Welcome to Toy Car Thursday! Each week, this will be the place for all manner of car-related toys and hobbies, whether it’s old and new kids’ stuff or “big boys’ toys” like premium plastic models and hobby-grade radio-control cars and trucks. I’m officially the Toy Car Thursday caretaker, but you can expect guest appearances from The Bishop with vintage-toy explorations and (fingers crossed) Mark Tucker with RC builds that will get you excited for small-scale off-road action.
For this first installment of Toy Car Thursday, our subject is the Hot Wheels Factory. Hot Wheels themselves need no introduction, I’m sure. As soon as Mattel released the first batch of sixteen models (the “sweet sixteen” to collectors) in 1968, Hot Wheels were an instant hit and established brightly-painted 1/64 scale replicas of performance cars, customs, and hot-rods on fast-rolling wheels as the recipe for kid-citement and huge sales that sidelined Matchbox as the big little-car brand.
Tracks and playsets that expanded play beyond shoving the cars pell-mell across the kitchen floor were also major factors in Hot Wheels’ success, and I’m sure most of you have plugged together your fair share of orange track segments.
Hot Wheels tapped the full zeitgeist of the car scene, from the excitement of the street and strip to seemingly mundane but play-value-packed locations such as service stations and parking garages. Perhaps Hot Wheels’ most ambitious accessory was the Hot Wheels Factory, which was not designed to replicate the appearance of a factory but instead perform the actual role of a factory, allowing kids to pump molten “Plastix” into two-piece molds to create their own Hot Wheels cars. Watch:
Raise your hand if you want one now. I do!
The set included molds to make cars with ten different body styles as seen below, complete with chassis weights to give the cars the heft of their die-cast counterparts so they could perform effectively on Hot Wheels tracks. In the lower left corner, you can see the “Plastix” material the “Factory” heated and injected into the mold. I couldn’t find an explanation of what Plastix actually was, but as later Factory toys used wax sticks, I would be unsurprised if the material is a hard wax like the type jewelers use.
The chassis and body are molded individually, with the wheels being cast into the chassis via their axles. The ribbed area seen in the first photo below is the inverse of the seats, as revealed when the chassis is demolded in the second photo. Neat!
There’s the Hot Pipes body after demolding (above). The humps to the right of the body shapes are the canopy designs for those body styles, which would be molded separately–you can see the injection port between them.
The screen grabs above come from the video below, which offers a detailed look at the car-molding experience as kids would have discovered at their own kitchen table, far from the idealized world of the Rod Serling-voiced commercial:
Mattel has revisited the Factory concept a few times since its original version, but injection molding has always been the core of the concept. The most recent version skips heat for a chemical reaction that begins when “Fusion Fluid” is injected into the mold, which simultaneously mixes the two-part compound.
On the plus side, there’s no danger of burning yourself, but on the downside, the floppy bodies produced by the two-part goop are profoundly underwhelming. Pass.
Before I go, it should be noted that Mattel was no stranger to hot-selling, literally hot toys before the Hot Wheels Factory hit shelves in 1970. The Mattel Vac-U-Form of the early 1960s was just what it sounds like, a miniature vacuum former wherein kids heated a sheet of styrene until soft, then swung it over a positive form where a fan sucked the material tightly into shape – pure magic. Just don’t lean on the hot sheet-heater. Watch:
In 1964, Mattel introduced the Thing Maker and Creepy Crawlies, which featured hot open-faced molds that kids poured “Plasti-Goop” (liquid PVC) into to create bugs and scary costume pieces and what not. What could go wrong?
Many a kid, including me, would forget the metal molds were hot and pluck them from the heater with bare fingers, a mistake only made once. See? It’s educational.
And that’s Toy Car Thursday! I hope you found it fun, and by all means, let me know if there’s a toy you’d like to see covered here. And be sure to tell me if you still have any scars from your own Hot Wheels Factory, Vac-U-Form, or Thingmaker. Brothers (and sisters, I’m cool) of the burn!
Top graphic images: Mattel
I had this!! Awesome article. I remember the cars weren’t very durable but the process was fun. And burn-y.
I remember having some sort of ‘welder’ gun as a kid that made sparks inside of this little clear chamber and would seemingly melt a plastic stick to join pieces of trucks together. I’ll never forget that smell. I need to see if I can find that toy again.
Edit: It was the POWER SPARK welder!
https://www.reddit.com/r/90s/comments/9ysb1t/does_anyone_remember_the_power_spark_plastic/
COX .049 dragsters (since this a car site) and the .049 tethered airplanes (P51 Mustang!) that also doubles and finger amputators. Great fun!
God, those tether planes were fucking terrifying.
had a burn-o-matic like that as a kid… now I have 2 3D printers as an aged adult.
The difference between men and boys is the price of the toys 🙂
Volatile organic compounds, anyone?
Looking forward to more Toy Car Thursdays! This factory concept is an interesting cross between model building, which was more popular back then, and toys. The off-brand vehicles are neat, but I would’ve wanted real models: Mustang, Camaro, Charger. Or a generic van; that’d be great to customize.
I am smack in the middle of the demographic for this, and I have no memory of it. My friends didn’t have it, I don’t remember seeing commercials for it. Nothing. Is it possible it was regional?
i had one of these as a kid. i got it after i got hit playing Jarts.
My mom had a Creepy Crawlies set!! She thought the process was neat.
I missed out on most of the cool dangerous toys, although I still have my set of actual sand-weighted diving sticks. (My local pool was far more concerned with keeping tennis balls out of the water; the diving sticks didn’t get banned until the late ’90s or early ’00s.) I did get to experience messy toys though, the best of which was Spin Art. You clamped a piece of paper to a turntable, flipped a switch, and dripped various paints on the paper. In theory it was great, but it relied on a very specific type of paper and very specific consistency of paint to have good results, which I never achieved…to hear my parents tell the story, apparently I only succeeded in flinging paint all over the kitchen.
Man, all we got in the 90’s were the hot wheels that changed color.
I grew up in the 90’s, and we had the creepy crawlers with the hot plates! My sister and I both burned the hell out of our hands on multiple occasions with it. My parents also got me a Dremel tool for my 10th birthday so I could cut up my model cars, so maybe I’m an outlier of the 90’s when it comes to dangerous toys..
I had the creepy crawlers as well. I was just meaning hot wheels specific.
Didn’t have this, but had the Mattel Mastercaster. So much melting…
I’m sure most of you have plugged together your fair share of orange track segments.
Not me, my mom was cheap and I hade a roll of track, maybe 20 feet that I have to put in hot water to unroll and run down the hallway.
This is a great idea! Looking forward to the series.
Spinwelder! The masterclass version of the Hot Wheels factory.
Remember when toys could hurt you and it didn’t immediately result in a lawsuit?
And there was always that one kid who did get hurt, but everyone wrote it off as “Well, that boy’s special anyway”, and the next dangerous, but fun, thing came out.
And then Lawn Darts were released, which seem designed to actively hurt you.
Lawn Darts were almost literally just Roman plumbata made with modern materials. Lead-weighted throwing darts with fletchings carried by infantrymen, thrown to wound enemy soldiers and horses before they came into range of other weapons.
It’s fairly reasonable to say that they were designed to hurt people.
Excitable boy, they all said
Is this meant to be the Pontiac Pthursday post? If so, I think you may have confused what “We build excitement” is referring to 🙂
I think they ran out of Pontiacs to highlight
I guess they haven’t been to Pennsylvania
I’m an old., I had a Vac-U-Form when I was maybe 10. I remember how I pitched my parents on buying me one. “If I get this, I can make all of my own toys and you won’t have to ever buy me another one”!
Actual results- I would burn myself regularly on this ridiculously dangerous thing.
I had an original Vac-U-Form, and a Thing Maker too. The Vac-U-Form was far more fun, I would stick all sorts of things into it and make the equivalent of blister packs.
When I was getting my MFA they had a 4×4 foot vacuumed forming machine that I never got around to using since the milling machines and metal presses always seemed to be a better solution for making cameras or weird musical instruments.
I’m sort of surprised that hobbyist grade vacuum forming and injection molding equipment isn’t a thing like 3d printing and CNC are.
Not sure about vacuum formers (though people make them), but there are workbench injection mold machines.
How Wheels fondue. I made mine using unleaded gasoline and flame.
I had a vacu-former in the 90s for making Hot Wheels sized vehicles. Don’t think it was an official Hot Wheels one though. The chassis were black plastic with pretty standard inserted plastic wheels and wire axles. You made the bodies from plastic sheet and there was a little nail clipper-esque nibbler for trimming the excess. There was a little pack of stickers (racing stripes, flames, etc.), and the body just sorta clipped onto the chassis.
If we get toy car Thursday does that mean we can get “Automotive would you rather Friday” back?
I didn’t have any hot mold toys, but I remember learning that the cigarette lighter in the car was not safe to touch just because it was not glowing.
I can’t remember who, but someone I knew had a version of the HotWheels maker when I was a kid. I never used it and I thought it sounded awesome, but I remember the kid who had it talking about how it was disappointing.
I had the second generation Thingmaker. It was a cauldron with several 1-piece plastic female molds of various creatures that would sit on top. The Goop (I think there were 4 colors) was heated in pockets in the cauldron and poured into the pockets on the mold to cool. Being 1-piece, the resulting creatures were minimally 3 dimensional (and not water proof) and, when the goop ran out, you weren’t getting more (I felt lucky to get batteries for battery toys or rare occasion). A lot of these toys gave lackluster results, but they were educational by their process and through immediate punishment for lapsed safety. Toxins aside, I think kids could use more of that today.
I also had some kind of plastic “stained glass” kit. It came with colored plastic beads you’d set into premade metal frames of animals and such with sections partitioned off so they could be filled with different colored beads that would melt in the oven to form transparent colored plastic panels like stained glass. I think we used it once and my mother decided that was enough. I imagine it stank, but I don’t remember.
Also had an Ouija board. They still make those for some reason.
I had one of these circa 1978 or so. Made a robot ornament that still hangs on my Christmas tree.
I had the stained glass thing.
My stupid brother got in my way moving it towards the oven and the beads jumped their compartments so I had to go through with tweezers to sort out individual beads.
They still make the ouija boards to keep in touch with all the kids that were killed by the other toys
That made me laugh!
This made me remember the (updated?) vac-u-former that I had in the early 90s. I recall the car bodies being fairly flimsy and easily crushed, but it was sort of a neat idea. If nothing else, it made cars you could run over with your tonka trucks and the like