Hi guys,

To begin, I want to apologize for not posting on here for YEARS then only posting because I need help with something. My empeg life crashed and burned when I paid a lot of money to have extra RAM added to my empeg as well as a fan and fan controller added. That empeg has never worked properly since (a ton of engine noise now). My backup empeg now has a dry solder connection on it's board so it won't boot up. I do have an original Mk2 that works but by that point my habits had changed to listening to podcasts on my Nokia E71 more than anything. Maybe I'll find someone who can buy the whole lot and give it a good home.

But, for now, I'm having a little crisis that I hope you can help me with.

Yesterday, my two year old son found my favorite die-cast model and tossed it down the steps. It's in pieces. I only own one that looks like my Subaru and one that is the WRC version from that year. It's the one driven by Richard Burns from 2001. It was a major pain to find it EIGHT years ago, and shortly after I acquired it, Burns died of cancer. So, it's always been special to me. The only ones I've found on sale are on eBay for about $250. Ouch.

Since we have a lot of European members here, I wanted to see if anyone had any advice on where to get something like this. Maybe a local shop I could call?

Here are the details: AutoArt 80192 1:18 Burns/Reid Rally Monte Carlo http://www.allcarmodels.com/acm/AUA80192.html

Any help would be appreciated. My wife wants me to just go ahead and buy the one for $250, but that'd be a nice four day vacation with the family... Maybe I can find something for just over 120?

Ugh...

brad

JB-Weld epoxy.

The issue with JB is that it's going to take a lot of work to smooth out all the welds so they can't be seen and then on top of that the whole model may need to be refinished. While this may preserve some nostalgic value, the car is no longer "original." I'm not sure if that matters to Brad, nor if he has the time and effort to dedicate to what could be a really difficult miniature reconstruction.

I've thankfully been able to find brand new, in box originals of a few die-cast cars of my youth. The copies I had weren't smashed to pieces but definitely showed a lot of damage/wear and I really appreciate having both the clean and used copies.

I'm not familiar with the WRX model, but there are a number of forums that specialize in this type of thing. Unfortunately I've been finding lately that Google's performance on some forums isn't very complete, which I've verified by using the "site:" prefix. This may need you to join a couple of other forums to perform some searches and/or post a few requests. Something I've also just done in a scale model forum.

Oh.. And welcome back Brad! Definitely don't try the JB weld on the empeg, in case Mark wasn't talking about the car.

Hey guys, I just wanted to thank everyone who offered help. Unfortunately, this model is very rare it looks like I'm out of luck. When my 2 year old gets older, I'll lay on the guilt! (For tossing it down the steps!)

But for now, thank you for the suggestions!