40 replies to this topic

[Chris Burlew]

Hello Larry,

 

Yes Dan was winding arms during the Bicentennial. Dan was a "padawan" of Mr. Bob Green of MURA fame and so Dan had been around a good long while by then.

 

I recall my first try at winding an arm, I think it came as a kit and you wound it and glued the comm onto it and you had a start on a motor. I struggled with the concept as I am not gifted with manual dexterity and when it was done I saw were you could mail the arm to MURA and they would finish and balance the arm. Well I did not believe what I had done was all that bad, but MURA sent me back one of their armatures, brand new in the bag and as a very young kid I was over the moon. The end of my rise to fame as a motor builder...!

 

PS. Hello Mike I will do my best, but I have always found my writing and telling of tales bothers some people. I can only tell you that I do not intend to offend folks. I am in Sales and I had a manager once tell me "Chris, please do not respond to folks with an email, as apparently you can not see the brutality of your writing." I will do my best to re-read everything, but please if I get out of hand just cut me off. Sincerely,  Chris

[Chris Burlew]

Hello Mike,

 

I am curious who started this Slotblog web site, would that be you?  Perhaps it is an organization that owns it? I see a lot of the folks I raced with have passed away and those that have not like Phillippe do not appear to be on line, at least not since 2006 or there abouts. I am as usual 10-15 years too late to the party....  typical really.

 

Do you have a blog story that details how the blog got started?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

[MSwiss]

Cheater, the current owner of Slotblog, can relate the history of it, if he wishes.

 

I'm just a moderator and a friend of his with ZERO financial stake in it.

 

Although , a few years back, someone pointed out that Westmont,  the town my raceway is in(and now my home), is somehow listed as the "location"  of Slotblog. 

 

This was most likely a prank done by someone who was kicked off of Slotblog or left on their own volition.

[Larry Labounty]

Chris I really enjoy your posting always learn from them. Someone once told me that they stack the Lexan sheets, on a mold and pull 10 bodies at a time. I thought that would affect the quality of the body if that was true. 

[Bill from NH]

Stacked sheets would make each body a different size. I've seen photos of multiple molds set side-by-side & 6-8 bodies pulled from a single sheet at once, depending upon the size of the vac former machine. 

[Chris Burlew]

Hey there guys,

 

No stacking the sheets. There are a number of reasons why that would not be good, but suffice to say the machine MAC got from Lancer and the one we had at Outisight Designs was a table with a platform that was roughly 24" x 24" and you would screw a plate to the vacuum machine table top with the mold glued to the top of the plate. There were in fact no sheets, but we bought Lexan in a roll  and pulled the lexan out over the top of the table with the molds on it and then clamped the lexan down and rotated the heat over the top of the lexan where it was heated. Then at the proper moment that frame holding the lexan would drop down over the very hot molds and the suction or vacuum would begin until the body had been pulled into place. With what little bit of a memory I have left we generally would run six molds at a time, unless we were running some HO or 1/32" bodies and then it was a free for all.

 

The first 5-10 "pulls" would yield a clear body, but with lots of dust on the mold it was not as clear as it would get as you got into a rhythm running the machine.

 

I think you could make a machine to pull one body at a time and run sheets of lexan, but that was not what we did in the old days.

[Phil Hackett]

Just in case anyone is wondering who Foamy is.... He is Dennis Hill and he's doing well in Torrance, California....

 

Chris, Frank Pretzman was the one that made it possible to start Sonic Products. John Geddes and I were racing pretty much every weekend and found the tire costs getting out of hand. A fortunate sale of the remaining Riggen wheels, rubber and some body molds to us by Charlie Holland, General Manager of Riggen at the time, gave John and I a large amount of rims and tire doughnuts to play with (something like 6000 wheels and the matching amount of rubber. Riggen had been sold and the new owner abandoned a large amount of raw material).

 

We were happy just making our own tires but one night Frank called me up and asked if he could buy 200 pair of the tires we were making. It turned out that that tire worked well for his track. We thought we hit the jack pot: getting paid for what we were already doing! "Sonic", which wasn't an official business yet, probably sold 1000 pair to Frank over the next year or so. I'd deliver the tires on a Tuesday night and watch Frank paint bodies in the "backroom" while discussing politics, world events and traded slot car gossip. He frequently talked about the "mail slot" and the $50 bill with a name attached to it. I don't know if that was true but he certainly made it sound that way.

 

Those tires were popular enough that Ron Granlee inquired about distributing them through Speed & Sport. This is where the slippery slope started and Sonic was organized (and vastly under capitalized) to make slot car tires which we did until we seized production in the year 2000.

 

There is so much unrecorded SoCal slot car history and I'm glad you have told part of the stories of MAC and Outasight.

[Bill from NH]

Phil, my favorite fronts for 4.5" stockcars in the day were Sonics, I had them for both 1/8" & 3/32" axles. I don't recall if they came in different amounts of firmness or if they were all one firmness. So, some of your tires made it east to New England.

[Phil Hackett]

Phil, my favorite fronts for 4.5" stockcars in the day were Sonics, I had them for both 1/8" & 3/32" axles. I don't recall if they came in different amounts of firmness or if they were all one firmness. So, some of your tires made it east to New England.

 

Not to drive this thread off-topic: those front tires had rubber that was used in athletic shoes. When Nike, New Balance, Reebok, ect. stopped making shoes in the US that rubber became unavailable and substitute rubber wasn't the same. That's when we stopped production of that product.

[Chris Burlew]

Hello Phil,

 

Oddly enough I was thinking about you guys at Sonic the other day. It happens I went into Piranha Raceways the other day and all their tires are black.... what happen to orange tires?

 

Do you still have a biz selling to the raceway distributors?

 

Good to see someone is still around!

 

Chris

[Dave Crevie]

Vacuum forming clear sheet was essentially invented for blister pack packaging. Back in 1962, a family friend was working for Arrem plastics, whos primary product was blister packs. Vacuum forming had already been used in the hobby and toy industries. It would soon take over slot racing.

 

https://youtu.be/r5F...wAQHpc7RGlzKyLU

[Mr. M]

Not to hijack this thread, but what was in the Sonic bottles sold as gear and bearing oil?

[Phil Hackett]

Not to hijack this thread, but what was in the Sonic bottles sold as gear and bearing oil?

 

I don't recall ever selling gear and bearing oil BUT John and I used pharmaceutical grade mineral oil (don't ask where I got it... they're no longer in business), so *maybe* there was a sample of of this running around. There were some counterfeit products that used our logo so maybe that was an example.

 

(EDIT:  I just remembered: was the oil in a needle oiler? I had sourced the needle oilers and received a sample from them... that was an extremely small amount and some of those oilers might have been shipped.)

 

I never wanted to sell oils or liquids.

 

Chris! Was that the race where the SF crew used Beautox glue? After Beautox appeared Neil McCurdy of RevTech came up with Mother Neil's Brickwall. That never was bottled for sale or used outside of testing but it worked as advertised. In fact, the "glue" tore rubber off the rims on the first pass. 

[Mr. M]

It was a needlepoint oiler for sure! Was this mineral oil?

[Chris Burlew]

Hey there Phil,

 

I never expressed it but I enjoyed the time I spent with Neil from Revtech. Do you know if he is still around? I thought he had a day job working for "Panovision" the movie folks with their uber fast cameras. Perhaps he is still doing that or perhaps just retired.

 

There were a great many brands of "glue" used at Monaco for the race in 77, but I never used anything that Neil had put together. It sounds like a little bit would go a long way. That day the guys from Fogsville seemed to have had one gallon containers as we were literally swimming in glue, in both the corners and the connecting straight bits. What a mess they made.

 

Thanks for the memory of Frank Pretzman. I can still see him with one of those long brown thin cigarettes hanging from his mouth, great man!

[MSwiss]

Somewhere he moved to the Chicago area to work for Bosch.

 

Shortly after he arrived, he called Koford Engineering back when I was GM there.

 

Remembering his name, I spoke to him for a brief time and then passed him on to Stu.

 

Unfortunately, I recall that Neal passed 3 or 4 years ago.

 

The Slotblog search feature works really well.

 

I quickly found the article where Mike Brannian mentioned it.(post #19)

 

http://slotblog.net/...-car-armatures/