What is It?

Friday, February 23, 2018
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What Is It?

Please click here to visit this interesting ebay merchant

From time-to-time I receive questions about toys. Late last week, I received a request from Mr. Jim Bocckinfuso to identify a boat tail racer toy. He's planning to give it to his grandson, and so wanted to know about the toy. Jim wrote to say that the toys appeared to be from the 1940's, thought it was made of cast iron, was 5" (127 mm) long, and had the # 2 imprinted on the inside surface of the car , with # 1 labelled on the outside. Jim also said that the  toy was a boat tail racing car (racer).

The first thing that I did was to do a Google search for  "boat tail cast iron racing car".

Below is the screen-capture from the Google search. The boat tail design was very popular for racing cars of the 1920's and 1930's. As a result, the search yielded all kinds of boat tail racers, but none that I was looking for.

I then decided to do a Google search for "ebay boat tail cast iron racer". Again, I got lots of photos, but none of the particular toy that Jim was looking for. And so, I then decided to do a search on ebay with the same description as before. This time, I got 3 images of Jim's toy.

They are image numbers 2-4 on the bottom-most line of 4 cars.

I clicked on 1 of the images, which led me to Willowmoon99 . Amy, the owner of Willowmoon 99, 

described her toy car as follows:

"Vintage Rare 1950s Leslie Henry Boat Tail Race Car #4 (red & original) almost 5" long,  Die-cast & In good condition with some paint wear & loss. Made in the USA &  marked with a 2 on the bottom, with black rubber wheels. "

And so I had a match. It turned out that the toy was not cast iron, but die-cast. This means that the metal for the die-cast is not iron, but is an alloy made for die-cast toys. Jim, later wrote to say thank you,  and by using a magnet, he realized that his toy was not cast iron, because the magnet did not stick to the toy.

In Amy's own words:

The gold Leslie Henry racer is one of my restored toys that I did but they do come in gold. Leslie Henry also made convertible die-cast cars with tin tops & some with metal windshields. They also have fire chief sets & racing sets which include 6 to 8 cars. The fire chief set Has trucks & most Leslie Henry toys have a chassis like bottom, only a few do not have them, the racer being one of them. If you look up my Leslie Henry toys, I have a few you can see & I will be adding some more Leslie Henry trucks soon. 

About me, I love vintage & antique toys & I have a lot of different kinds, also I restore, customized & repair toys.I have lots of original toys & I get request from customers to customized toys from time to time.

Hello again,
Leslie Henry was based out of NY in the 1950s & another set was called Precision Cast metal automotive fleet, which came with 4 racer & 2 tanker trucks & one wrecker truck. They also made a die-cast fleet train set (very rare & hard to find).
Thats all I know.
Amy

Many thanks 

Amy

Have a close look at the bottom  photo of the inside of the racer casting. Notice the # 1 towards the front of the car on the right side of the photo.  In Jim's description, his number is number 2.

What these numbers refer to are the number of casting that were made, probably at 2 different times, and with 2 different original casting moulds. # 1 was the original casting, while # 2 was the second casting.

 Amy wrote to say that this gold-painted car was rare. 

I'm wondering if the car came this way and without a number on the hood, or  if the toy was repainted in gold.

And one final bit of information that was in Amy's description above:

The car was manufactured by  the Leslie Henry company. Along with toy race cars,

the company made lots of cap toy pistols., with holsters.

Thanks for dropping by,

And have a great part of the day or night.

Stacey Bindman

toysearcher@gmail.com