So the story begins… its late Friday night, my usual ebay searches ( I’m looking for an excavator) hit my inbox and I notice that a tracked wheel loader had just been listed, in Germany.
It looks a little odd, as its gold in colour! I Did a little bit of research and it transpires it’s a limited edition model from Graupner, for their 75th anniversary. They made 75 models ( anybody guess why?) and had them gold plated. I did a little more research and soon realised that this is infact a scaleart 963 tracked wheel loader, Graupner commissioned scaleart to build them. They originally went on the market for 13,000 Euros and came built and ready to run, with everything, all contained in a nice wooden box, and the best thing, this one had never been used…
So I placed a cheeky offer, which was instantly rejected, and rightly so. I placed another and waited…… Saturday morning arrived and I received a counter offer, we eventually agreed on a price acceptable for both of us. Excellent, so I agreed to buy a wheel loader from somewhere in Europe and wanted it now! The seller was very helpful and we made arrangements to meet at Midday the following day. I Looked in Google maps, its was 8 ½ hours away, plus an hour or two for the ferry…
So off I set at 1am Sunday morning, channel tunnel ticket in hand, passport in other and a pocket full of Euros… several hours later and many red bulls, I arrived at ttm-funktionsmodellbau and met Sven and his wife. Wow, what a shop, if you are ever bored and fancy a day trip and happen to be in Germany, go there, it’s the Hamleys of the modellers world. Its massive, it has everything you could ever want and best of all, they have a display stand in the middle of the shop with all the Wedico construction range on, for you to play with, the problem is I had limited time and it was after all Sven’s day off. But I managed to play for an hour.
Loaded up my new Tracked loader and headed back to the UK….. the rest they say is history.
Being gold plated it doesn’t photograph too well.. but here are a few any way.
The question is, do I use it, do I paint it Cat colours or leave it gold?
