On a recent trip to a flea market I picked up the remains of a vintage Star Wars Kenner X-wing. It was missing all parts and was very dirty with tatty stickers. But it looked like it could be fixed, and that's what I like.

So I set about taking the ship apart, cleaning it and fixing any broken parts. All filmed to be part of a restoration video on my YouTube channel.

After the first part of the restoration video was uploaded I was delighted to be offered donations for some of the missing parts to the X-wing by followers of my channel. And over the next few days I received in the post parts from Joost Dirkx, Bernd Kaiser, and Tristan Howden. All of which enabled me to finish restoring the X-wing and give it a set of new custom stickers. The end result looked fantasic, even if I do say so myself.

Watch the full restoration videos here

Normally at the end of a restoration the ship would either go into my collection, or I would sell it on to another collector for what it cost me to fix, which is often way cheaper than you could buy a complete toy for.

But in this instance as a lot of the X-wing had been given to me I thought it would be nice to auction the ship off and give the money to charity. For this first auction the charity would be Cancer Research UK.

Over the next week I set up a blind bids auction via my Facebook page and received many bids, which I was quite surprised (and pleased) by.

It was quite exciting for me to check my inbox each day and see what emails I had received with bids in. At the end of the auction I checked through all the emails and was amazed to find the winning bid was for £42.76 from James Stroud. A very generous bid indeed.

So thanks to a find at a flea market and some help from my subscribers I was able to send £42.76 to Cancer Research UK. As I have other ships that have been donated by Youtube followers and friends I will be doing another charity restoration and auction very soon.

So if you would like to be able to bid on the next auction, or are just interested in restoring old toys, make sure to join me on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks

Toy Polloi