The Oshkosh Snowplow– 1983 to Present

Hot Wheels original casting of the Oshkosh was done in three separate parts. First was the hood, interior and the four fenders as one piece, then then cab and sander box together as another, and the chassis as the third piece. The front V-Plow is molded in orange plastic. The body pieces were all painted in bright orange enamel and riveted onto an unpainted metal Hong Kong chassis rolling on all large construction tires with wheel centers painted orange.

The country origin on the chassis was later changed to Malaysia.

For the 1984 season Hot Wheels released it again as part of the “Extras” series. Extras were vehicles that had an extra part available to attach. For the Oshkosh, it is its large front V-Plow blade, which incidentally, has always been included in the package. There is also a little-known variation to the Extras Oshkosh with chrome wheel centers of the construction tires. The card is also marked “New Model” whereas the orange wheeled trucks have “Moving Part” labeled on the card. This one is quite rare and won’t ever show up on an orange one again.

The Blue Card Collector Numbers series started up for the 1990 mainline releases and the Oshkosh Snowplow shows up as number 42 on the list. It was cast in the original three separate pieces at first but was eventually redone with the cab and box being molded of color-matched plastic, but apparently there was some sort of issue matching the plastic with the color of the painted metal parts.

The first release of the Collector Number 42 Oshkosh was painted orange enamel with orange wheels like all the others before it. It was soon changed to green and can be found in a range of bright green to dark olive enamels. Maybe the parts were painted in separate locations or at much different times because there were issues matching them for assembly. There are trucks with bright green fenders put together with a dark olive cab and box, and they can be found the other way around too. It seems the rarest of these are the ones that actually all match in color. Even when they started molding the cab and box in plastic, it was the same as all the painted parts—they too range from bright green to dark olive, making for some very unusual color combinations.

The wheels on the green Oshkosh trucks first came with chrome wheels on construction tires, but that was changed to the chrome spoke type wheels on construction tires. There were many vehicles done at that time that were also getting those spoked construction wheel variations and they are quite sought-after today. Later in the Collector Number series, the Oshkosh came back in orange again and this time it had a molded plastic cab and box with metal hood and fenders. The wheels ranged from orange or blacked out wheel centers to the Tri-blade wheel, which was a new style for the time. After the Blue Card Collector Numbers series ended, many more color, tampo and wheel variations of the Oshkosh Snowplow have been released—too many to catalog here so we’ll stick to these early castings and leave the others for another time!

During the run-up to this issue we convinced the IT guys in the DCX office to set up a way where you—our creative and industrious readers—could show off your custom diecast projects and share them with us too so that we might feature them in upcoming issues. What we came up with is the DCX Custom Garage, where you can post your custom projects and check out projects posted by others. When you post it creates a dedicated page for your project vehicle that you can then link to, share on social media, or do whatever you want with it! It also sends a link here to our editors so we can check out your project too. If we like what we see the images and info you posted can be converted to be used in the magazine in one step—no more email attachments!

We asked some members of the 1/18 Custom Diecast Syndicate Facebook group to try it out and they gave it their thumbs up. In honor of the Honda Performance feature elsewhere in this issue we thought we’d show you one of the first cars posted.

Orange Oshkosh with chrome wheels from the Extras series.

Over several years the orange color scheme came in the packaging of a few different series with minor variations to features like wheels.

Some versions of number 42 green plow came in mismatched shades between the three casting pieces, while others match perfectly. They also came with chrome gear-pattern wheels (left) or chrome construction wheels (right).

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Thierry’s Civic build is subtle, but the extra work of lowering the suspension paid off with the perfect stance.

Most of the effort went into upgrading the interior, and most of the parts are salvaged from AUTOart models, such as the Sparco racing seats and steering wheel out of a Ford Focus rally car. Thierry handcrafted the half roll cage out of styrene and painted it red before final assembly.