PHOTO
Ronnie Proctor says he would be happy to never see another toy car roll through his Dunedin auction house doors.
Photographing more than 6000 toy cars in a week would do that to someone.
The owner of Proctor Auctions is spending this week preparing for a three-day auction that starts on Friday, which will be filled with thousands of toy cars, amounting to about 2250 lots.
Mr Proctor said all the cars had come from private collections in Invercargill, Dunedin and Christchurch.
“It is a lot of toy cars and it’s been crazy.”
He said he and his staff were all “a little bit sick of toy cars”.
“But it is quite fun because you don’t come across collections like this often.
“The staff will kill me if we have to pack it back up, take it upstairs and do this all again.”
Some of the cars were left over from late last year when he sold an Invercargill man’s Matchbox car collection, but since then the amount of life-long toy car collections coming into the action house had tripled.
“I’ve still got more that hasn’t come out yet, because there’s more collections to come, but we’ve just run out of space and time.
“I went to a house [yesterday] that still had a collection of cars out here in Dunedin as well … there’s big collections all over the country.”
This weekend’s auction will feature many Matchbox cars still in their original packaging, many Dinky toys, some die cast Corgi toy cars and a big collection of 1/18 scale models.
There was also a restored miniature Plymouth car which had been used for road safety training in the United States during the 1960s.
They were used to teach children about road safety by making a child-sized car-filled obstacle course, complete with signs, he said.
New Zealand toy car auctions always drew a large international audience.
When Matchbox cars were manufactured, the United States and Europe all got the standard black, brown and white colours, whereas New Zealand got sent greens, purples, oranges and yellows.
“Because we got the variants, there’s only a certain amount of those around, and they are of interest to many collectors.”
Friday and Saturday’s auctions will be online only, while Sunday’s auction will be in person at Proctor Auctions in George St, North Dunedin.
laine.priestley@odt.co.nz