TOPIC:

I may have a chance to bid on a fairly complete mk1 sand scorcher. All the body parts are there except one front turn signal lense and the stinger on the exhaust. And it looks like there's no speed control. How high would you guys bid?

What it's going to be worth finished
- (minus) cost of shipping
- parts needed to complete
- cost of anything else required for that build

---

= what I'm prepared to bid


Unfortunately I've also got to work within a budget & being in NZ the shipping can be quite a lot. Don't fall into the trap my father falls for every time he bids online. Once he decides he needs something he'll outbid anyone no matter the cost. So he at times pays far too much for used goods that he would've been better off buying new. I know vintage RC isn't readily available like this but the principle remains the same. I used to restore Japaneese motorcycles when I was single & I always did the paperwork for each build. Just to ensure what I was spending never exceeded the value of the finished build. When I was young I watched someone pour a huge amount into a full restoration & when it eventually had to be sold it was worth a fraction of that it had cost.

Tough question...
A true Mk.1 is desirable, but make sure it has as many of the Mk.1 attributes as possible. The changes came during productsion, so you will find a large number of variances ranging from pure Mk.1 to pure Mk.2

bumper: Mk1 Black
front suspension arms: Thinner on Mk1
gear box: lots of smaller changes
rear a-arms: room for bearing on the inside (which it was not)
front shock towers: screws for spring adjustment
front body post: T-profile vs. hole for snap pin
And more...
(We need to write e definitive article on this subject...)

For price: whatever it's worth for you.

Stinger & indicator missing wouldn't bother me as "real" ones do turn up occasionally & if not the re-re ones fit the same. Missing MSC would be more of a problem I think....

I did look at my notes on Scorcher sales (c.130 recent sales) but that's only ebay lisitings where the price was properly visible at the end, and nowadays that's only a fraction of total sales, so many final values are opaque - "best offer"s, cars that are "lost or broken" or "no longer available for sale" (meaning they sold ouside of eBay), plus all those that sell through forums, facebook, craigslist, gumtree & so on - you might be able to see what the headline price was, but have no idea what it really sold for, so as I have some ambition towards a methodology that's at least auditable,


There do seem to be some trends though:
- mk.1 is not that rare, seemingly a bit less than 1 in 3 surviving Scorchers are mk.1s;
- there's no evidence of a mk.1 being worth a premium (really);
- most cars are poor by my standards - I would class a scorcher as a decent buy if it was a non-completed build, NIB, barely used & complete, or even just quite well used, mostly complete & not buggered around with too much. According to my notes, that makes up around 13% of the total sales, far too many have some significant flaws - some combination of badly damaged, wrong wheels/tyres, lashed up with non-Tamiya parts, cars that are "all original" apart from the 50% re-re parts, horible paint (including on the wheels & chassis), often over damage, etc, chassis, radio boxes & motor covers hacked up to fit modern electrics - and so on. There's also a trend to more cars where all the body details have been stripped off, and towards "restorations" where the result makes you wish they'd just left it alone. Some of my notes are quite rude
- there's some correlation between condtion/completeness and price - but not a whole lot. There are far too many odd prices to consider them as outliers, there are some sales where it's apparent that 2 or more people really wanted it - and/or it looked shiny when they were fingering their preciouses (smart phones ), but far too many are inexplicable, at least with accessible information. I'm guessing there are other factors that come in that I'm just not seeing - tides, celestial congugations (the moon in Uranus, etc ), maybe time to/from payday?
- Leffover build kipple/ephemera (boxes, manuals, screw bag headers, leftover parts/decals) of any amount is only present I guess 1/5th of the time, there is some evidence of a price premium on that, especially a "full set" as though everything was kept after the build.


From what you've said I don't think this car is a total shed (so we can rule out the 75 GBP very low end), but neither is it likely to be a well built, very lightly used example with great provenance (boxed with kipple) example, which given all the garbage out there should/could be worth 300 GBP.

Without seeing it I'm going to say 120 to 180 GBP (so you'll have to convert) - depending on condition. 200+ would probably be too much.

Thanks for your input guys. It's a local silent auction so I only get to bid once. I'm not sure if I'll get to see it in person till the night of the fund raiser and I'm going to bid online because I won't be in town the night of the party. I think I'll bid $175 USD and hope for the best. People around here don't know anything but Traxxas and new bright so I may be the only bidder.

You maybe should place a very high bid to be sure to win it?

If I had the money to bid real high I would but I got laid off at the coal mines and have been working odd jobs so money is kinda tight. Not tight enough to be suffering though.

You pay what you place? Same if the lower bid is cheaper? That sucks!

Yep every interested party puts in one bid and only the person running the auction knows who's bid what. At the end of the night whoever bid the most on an item pays up and takes it home. It is possible that I could bid $1 and win if no one else has interest.

I didn't get it. I bid $200 and the high bid was $425. So sad. It did have the MSC and 2 sets of door handles and mirrors.