Vintage toy finds: Nikko Super Tiger 4WD (1988)

Last weekend I went wandering around some antique shops, like the one pictured above. And as we all know, such shops can be very hit-and-miss when it comes to finding vintage toys – especially toys from the 1980s/90s era.

Most antique stores are overloaded with things like crockery, clothes, books, jewellery and furniture. So if I’m on the lookout for toys, my eyes tend to dart around searching the seas of drab white, brown and grey, looking for “pops” of 1980s colour. I think we 80s kids and toy collectors are attuned to look for those typical 80s plastic toys with their bright packaging. If you’ve ever been vintage toy hunting, you probably know the feeling! Often my eyes even dart toward bright things that aren’t toys – hoping they’re toys…

Anyway. In my region of the world, I’ve had my eye on one particular antique store for a while because it’s more like a junk shop and notably usually has a fair few old toys. And not just the rusty 1950s kind, but also items from the 80s/90s/00s.

The shop is a bit of a mess though. There’s just stuff everywhere! It’s long and narrow, with shelves that just have items of all kinds strewn across them. Even valuable toys like model trains and things can be seen jumbled all over the place. There’s a sense that similar items are grouped together, but many things are still jumbled on shelves, lying upside down, etc. The picture above is a snap of the front window of the store – where you can see model train engines randomly upside-down 😅 A twinge of pain, for any model railway enthusiast (including myself)…

On this visit, that same window contained a vintage 1988 Nikko Super Tiger 4WD buggy, perched on top of other objects, but in what seemed like very nice condition. The transmitter was also there. But the telescopic aerial was missing. On the car, the “plastic straw” for the aerial wire was also missing. No box. But overall… it was a joy to see a gem like this for sale. And there was no question I’d have a go at buying it.

After inquiring inside, I was given the price… but it was WAY too high. My heart sank. Often it can be impossible to lower a seller’s expectations to a realistic level, if things start too far off the mark.

What to do…

So I had a bit of a friendly chat with the shop owner. And just explained my thoughts about the car’s history, the year it was made (1988), what was missing or flawed, and what a new in box example would be worth. After some online research, the seller was quite reasonable about it. And the price was dropped by about 75%, down to meet my best offer (AU$80). Which I think was still decent and in the ballpark of eBay, for what was still an untested model.

At last – this very cool Super Tiger could be saved and restored. So it came home for a full clean and service.

About 4 hours later, the work was complete. Turned out the transmitter had actually been full of sand 😨 So there’s no way it would have worked had we tried it at the store.

The car body also had a few flaws – such as some non-original additional decals, and some dirt under some of the original decals. The incorrect ones were removed and the others carefully cleaned. And I was really pleased with the end result. I think only one original decal is missing.

Most critically, the original tyres are of “unused” calibre and have no cracks. And as for the aerial – well, 30 years of collecting meant I luckily had a perfect genuine Nikko spare to use.

Worth noting that this model was made in Japan – toward the end of Nikko’s era when they still manufactured most of their cars there. What a

And after all the clean-up, and some further tinkering with the transmitter circuts, it also works perfectly. A typically energetic and really solid little buggy from Nikko, with the bonus of 4WD and twin driveshafts. There’s honestly nothing ready-to-run in today’s toy stores that even comes close to the quality and weight and complexity of models like these.

So, a really fun day of vintage toy hunting that almost didn’t work out… but I was happy to give this lovely Nikko Super Tiger 4WD a new home, and clean and restore it.