Master Caster

Ah, yes, every (?) boy's fantasy...the opportunity to "build" your own car. You would take the wax, seen to the left, melt it in that little grey heating pan, pour it into the tray below when it was molten, then pour it into the cast. Get tired of the car you were playing with? No problem...break it up, repeat the process. What a GREAT concept.

So great that it involved a 2-prong high voltage plug in the hands of young kids...yeah, no potential for problems there...and having kids playing with wax hot enough to pour into molds was pretty smart, too. I mean, think about it...this product was NOT marketed at teenagers...it was directly at the 5 - 10 year old set.

I don't know how old I was when I got it. I do remember having a lot of fun with it...though the fun factor was perhaps somewhat mitigated by random encounters with red-hot metal, scalding wax, and a cruel sister who may have experimented with snapping the wheels off. Not that it may have been completely undeserved. Unconfirmed reports have me being somewhat less than an angel as a child...I can neither confirm nor deny those reports. On a completely unrelated note, unconfirmed reports have me being something less than an angel as an adult...

Anyhow, being kids, my friend Carl Speelman ( a truly great friend and an example people should emulate) and I goofed around with it...mixing colors to create our own. We probably had more fun breaking the cars and remaking them than we did playing with them, even though I had some of that orange track that meant we could "race" them...

About that time, my sister had an unfortunate incident at a neighbors house, the VanDevenders, in which she expunged food from her system through the mouth. You may be familiar with this as "projectile vomit". Regardless, the color was a rather disturbing shade of green, perhaps the ugliest shade I have ever seen. Why is that important?

Well...we once mixed blue and yellow with a couple of cars we had mashed up previously of indeterminate color...almost black maybe? Anyway, the resultant color green was pretty repulsive. So repulsive it reminded us of Sue's unfortunate evacuation of stomach contents and led to us naming the color "Vanio" as in "VanDevender's Patio".

Ah, the joys of remembering childhood. I don't remember for sure when I put the machine away. Probably one too many times of touching the remarkably unprotected metal that heated up the wax or burning myself with wax or maybe the next hot toy came along (pun intended) or maybe I just grew up.

Oh, the joys of Master Caster...a toy that, in retrospect, never had a proper audience. Too dangerous for the age group that would be interested in it, not much fun for those for whom it wasn't dangerous.