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(1) This Ed Shaver AMX, bought early in 2010 by a friend of mine, was my first introduction to Voodoo-Moto-Kings and the world of redline restoration. With its deep-dish Redline Shop redlines, authentic graphics and gleaming engine, it strikes all the right notes. (Photo by 'Voodoo Mike'; used by permission) (2) Piggybacking the shipping costs on my friend's order allowed me to get these two widowmaker Lotus' (are multiple Lotus' called "Loti"?) for what I had planned to spend on the Lotus Turbine I wanted for my collection. (3) If you can't display 'em, what's the point of havin' em? The rear wheel above is already showing signs of a shelf drop. Note the powdercoat-black chassis finish below, a look that Mattel never considered...and that most other restorers would never have even thought of trying. Among the premium finishes offered on Voodoo-Moto-Kings redline resto's at about this time were gloss-black powdercoat, chrome powdercoat, baby-blue enamel and plated chrome. Custom classics have topped the sales sheets at Barrett-Jackson in recent years...can a new collecting segment in diecast classics be far behind? (4) "Honest, it's not what you think.": The base finish below isn't the result of excessive sand tumbling. It's evidence of the process used used on all VMK resto's, even this black-powdercoat Lola which could have gotten away with a less thorough prep. You can't get good shine from Spectraflame paints without a thorough polishing of the surface metal. It does admittedly make the base look a bit weathered, unlike the powdercoat-flat-black finish above which looks as though it could have been original. Note the "buttonhead" hex rivets, the "signature" that uniquely identifies a VMK restoration to the observant collector. I'd be willing to bet that by 2015, we'll be hearing about "counterfeit buttonheads" appearing on spurious resto's being passed off as original VMK's. (5) I actually like this Lola better in basic-black than in "British Racing Green". Note the difference in feel between the top f3q photo below (mine) and the bottom (Mike's eBay photo, used here by permission). I think my photo, shot on bristol board in natural sunlight, is a more appropriate (and accurate) look, but Hot Wheels are less about look than feeling. And there's no doubt that the high-glamor suspended-in-space look of Mike's take outpoints my photo by a wide margin for raw glamor and excitement. And let's get real here..."appropriate" is a Matchbox feeling. Step aside, son, or you'll burn the soles of your shoes off. (6) The experimental "black" Cabbin' Fever below was a trial custom done shortly after the 2003 "Carbonated Crewsers" release. Now that I've got a few spare 2001 Cabbin's to work with, this ugly beast with it's Sharpie-blackened platform cap will be replaced with a proper all-black Cabbin' held together with screws so I can swap in 5-spoke redlines when I'm displaying my Lola and all-black 5-spokes for my '79 Torino Stocker. (7) My next acquisitions were these four Ground FX'. Mike hasn't had much market success with newer castings, but he's got a soft spot for Mooneyes and Bonneville-style lakesters, and loves the Ground FX as a canvas. The top GFX is actually powdercoated chrome, which has a bare-metal look that will survive with the toughness of powdercoating. The bottom three are actual Spectraflame renditions.. He actually had a Mooneyes tribute planned (see his other Mooneyes pieces - including a drop-dead-gorgeous Neet Streeter - on his own website) until he learned that Mattel already had their own planned for the 2010 "Performance" series. This is a collage of Mike's eBay photos, by the way; the Spectraflame's arrived in early-run "Voodoo Resto's" blisters which I haven't had the guts to open yet, and my photo of the 'powderchrome' version doesn't match the beauty of his shot.

An unexpected post-Christmas treat

I first ran into the Voodoo man while sourcing an original Custom AMX for a friend. In spite of 2010 being the best buyer's winter in years for redline collectors, I couldn't find a really nice example within his budget.

Eventually I always stumble upon something tasty. In this case it was this delicious Ed Shaver AMX shown at right. Wow...a brand-new Ed Shaver for the price of a C7-8? Only one problem with that: it's a restoration, and resto's are notorious for failing to hold their value. I recommended it to my friend anyway, and ultimately we were both very glad that I did.

You see, this isn't just a faithful reproduction. Like every Voodoo-Moto-Kings restoration, it's better than the original. Even at this modest resolution, the wheels are unmistakeably Redline Shop. The engine gleams. The interior looks smooth as glass. And wow...the paint...only the seller's eBay feedback assures you that it couldn't have been retouched.

Between my friend and I, we took home four pieces on that first order, including the two Indy Lotus widowmakers* at right. I got both for about $5 more than I'd budgeted for a good original. The Lola had just been marked down, and while technically it was no bargain, I had a feeling about it, a feeling I still have today.

A history of failing to hold their value has made buying resto's for your personal collection a very risky proposition...unless, of course, you're buying second-hand. The only exception I know of is Rooster, who for some time has been virtually the only "name" restorer in the redline world.

I had a hunch as I browsed through the Voodoo-Moto-Kings inventory that that I might just be in the presence of a new star in the Hot Wheels heaven, and that I might just be one of the very last people to ever have a chance to buy a Voodoo-Moto-Kings restoration at a bargain price.

All the right ingredients for stardom

Hot Wheels is all about image. Hot Wheels is pop art, and successful collectors, dealers and other "stars" all seem to exploit the same rules that govern the success of pop art and pop artists. I saw those essential ingredients not just on the pieces he offered for sale, but on his eBay pages as well. He isn't just a name or a guy who restores redlines...he's a brand: Voodoo-Moto-Kings. He designs, creates, promotes, sells, and now even packages his own pieces. He's still working out the packaging angle (just ask the Matchbox lads about the hassles involved in designing a successful blister card) but the web presence and point of sale are both pure eye candy.

He's even got a trademark: the "buttonhead rivet" shown at left. Passion and packaging have to be combined with quality though, and this is where Mike, the man "who do the voodoo", stands out in the crowd. He also prefers to be known only by his first name, or as "Voodoo Mike", further adding to the mystique that comes with one of his pieces. His love of both his craft and the toys he crafts comes through at every level...you can see it in the quality of his eBay photos and feel it in the descriptions of his lots.

Most of the redline resto's you see being sold on sites like eBay and The Toy Peddler come quite close to the quality of Hot Wheels originals...some a bit worse, some a bit better. When Mike does an "authentic" (just to clear up the difference: the aqua Lotus at right is technically a "custom", not an "authentic", since that model never came with a black base) you can be assured that with the possible exception of a few Gran Toros models, it will be better than anything that Mattel ever produced during the redline era. Put another way, if any half-decent resto is a show-quality piece, Mike's are closer to concourse quality.

Mike's got the balls to match his work, too. He honestly believes that no other resto's made today match those produced by him and Rooster. I certainly haven't seen anything that would call his claim into dispute. And it would be easy to label him as brash and arrogant if it wasn't for three things: firstly, his work is very, very good. Secondly, he practically dares you to prove otherwise. That "buttonhead rivet"? It's actually a hex bolt. Every Hot Wheels mainline and every other resto I've ever seen is riveted...meaning permanently sealed. If you want to find out whether the restorer cut corners that aren't obvious from the outside, you have to break the rivet to do it. But you can open up a Voodoo resto with nothing more than the right-sized Allen key. Not that he actually encourages that, or that you'd ever want to try that with a fifty- or sixty-dollar showpiece. Hell, most Ertl's and Jada's are bolted, too, and we don't make a habit of cracking them open. But isn't it nice to know that you could? Or that the person who restored the vehicle has enough pride-of-workmanship that he'd allow such a thing?

Thirdly, the more you get to know the man, the more brash arrogance begins to look like confidence and self-assurance. You see, Mike also does quite a few customs, but as he said to me once on the subject of his own customs:

"Customizers almost have to read the minds of customers as to what they want. I think custom cars are cool but my ideas for customizing simply don't sell."

Now that is self-confidence.

Put this all together and you've got very nearly the perfect recipe for a legend in the making. But it doesn't stop there. Because in addition to his talent, passion and penchant for self-promotion, Mike has an inherent understanding of Hot Wheels matched by few individuals I have ever known, and perhaps the purest philosophical approach to his work that it's possible to possess.

"For some reason Hot Wheels memories dominate what we remember as a kid," he told me once. "They are one of the few toys that still give you the same feeling you had as a kid."

They have to be better than mint

What Mike understands - what the serious collectors who make up the core of his clientele understand, and what even Mattel has come to understand in recent years - is that a brand-new Boss Hoss or Heavy Chevy "Silver Special" won't give us the same thrill we had when we first opened our club membership kits at age nine. We've got decades' more experience and maturation piled on top of that feeling, and - let's be honest here - decades of slow decay of the senses, too. It just plain takes more to elicit that kind of excitement.

And more is exactly what you get with a Voodoo resto. Mike is not the only one producing Ed Shaver AMX'. But have you ever seen a photo of an original, or a modern reproduction, which matches this level of perfection?

"Whenever I finish a car and stare at it," Mike continues, "I always remember staring at them the way I did when I was a kid. I can't say that about any other toy I had."

At this point, he almost verges into the maudlin...and this bears some explaining.

"For me, the bottom line is having someone smile when they receive the cars I restore. You can't deny that that smile is the same one you had as a kid...that Hot Wheels grin we get from nice clean Spectraflame paint jobs."

He has a point. I got to share in that sense of satisfaction when I delivered Mike's AMX to my friend. Hey, I was the guy who found it for him, and that counted for a lot. And he really does care about his customer. When I suggested that the black Lola reminded me of a Penske Lola GT70 that won at Daytona (Sebring?), he went to the trouble of sourcing a reproduction decal set as an option I could have with the car. But after conversing with Mike by e-mail for several weeks now, I suspect he's really talking less about the customer's grin than his own...the kick he gets when he lays his eyes on a completed piece that looks brighter, cleaner, better than anything Mattel ever made in the '70s.

I have other reasons for suspecting that he's really talking about himself here. Look at the difference between his photos and mine. My photos aren't the best, admittedly, but they're all shot with Canon optics in natural sunlight on plain white bristol board, which is about as good as consumer-level photography can get. In comparison, his look like pure eye candy. You couldn't accuse him of retouching, but there's no question that he finds the most flattering light for virtually every eBay photo he takes of his work. My photos have a certain fascination, sure, but his photos elicit the thrill we felt leafing through the Hot Wheels and Matchbox pocket catalogues. They're so nice that I safely store the downloaded webpage for every Voodoo piece I buy. His eBay pages have become a sort of electronic blister pack for me. Yet this degree of glamor simply isn't necessary. Every experienced eBayer learns that beyond a certain standard level of quality, glamorizing your lots only end up making more work for yourself. It's harder to get that level of quality, and it's a pain in the neck dealing with customers who feel that the real thing doesn't match the photo. So you do the math: who's he really glitzing these pics up for?

And there's one other thing. For a man with such apparently low opinion of his own customizing ideas, he still manages to produce a high percentage of unique pieces in each new batch of resto's. A third Lotus in this batch was lead-weighted and fitted with FTE axles as a custom gravity racer. A month later, his inventory sported a range of Spectraflame Ground FX', a baby-blue enamel Custom Camaro, and a Custom Fleetside with a white roof and white tonneau cover. The month following, he offered up a truly delicious array of chrome-plated pieces which were never originally available in chrome. Yet in spite of the fact that these customs typically sit unsold on eBay twice as long as his authentics, he keeps churning out unique pieces week after week. At this point it gets kind of hard to believe he's doing this for his customers.

Customs: the less-secure side of the craft

Finally we come to the point in all this. Up to this point, these have just been high-quality customs offered with a sense of brand identity. As more of his authentics end up in the hands of discerning collectors, though, it's my belief that those customs will soon become customs with name brand identity. And when...if...that happens, a lot of those customs that went out the door at bargain prices are going to look like very smart investments indeed.

I want to make it very clear at this point that I am not recommending Voodoo-Moto-Kings resto's as investment-grade pieces. Any number of events could transpire to prevent that from ever happening, from ongoing economic trouble in the US to a personal illness or injury that prevents Mike from continuing his work, to the sudden emergence of one or more even greater stars in the restoration game. I admit that I had a strong suspicion that I might some day end up with "name" customs worth more than I paid when I originally bought these pieces from Mike. But I didn't buy them for that reason, and you shouldn't either. I bought the first batch because I loved the pieces and the whole atmosphere around them. I bought more because I loved the pieces and have come to better know the person behind them.

And that last point is perhaps the biggest ace in the hole that Mike has. He's one hell of a personable guy if he lets you get to know him.** He loves to talk shop with his customers, but he also has the wisdom and experience to recognize insincerity and mediocrity, a skill we all need to protect ourselves from the leeches in the hobby. This isn't a trait I've found to be common among restorers. He also has a refined focus: redline-era Hot Wheels are pretty much the only things he works on unless a particular die catches his fancy, and his technical knowledge rivals that of the savviest of redline experts.

You just have to love this. The customs market for Hot Wheels and 1/64th diecast is still pretty limited. To get a decent dollar for your work, you must either create work of real artistic merit, or touch a nerve with the buyer in a very particular way. Any decent "authentic" will sell at a fair price in fairly short order, and it's not hard to understand why. There's a waiting market of collectors who simply can't afford to own mint-condition originals, but who can afford repro's. But the most reasonably-priced custom pieces sometimes sit for months - even years - waiting for the buyer who feels the same spark from the piece that the builder felt when it was originally conceived.

I think this is going to change. I don't know when it will happen, but I do believe it will happen. Three factors will drive that change: the continual reduction in the flow of newly-discovered collections coming to market, collector boredom with redlines in general, and the advancing age (and increasing wisdom and hunger for quality) of men born from 1956-1966, the cadre which represents the hard core of the redline market. As the first factor influences the market, redline values will stabilize much as they do for other collectibles. (Keep in mind that nearly all Voodoo customs are built on original redline carcasses, so they'll always preserve at least the value of the underlying carcass.) But they won't begin to equal the values of same-model authentics until collector boredom reaches a point where uniqueness begins to be valued for its own sake, or the spending power of the collector market reaches a point where the hunger for better-than-new can be seen in the market. (Think that's unlikely? Then why are so many '50s and '60s teenagers shelling out six figures for concourse-quality hot rods and muscle cars?) And that's not happening right now. Last winter I watched any number of unique pieces, from assembly-line pulls to presentation cars to a complete 100-piece set of top-quality restos, selling for prices that five years earlier would have been considered outright steals.

There may never be a strong market for custom redlines. Was there ever a real market for mastercraft original Beanie Babies? If and when that market arrives, it will be a rising tide which lifts all boats, from the most brilliantly-executed one-off diorama artworks to Mike's unique takes on classic pieces right down to my own do-it-yourself-level customs. But it's perhaps just as likely that the market won't be there at all except for a handful of truly special pieces. Haven't we seen Chip Foose customs recently selling at Barrett-Jackson for not much more than the base value of the underlying vehicle?

It all hinges on whether the collecting community begins to value the artistry and exclusivity of many of these pieces for its own sake. Restorers at Mike's level are few and far between. But the greater collecting community doesn't know that yet, so it's still possible to pick up many of his custom works - and even a few of his authentics - for less than $50. Mike's got the personality, the skillset, the passion and the promotional skills to become perhaps the name in redline restoration. When...if...that happens, his authentics will be recognized as te superior "C11" pieces that they are, and very possibly valued at more than C9+ originals. And some of his more desirable one-offs could even exceed those values at auction.

The fact remains that the current resto/custom market holds to most of the same rules as the market for full-size autos, with the exception that most better-than-mint resto's aren't yet recognized as being worth more than not-quite-mint originals. A cheap redline restoration is a redline...period. Quality work will cost you, but buy it for its own sake, because in the present market, you're not likely to get your money back when you resell. There's room for a star or three at the top of the restored-redline heap, and once those stars are established and recognized as such, expect to pay a premium for those pieces...and expect your existing pieces by that restorer to reflect that market.

Frankly, I looked at hundreds of resto's over the winter of '10, and didn't see restored redlines that compared with Voodoo resto's. Perhaps just as importantly, I didn't see evidence of a restorer on a par with Voodoo Mike as a living monument to the hobby itself. I'm very curious to see where this market is going to go in the next few years, and right now I don't know of anyone even close to Mike as a restorer with all the right ingredients to be the perfect barometer for the market.

Let me state this again before I close off here. Any number of things could happen to sabotage the future value of a Voodoo resto - sabotage the value of any resto, really - and while I've got a good record for picking winners, I'm typically wrong one time in three. But this much I will say. The pieces I bought from Mike were good value in and of themselves. Being able to watch his inventory come and go on eBay and see him develop and evolve as restorer only add to that experience, and to the value I get as a customer. The privilege of being able to engage him in an ongoing dialogue, enjoying his enthusiasm and benefiting from his knowledge and wisdom, was the bonus extra I didn't count on, the premium bind-in on my purchase that makes this experience one I will probably never repeat as a resto collector. Watching your pieces hold or appreciate in value shouldn't be the goal of resto or custom collecting. They should be the cherry on the cake. And in the case of my involvement with Voodoo-Moto-Kings, the cake itself was all the value I could have asked for and more.

Thanks again, Mike.