Sam's Asylum: Nostalgia Is a Hell of a Drug Part 3: The Lowrider Kid!

As a kid I had a small collection of 1:18 scale diecast model cars and a rather large collection of 1:24/1:25 scale model kits. Though they were all different kinds of cars they all fell victim to the fact that I was really into Lowriders. Even before AMT and Revell started making lowriders kits I was going to websites like Pegasus and Hoppin Hydros to get wheels and accessories to build my own lowriders. Now, let it be known I was great at painting the interior, engines, and setting up a stanced lowrider chassis, but I couldn't paint the body for shit. That's one skill I just could not master. I'm sorely disappointed to this day, as I really need to learn to spray paint for my guitar pedal building hobby. It's been years since I've tried, so I might be better at it these days, as I've learned how to be more patient.

The first official lowrider kit I can remember was AMT's 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo, which came with various hydraulic cylinders so you could stance it almost anyway you wanted. Model kits including extra parts to allow you to customize how you built the car wasn't new, but this blew my tiny little mind back then. The car was green on the box, but moulded in an off white/ grey color, so I knew mine was never going to look great. Even so, I built what I could, stanced it how I wanted and still enjoyed what I had created. I also had quite a few 63 and 64 Impala kits. I did paint one of the 64 kits blue, but the paint started to run on the rear quarter panel. I didn't care, it was the best I could do, so I lived with it.

Then came Lindberg, hitting heavy with their kits that included hydraulics. These were already moulded in nice colors, all I had to do was put them together. I had EVERY one of them, although I never got into their Pocket Hoppers line. My favorite by far was the S10. I actually still have one of the 63 Impala Red's Hydraulics Jokers that still works, kind of. I also bought the Hoppin Hydros Linberg D's, which were an upgraded lowrider wheel and white walled tire set for each and every one of them. It becomes apparent that I, at that age, had no clue what money meant.

Years later I bought a pre-built 1966 Bonneville kit off ebay thinking I could fix it. The previous owner had already setup the hydraulics, but the wiring was a rats nest. I tried to fix it, but all I really did was take it apart and forget how it went back together. I also tried to mate a Dodge Caravan kit with a Lindberg hydraulic chassis, which was going great, until I could never get the body to sit straight on the chassis. I also bought a metallic hunter green Chevy dually that I lowered and added wire wheels to. Soon after some company started producing a line of diecast bodied ones that looked a lot like mine. I have my suspicions they might have used mine as inspiration, I'll explain more at the end.

Something I only saw for a short period of time in the early 2000s and never seen since was a huge radio controlled lowrider with hydraulics and everything. It wasn't the Radio Shack Lowrider, but whatever it was never really lived up to the hype the ebay listing had promised. I used it the day I got it and put it back in the box for display, and as with almost all of my other model cars it was eventually sold. I even made my own lowrider from a super cheap remote controlled car I bought at a dollar store. There is also some other cheap lowrider car that came with a key fob that I have somewhere. I'll try to find those and add pictures below.

As a part of this hobby I also still have a small collection of Lowrider and Lowrider Bicycle magazines packed away. In the back of Lowrider Bicycle, if you flipped the magazine over, you had a whole half that was dedicated to lowrider scale model cars. I used to look at those cars and wish I could do stuff like that. It wasn't until model car companies started painting the bodies that I ever actually felt I was anywhere near that level, of course I still wasn't, but I felt as if I was.

Now way, way back in the old days of 2002 I started a website that, looking back, was poorly named. Low Ridez N 1:24. Yep, the early 2000s were a veritable wild west of misspelling to come up with something catchy. I wanted to be a one stop shop for all small scale lowrider information, and I really thought I was. I added anything and everything that came across my path that had to do with lowrider model cars, as well as photos of my own builds. Now all that's left is the web archive, but when they crawled the site they never archived the photos, which were literally kilobytes in size but whatever. So having my builds posted wasn't a concern, until I saw the diecast lowrider duallys that looked like mine. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, it doesn't matter twenty years later, but to me it just seemed odd.