page_title: Aurora Plastics Corporation
section_title: Model motoring
hierarchical_section_title: Aurora Plastics Corporation / Product range / Model motoring
caption_attribution_description: English: An Aurora Thunderjet-500 chassis, circa 1963.
context_page_description: The Aurora Plastics Corporation is a U.S. toy and hobby manufacturing company. It is known primarily for its production of plastic model kits of airplanes, automobiles, and TV and movie figures in the 1960s. Its principal competition in modeling were various other plastic modeling firms like Revell and Monogram.
context_section_description: In the late 1950s, Aurora acquired the rights to the Model Motoring slot car racing system from U.K. toy manufacturer Playcraft.  Aurora's first HO-gauge racing sets appeared in the fall of 1960.
  The cars were originally driven by a unique, vibrator drive system based on a door "buzzer." This motor comprised a wire coil around a vertical iron plunger which very quickly opened and closed a contact which fed power to the coil, and also drove a reed up and down that engaged a toothed drum on the rear axle, causing it to turn. When these early cars ran down the track they produced a loud "buzz," which many users found irritating. The vibrator car was produced until 1963 when the Thunderjet pancake motor, or T-jet, replaced it. Following improvements in the chassis with the Thunderjet and A/FX series and the adoption of popular racing car body styles, Aurora's Model Motoring race sets became top sellers, with over 25,000,000 cars sold by 1965 (HO Slot Car Racing 1999–2011).
  By the end of the 1970s, however, the slot car craze had passed and modeling in general was on the decline (HO Slot Car Racing 1999–2011). One website attributes the decline to both the maturing of the baby-boom generation along with the fragile economics of the slot car industry and the closing of many slot car shops as toy companies offered smaller sets to be used at home (Slotblog 2007).
caption: An Aurora Thunderjet, or T-jet, chassis.
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