from the many different decades of the twentieth century, even the nineteenth century for some models when automobiles were first produced. Die cast toy cars are available for all the popular automobile makes including MG, Hillman, Austin, Bentley, Jaguar, Mercedes Benz, Rolls Royce etc.
In addition diecast toys are made in different scales from 1:28 to 1:64 the most popular scale to collect being between 1:43 and 1:50. Although originally made for children they were collected by adults from about the mid 1950’s probably by children keeping their toys when they grew up and discovering that they were becoming valued items to collect.
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