Speed King magazine scans- articles on Dave Deal and Deal's Wheels
There are a lot of scans below, so I hope you aren't on an old dialup connection! This is a magazine Dave Deal sent me a while back, it's a Japanese magazine from Spring 2005. Deal has quite a following in Japan and in fact has been partially credited with starting the Choro Q craze. Unfortunately the articles are in Japanese and a translation is not available, but the photos are really nice and there's lots of great content, so it's well worth a look. Enjoy!
This giant Baja Humbug is actually a Deal's Wheels "tribute", the builder modified a generic toy VW to look like the Baja Humbug model. Note the helmet which is painted to match the driver's helmet in the Baja Humbug kit.
He also modded a little Choro Q car to look like the Baja Humbug. He must love that particular model!
You may recognize this store display, it appears to be the same one that I was sent a picture of many years ago that came by way of a Japanese collector named "Shenji". I'm guessing Shenji contributed most of what you see in this article. I've never spoken to him directly, but according to a mutual friend Shenji has a rather large collection of Deal's Wheels. As a sidebar, I don't believe the models shown were part of this display. I have collected 3 of the displays and they all had a single model attached instead of two as shown. They have two tabs like this one, but the tab for the car shown was bent up while the other remained flat. I suspect that the display was designed with two cars in mind, but that probably didn't happen due to costs.
Here is the real Baja racer campaigned by Deal back in the 70's. Revell made a kit of it which is also shown in the pics.
And here he is, the Big Deal himself! He told me before that he has played around with installing parts from different kits on the Deal's Wheels models to see what he could come up with. Note the Baron in his hand with one wing; and the Gomad Nomad that appears to have a Ferd Phony Car chassis and motor in it!
Here are some original pictures of the Jim Allen show cars, at long last we have pictures of all 4 of them (the 57 is shown on another page).
Check out the plume of smoke from the Swine Hunt, it could really shoot ping pong balls! I have it on good authority that Jim Allen still has this Swine Hunt, it is hanging from the rafters of his shop!
A rare look at Deal's studio; and some roughs of the Cars movie characters.